(urth) Gummed-Up Works or Got Lives?

[Gerry Quinn]

From: David Stockhoff 

> On 12/16/2011 4:05 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:

> > > Ha! You demonstrate my thesis with your very first lunge. "Fairies have 
> > > wings, therefore the defense must prove that his client has wings, else 
> > > he be no fairy and must hang." But some of us have actually read books, 
> > > Gerry, /without the Disney logo on them./ And we know that true fairies 
> > > lack wings. Except, of course, when they don't.
> > Or how about his underground life? Because *today*, of course, it 
> > seems that fairies live underground, in accordance with your 
> > ill-thought out argument du jour. Do the Neighbours live underground? 
> > If not, where does that leave your argument on that occasion? Wingless 
> > and buried, it would seem.

> The Sidhe were always associated with barrows. Other, more literary and 
> Victorian fairies tend to disdain burial mounds and live in glens. Yet 
> others are matronly women who live in cottages, while others dwell in 
> shining towers. Perhaps this confuses you. It confused me until I 
> realized that the literature of fairies, like that of the gods, is 
> complex and contradictory and is derived from many different sources and 
> has been put to many different uses.
In which case demanding that I express my thoughts on what an amnesiac Neighbour consciousness inserted into a human body might sense as odd in terms of fairies, rather than what we know of the Neighbours, is a bit stupid, isn’t it?   Given that the sort of fairies they were supposed to like was not ever defined.  Yet you even demanded references to literature about fairies.

> > Your accusation of illiteracy is a transparent device to divert the 
> > discussion from the works of Gene Wolfe, into some nebulous body of 
> > extra-textual material which need never be defined.

> It's not just the fact that you have never read any literature, even the 
> literature Wolfe has demonstrably read and deliberately echoes. It's 
> that you insist on the very actual and concrete relationships that 
> intertextual literature cannot offer. You cannot seem to imagine more 
> than one sense of the word "is."

I have no problem with various senses of various words, so long as it is made clear what sense is being used.  As for the issue that was under discussion then, which was to do with James’s theory about what happened Horn in the pit and what Horn might have been expected to experience thereafter, I don’t recall you contributing anything regarding it.

As for literature, I may not have read as much as you, but perhaps I read it better.  Now I recall it, there was another time you accused me of illiteracy: when I disputed your characterisation of the ‘Hunter of the east’ as Orion.  My offence was to read the poem itself, rather than churn out a risibly mechanical correspondence between ‘hunter’ and ‘Orion’, ignoring the clear Sun metaphor in the poem itself.  If the latter is what constitutes ‘knowledge of literature’ in your mind, I’ll pass. 

- Gerry Quinn
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