PEACE EZ Timeline

Adam Stephanides · 27 Oct 2000, 14:04 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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: Adam Stephanides <adamsteph at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) re: PEACE EZ Timeline
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 14:04:09
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0067 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0067.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Michael Andre-Driussi wrote:
>=20
> To show my enthusiasm for Roy's timeline: we had long suspected that the
> Dr. V astral visit was a mix of at least two realtime visits (which seemed
> the case when the nurse comes in and tells Den he ought to be
> undressed--this seems like a "bad splice"); if this is true, then I found=
 a
> nearly invisible seam of splicing when Den first goes in, before he sees
> the doctor.
>=20
> 1) Fat new president Den (rich man at 50) enters waiting room, sees
> Margaret Lorn (uh, that's Mrs. Price to you, bub <g>), Sherry Gold, Ted
> Singer (odd, but we have some stuff on him), and Abel Green (huh?).
>=20
> 2) Margaret is reading "Life" magazine, but then she puts it down and goes
> in to see the doctor, never seen in a later timeframe. (This putting down
> of "Life" and exiting, added to the damp impressions left by her hands,
> make me suspect that she is terminally ill and will die before Den's next
> yearly physical.  IF that is true, then Den will retreat from the scene to
> avoid the pain . . . )
>=20
> 3) Nurse calls for Mrs. Price, and "Sherry, who is sixteen now" tells her
> that Margaret already went in.  SPLICE!  (See, the discontinuity of the
> nurse's behavior is the first hint, but Sherry is sixteen =3Dnow=3D, [she=
 was
> in her twenties, say, a sentence before] that's the smoking gun.)
>=20
> 4) Doctor examines underweight (i.e., poor man at 40) Den.
>=20
> This, then, is a way Den can go into the doctor's office in the 60s but
> actually only see the doctor in the 50s!

I think we'd need at least one more splice, maybe two.  On the page
after Weer is underweight, we have this dialogue:

   "There's not a man in my plant I'd talk to the way you talk to every
patient you've got."
   "But I can't fire my patients, Mr. Weer."

The clear implication is that Weer is president at this point; at any
rate, he's not the poor 40-year-old.  Then a couple pages later we have
the dialogue putting Weer's age as in the early 40s.  I don't know if we
can push Weer's presidency back that far; if not, another splice.

While looking this up, I noticed another sentence: "There is (as a
matter of fact) a whole pile of _Lifes_ before me, and I play the old
game of trying to arrange them chronologically without looking at the
dates, and lose." (3)  If that isn't Wolfe going nyah-nyah-nyah to his
readers, I don't know what is.  (And I won't even go into the
implications of reincarnation in the first half of the sentence!)

--Adam

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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