Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Clues: Needles in Haystacks

James Jordan · 26 Nov 2002, 17:58 · 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: James Jordan <jbjordan4 at cox.net>
Subject: (urth) Clues: Needles in Haystacks
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 11:58:29 -0600
Message-ID: <urth-v0211-2260 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0211/2260.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 11:04 AM 11/26/2002, you wrote:
> >
> > I think Wolfe is subtle, demanding, and sometimes frustrating.  But I
> > also think he plays fair with his readers.
>
>I suspect he tries, but I don't think he always realizes what can be
>interpreted as a clue.
>
>Jerry Friedman

Yes, that's perhaps THE weakness in Wolfe. Out of the 1,000,000+ items he=20
tosses into every novel, which are the clues? Wolfe gets frustrated that=20
people don't "get" what's going on, but it's his own fault for putting so=20
much stuff into his books and burying the clue-needles in such large haysta=
cks.
         But even so, the trip is always worth it!

Nutria


--=20




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