Digest urth.v030.n118

Alice Turner · 23 May 2001, 20:34 · 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: "Alice Turner" <pei047 at attglobal.net>
Subject: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v030.n118
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 20:34:41
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0439 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0030/0439.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


I swore I wasn't going to get into this one, but...sigh.

> "Adam and Lilith never found peace together; for when he wished to lie
with
> her, she took offence at the recumbent posture he demanded. 'Why must
I lie
> beneath you?' she asked 'I also was made from dust, and am therefore
your
> equal.' Because Adam tried to compel her obedience by force, Lilith,
in a
> rage, uttered the magic name of God, rose into the air and left him."
>
> We know that Wolfe is familiar with Graves, and I think that Jane
Doe's
> "Vhas a groose." and "Aw zay, 'ou vhill nawt neffer grawnt offer mee
agan."
> almost certainly refers to Adam in this Lilith myth.

Roy is right. "I say, you will not never grunt over me again." Double
negative being part of GW's accent-addiction. And I guess she's going
"Yuck!" in the first part, though that's not the tradition, which was
that she got bored always doing it one way, not that she disliked it
altogether.

> On another tack, has anyone else wondered exactly what Wolfe intended
with
> the last six words of the story: "a mountain ram winded its horns."?
Even if
> Wolfe hadn't been raised in Texas, much less been a former Aggie, he
has to
> know that no animal blows a horn, much less its own.

This is why I'm outta this. (Or should be.)

> Further perusal of HEBREW MYTHS yields the following wrt the
fratricide of
> Cain and Abel: Wolfe has a tendency to
> conflate and otherwise rearrange mythological elements to suit
himself,
> which is what he seems to me to have done in "Copperhead". Thus "Dhoss
> bhoyes, de vhun keels de odder", I still maintain refers to Cain and
Abel,
> whether or not it also refers to the murdered man and Boone.

Yup.

But (defiantly) it's still a dumb story.

-alga




*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