Rostum & Nutria

Kevin J. Maroney · 08 Sep 1997, 17:30 · from whorl-v0007.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: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney at crossover.com>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Rostum & Nutria
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 1997 17:30:35
Message-ID: <whorl-v0007-0564 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/whorl/archives/v0007/0564.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]

At 07:22 PM 9/8/97 GMT, you wrote:
>Hey, Nutria!  If you're going to get photocopies from alga (that
>NYRSF piece) maybe you should offer in exchange a photocopy of Peter
>Wright's essays from "Foundation No. 66"?

Hmm. Well, I don't want to be *too* picky, but all of these works *are*
copyrighted....=20

Anyway, I think it's pretty clear that the Outsider is both God and a burst
blood-vessel in Silk's head. While it is true that the Outsider shows Silk
many things that Silk could not possibly have know, remember always that
_The Book of the Long Sun_ is a *composed* text, written by a human being,
who wants to make it look like Silk had a real revelation.

I don't put much credence in the idea that the Outsider is Severian,
incidentally, even despite the multigendered polyphony. The entire
Enlightenment experience is polyphonous; of course the Outsider "is", as
well. I think we might be looking for connections where none are present.
(What? Can it be?)
--
Wombat

Kevin Maroney		kmaroney at crossover.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor	New York Review of Science Fiction
http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/olp/nyrsf/nyrsf.html

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