(urth) The Lochage's Rant...

[David Stockhoff]

  The favelas were my first thought as well. Nessus is a bona fide 
megacity, with a core (or two) and vast slums.

These slums border on wasteland---the only difference between Nessus and 
our megacities is that ours are growing. Nessus dies every day as it 
moves north, although so slowly you can't see it. It's hidden.

I'm also a little mystified by the need for this description. But it 
seems like a kind of circle-of-life metaphor. Nessus is both alive and 
dying. And since to some degree it stands in for the Commonwealth and 
the Commonwealth stands in for Urth, Nessus _is_ Urth.

I'd look there.

On 8/31/2010 12:46 AM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 8/30/2010 9:31 PM, Ryan Dunn wrote:
>> Hello All,
>>
>> I have had a hard time with a passage from Shadow... the rant the 
>> lochage gives to Severian in the bartizan. He is telling Severian how 
>> vast Nessus is, how all attempts to count them have failed, and so 
>> forth.
>>
>> But he describes the city in this passage, as follows:
>>
>> "The city grows and changes every night, like writing chalked on a 
>> wall. Houses are built in the streets by clever people who take up 
>> the cobbles in the dark and claim the ground - did you know that?"
>>
>> I think I understand the second part. I'm not sure what taking up the 
>> cobbles in the dark means exactly, but this has something to do with 
>> clever people claiming land as their own by stealing it in the dark? 
>> Anyhow...
>
> If you google on "cobblestone street" you can see lots of streets, 
> sidewalks, and plazas paved with a variety of cobblesstones from 
> natural found rocks to shaped and polished stones to bricks, closely 
> or loosely tesselated to form a durable, weather-proof surface for 
> foot and vehicular traffic in these public areas.
>
> "Clever people" can arrange for a party to clear an area of these 
> stones and put up a quick-and-dirty shed in the place so that by the 
> light of the next day, it looks like the place was never paved to 
> start with and has been a private home all along. The cobbles are also 
> worth money if they can be hauled to where new development is taking 
> place.
>
>> More importantly, what does he mean by the city changing every night? 
>> And how is writing chalked on a wall the right metaphor here. Is he 
>> saying there are so many people, that every day a line of buildings 
>> might appear, while another might crumble?
>
> With multiple hand-made buildings per person, there are always 
> opportunities to tear down here and reassemble there. I imagine it 
> yields something like the the Brazilian favelas:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela
>
>