(urth) Weekly blog links

[John Watkins]

Oreb remains funny throughout, but I agree--there's little humor in Short
Sun.  It's a melancholy work.

On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 8:01 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>wrote:

> I find BotNS has a comic aspect that has receded with each Sun novel since.
> Almost every scene in which Severian deals with other people is either a
> hilarious set piece or a riff on a well-worn tale: Severian in the catacombs
> with Ultan, Severian in bed with Baldanders, Severian on stage with Dr
> Talos. Shadow keeps me in a constant state of chuckling.
>
> I miss this tone in the later books. Silk's tale sometimes has a sly sense
> of humor, but SS seems to have almost no sense of humor at all, as far as I
> recall. I assume this is partly because a comedy of manners is hard to pull
> off when the society itself is formless and the "manners" unspecified, as
> among the isolated farms of Blue. Or else it's just harder to detect.
> It may also be because Wolfe started to treat his subject more seriously,
> if he did do so.
>
> But another likely factor is that BotNS was written with dozens, if not
> hundreds, of literary predecessors in mind, and fantasy and satire are
> rarely far apart. Urth's society is recognizable; the Whorl's is not, or at
> least not so readily. And the later books' antecedents seems to lie less in
> Chesterton and Vance than in older myth. IMHO.
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 19:11:56 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Stuart Hamm <hammstu at sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Weekly blog links
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Message-ID: <648691.66443.qm at web81408.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> I agree FWIW
> I am a big fan of the short stories (earlier than later), and TBotNS got me
> hooked for life...but for my "Desert Island " book I would take? Long Sun
> and Short Sun as 1 book and be happy to read it over and over and over and
> over and....
>
> ??????????-\\~S~//-  ???? Skype?? stuart.hamm
> myspace.com/stuhamm
> ? ??? stuarthamm.net
>
>
> --- On Tue, 4/14/09, don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: don doggett <kingwukong at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) Weekly blog links
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 6:55 PM
>
>
> Doggerel
> www.don-doggett.blogspot.com
>
>
>  > Many people find Long Sun accessible and satisfying because
>> > they think it has a generally reliable narrator and the
>> > narrative is not so occulted. They are wrong. I think the
>> > most valid criticism of Short Sun (I don't agree with it) is
>> > that it's very well crafted but it's just tooooo Wolfean:
>> > It's a bridge too far. Yet, many of the puzzles in Long Sun
>> > that readers didn't know were puzzles are resolved in Short
>> > Sun--can ONLY be resolved in the Short Sun--and the answers
>> > go right over those readers heads because they weren't
>> > looking for answers. So is that a defect in the books?
>>
>>
>
> I agree, and I would go a step farther and say that LS and SS are really
> one
> novel. SS is basically a continuation of the epilogue in LS and doesn't
> stand at all on its own. And LS is brilliantly written (better than New
> Sun,
> really) but the plot is unsatisfying without the revelations of SS.
>
> Don
>
>
>
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