(urth) The Guild's Revolutionary

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 9:26 PM, Adam Thornton <adam at io.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 21, 2009, at 4:54 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
>
>> Fascinating!
>>
>> The "apparatus" is clearly a Kafka reference, and one that has been in my memory since I first I read that story as a child.
>
> It strikes me that we could probably learn a lot if there were some way to get everything in Wolfe that seems obvious to some reader and pile all of those together in one place.  For instance, I was all aboard the "Nessus is Buenos Aires" train when I read _BotNS_ first at 13 or 14, because I was also in the throes of a Borges phase and Master Ultan was obviously, clearly, no question about it, Borges.  Same with "Baldanders."
>
> Later I found out this might be controversial.
>
> I strongly suspect if we actually put everything together that each reader had always said "Well, DUH, I didn't mention it because I thought everyone knew it already," then we'd actually discover a lot of stuff.
>
> Sort-of-speaking-of-which as someone-who-likes-Baum-way-too-much (although I think Wolfe is Just Plain Wrong about Ruth Plumly Thompson), man, "The Eyeflash Miracles" is brilliant.
>
> Adam

It would be nice, but it's hard to do. I mean, if I were reading
through _Shadow_ again and I saw the Kafka ref, I wouldn't say 'hm, I
wonder if that's on THE LIST already; I'd better get up, go to my
computer, fire up my browser, and check'. I'd just go 'Kafka' and
continue on. The best way would be to have a webpage of the text of
_Shadow_, in a wiki perhaps, and then one could read the text instead
of one's book and on reaching that line go, 'why, I see no footnote
link, despite it quite obviously being a ref; I think I shall add it.'

Of course, the hard-to-do part is that annotated _Shadow_ pages are
copyvios, and while Wolfe has been very obliging of Andre-Driussi, he
is also listed as co-author and still I don't see very much quoting in
my _Lexicon Urthus_ (at least, nowhere near as much as I would've
used), which suggests to me that Wolfe takes his copyright seriously.

-- 
gwern