Digest whorl.v005.n023

Alice Turner · 04 Jun 1997, 09:47 · from whorl-v0005.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" <al at interport.net>
Subject: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v005.n023
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 09:47:20
Message-ID: <whorl-v0005-0326 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0005/0326.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


[Posted from WHORL, the mailing list for Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun]



>  Aren't priests the only ones who carry the gammadion?  For=20
> that matter, is anyone besides Silk mentioned as having one? =20
> Furthermore, the gammadion does function as a tool for working on the=20
> 'Windows', the sources of 'revelation' whether you regard that revelation

> as true or false or (better I think) truth which conceals another truth?=20

> And I don't think that Wolfe uses language in a sort of simple=20
> equivalence such as gammadion =3D screwdriver and nothing more; after all=
,=20
> he could have invented some science fictinal gobbledygook for futuristic=20
> tools like they do on Star Trek (induced phase decoupler or some such=20
> nonsense).

All priests carry them and have been taught to use them to fix Windows.
They get fancier with rank---Quetzal's is jeweled. Incus fixes Hammerstone
with one, and his non-priestly black mechanic pals doubtless wield them
too, possibly illegally or at least heretically.=20

I don't think any of us thinks of a simple equivalent (gammadion =3D
screwdriver), but it doesn't hurt to use an analogy. Mantis once came up
with gammadion =3D Swiss Army knife, and I rather like that.

-alga-=20

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