This Week in Google Alerts: more _Land Across_

Lee · 30 Dec 2013, 19:22 · from 2013-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee)
Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2013 14:22:45 -0500
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: more _Land Across_
Message-ID: <BLU175-W263D0EC041A73BC395D222CFCE0 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn: Hmm, if we are to assume it was a black bean, it would not make him the 
>nicest kind of supernatural being!  [I'm assuming that the story of the 
>black beans cast into the sea in BotNS is meant to refer to the origin of 
>Abaia, Erebus and the rest.]

With recognition of the lightheartedness of this reply, I truly do not think that Gene
Wolfe considers himself to be the "nicest" of people.

I haven't met him in person but I know he is often described as "genial". Still in the
tone of some of his answers to direct questions, I know he has a sharp side. But these
are all external judgements anyway.

I find Wolfe's self-assessments best exemplified in his most autobiographical characters
(Weer, Severian and Horn, imho). In these characters I find self-criticism which goes
beyond acknowledgement of imperfection and which drifts toward true confession and self-
condemnation.

Moreover, if the role of author may be considered as demiurgical creator, as has been
discussed in other threads, perhaps the comparison of Wolfe himself to giant god-like
monsters is apt. If "black beans" hold the origin of "Abaia, Erebus and the rest", then
Scylla must be included and thus, by extension, Typhon/Pas and Echidna (whom I find 
difficult to disconnect from The Cumaean).

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