Collusion

Nathan Spears · 26 Jan 2005, 11:29 · from 2005-January.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: spearofsolomon at yahoo.com (Nathan Spears)
Date: Wed Jan 26 11:29:41 2005
Subject: (urth) Collusion
In-Reply-To: <20050126182518.73681.qmail at web25704.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <20050126192939.30372.qmail at web50305.mail.yahoo.com>

This isn't a scholarly post; just a strange observation.  I loaned my brother Book
of the New Sun and Radiohead's Amnesiac at the same time, and afterward he said he
noticed so many similarities that he wanted to write the band and ask them if they'd
been reading the book while they made the album.  I don't think they did, but here's
some of the things that stand out:

Pyramid Song

"i jumped in the river and what did I see?
black-eyed angels swimming with me"
...
"all the figures i used to see
all my lovers were there with me
all my past and futures"

This fits in well with the undines and the alzabo, obviously.

You and Whose Army?

"Come on, come on
You and whose army?
You and your cronies
Come on, come on
Holy Roman empire
Come on if you think
Come on if you think
You can take us on"

Not as tailored but certainly fits in with the Ascian theme.

Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors

"There are doors that open by themselves
There are sliding doors
And there are secret doors
There are doors that lock
And doors that don't
There are doors that let you in and out
But never open"

This fits in both with the House Absolute's secret doors and metaphorically with
Severian moving through time.

I'm not suggesting that Amnesiac is Radiohead's singalong to BotNS, or even that
they pulled anything from it.  I just thought the similaries were interesting and
that someone else might enjoy them.  As a side note, the album's tone fits oddly
well with the book's.

__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today! 
http://my.yahoo.com

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