barrington interview

Marc Aramini · 06 Oct 2014, 02:41 · from 2014-October.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: marcaramini at gmail.com (Marc Aramini)
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2014 19:41:33 -0700
Subject: (urth) barrington interview
In-Reply-To: <BLU175-W10D6888870883549B6F32CCFA50 at phx.gbl>
References: <BLU175-W10D6888870883549B6F32CCFA50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAF1072wbxvCZekTCQHg1FvK03Lq3oSJyF5vhu2sAJJYsoaPPDA at mail.gmail.com>

Scientific reproducibility lurks under all of his fictions.  For example,
in doctor of death island, every time someone dies the three fingered
doctor shows up.  Borski notices this and STILL sees him showing up at the
end of the story as a sign of hope, a blatant and unscientific breaking of
pattern.  His return is a sure sign of Alvard's death. Wolfe sets up
patterns that are usually fair, but undisciplined speculation runs contrary
to Wolfe's engineering mind.

I think Home Fires is as subtextually cryptic as anything he has written
but in general his reluctance to provide closure peaked at short sun.  His
80s short fiction is less dense than his 70s fiction and less obscure than
the short stories he produced in the 90s. I had to wrack my brain to see
the c.b. pattern in Home Fires and figure out who controlled the puppet
agent Skip.



On Sunday, October 5, 2014, Lee <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

> >Jeffrey Wilson: I believe Wolfe's stated in at least two previous
> interviews that he
> >doesn't give that information out because it would cheat the careful
> >reader of the pleasure of discovering it for himself. But that doesn't
> >mean he finds the necessary consequences entirely satisfactory.
>
>
> That sounds reasonable on the surface. But consider the real world results.
>
>
> We have a few published analysts and many on this board who are more than
>
> careful, and often excruciatingly exacting in their detailed reading of
> Wolfe's
>
> work.  Yet each one still seems to come to quite differing and
> individualized
>
> understandings.
>
>
> I have full respect for the intelligence of all avid Wolfe readers, so how
> can this
>
> divergence in understanding be explained? Either Wolfe is deliberately
> making
>
> his work ambiguous and subject to individualized understanding or he is
> doing
>
> it by accident. I think one of these is more likely than the other.
>
>
> Some might argue that Wolfe's latest work is less ambiguous than his
> previous
>
> work. I'm not sure. I'd be interested in the opinions of others on the
> overall
>
> trend.
>
>
> Just in regard to the 12 volume Sun Series, written over the course of
> some 10-15
>
> years, I'd have to say with some confidence that the writing became more
> ambiguous
>
> as it progressed. I find the WTF moments in Return To The Whorl to be far
> more
>
> frequent than they were in reading Shadow of the Torturer.
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net <javascript:;>
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20141005/45924297/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net