Quetzal On Urth?

Charles Reed · 25 Nov 2002, 19:30 · from urth-v0211.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: "Charles Reed" <cmreed at link.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Quetzal On Urth?
Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 13:30:18 -0600
Message-ID: <urth-v0211-2239 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0211/2239.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

matthew.malthouse at guardian.co.uk wrote:

 > On 25/11/2002 18:02:17 cilluff1 wrote:
 >
 >> other words, if the inhumi can travel to Urth (as has been
 >> suggested off Quetzal) then they've *got* to do that
 >> We would hear stories of them them on Urth, see one
 >> flying in the distance, observe people who don't eat,
 >> can't run, and lick their chops when someone mentions
 >> blood.  Something.  Some indication.  But there's
 >> nothing.  No indication whatsoever that any of the
 >> inhumi have ever been on Urth.
 >
 > I dislike the inhumi on earth theory. Dislike it a great deal.
 >
 > However there is no necesity for inhumi to travel to earth by their own
 > means. Think apports, ships and mirrors.

OK.  That would mean that there are (or were) such devices on Green (or=20
Blue).  And again, we're thrown into the realm of having no evidence of=20
any kind -- that I'm aware of, that is -- to suggest such a thing.  And=20
it's this kind of thing that bugs me. =20

I know there are different schools of thought in how to "criticize"=20
literature.  One such school of thought, sometimes referred to as=20
"Formalism," holds that a work of literature should be judged solely on=20
what is in the text itself -- not the author's background or religious=20
beliefs, not the historical context in which the author wrote, not the=20
unspoken, underlying psychology motivating the characters, etc.=20
 Obviously, few people who post to this list (including me) subscribe to=20
this school of thought since we all tend to make use of the fact that=20
Wolfe is a Roman Catholic, that he has said this or that in certain=20
interviews, etc.  In fact, it severely limits a person's ability to=20
evaluate a work because it fails to account for allusions and resonances=20
with other works.

Still, I believe that any theory of what a text means has to be=20
supported in some discernible way by the text itself.  To do otherwise,=20
I think, is merely to play games -- to build a house of cards that has=20
no firm foundation in the bedrock text.  (e.g., the "Frodo and Sam were=20
gay lovers" nonsense).

Charles

--=20

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