(urth) "Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius", Peter Bebergal

Marc Aramini marcaramini at gmail.com
Fri Apr 24 13:12:00 PDT 2015


They had a reputation for being  anti-intellecual, kind of barbaric and by
implication not high class enough to bathe I suppose ...
On Apr 24, 2015 1:08 PM, "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've always wondered about that phrase, "unwashed Philistines." Is there
> any reason to believe that Philistines bathed less frequently than their
> neighbors?
>
> Inquiring minds want to know.
>
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 1:05 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Looks like the day is rapidly approaching when I won't be able to snicker
>> at the unwashed philistines at the New Yorker.
>>
>> On Fri, Apr 24, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It's a nice article IMO.  Might not bring him readers unverrsed in SF,
>>> but that's probably a good thing.  If someone is  unfamiliar with SF
>>> tropes, Wolfe's SF will be beyond them.
>>>
>>> - Gerry Quinn
>>>
>>>
>>> On 24/04/2015 16:34, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>>>
>>>> "Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius", Peter Bebergal
>>>> http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sci-fis-difficult-genius
>>>>
>>>>  On the phone from his home in Peoria, Gene Wolfe explained to me
>>>>> recently that Latro’s memory loss does not make him an unreliable narrator,
>>>>> as many critics assume. Instead, Latro might reveal only the truth that
>>>>> matters. Latro must ask himself, Wolfe said, “What is worth writing, what
>>>>> is going to be of value to me when I read it in the future? What will I
>>>>> want to know?” These are questions that Wolfe has been asking himself, in
>>>>> one form or another, for decades. His stories and novels are rich with
>>>>> riddles, mysteries, and sleights of textual hand. His working lexicon is
>>>>> vast, and his plots are unspooled by narrators who deliberately confuse or
>>>>> are confused—or both.
>>>>>
>>>>> ...Moments like this have turned many of Wolfe’s fans into something
>>>>> like Biblical exegetes, who dig deep into his texts in the hope of finding
>>>>> clues not only to the plots and the characters but to Wolfe’s larger
>>>>> intentions. Partly what readers are excavating is Wolfe’s Catholicism,
>>>>> which he is quick to say figures into his writing. “What is impossible is
>>>>> to keep it out,” he told me. “The author cannot prevent the work being his
>>>>> or hers.” Flannery O’Connor, in her essay “Novelist and Believer,” cautions
>>>>> novelists to use religious concerns in ways that do not alienate the
>>>>> reader, to render encounters with the ineffable so that even those who
>>>>> might not understand or care for a particular metaphor—Aslan the Lion as
>>>>> Christ, for example—can still be moved by it. Many critics have speculated
>>>>> that Severian is a Christ figure: he brings the New Sun and puts an end to
>>>>> the cruelty of torture. But Wolfe wraps his Catholicism in strange language
>>>>> and cryptic images. Truth of any kind, no matter how closely you read, is
>>>>> hard to come by in Wolfe’s books. And yet, over time, it does seem to
>>>>> emerge.
>>>>>
>>>>> During his journey, Latro is accompanied by another soldier, a black
>>>>> man whose name he doesn’t know. Though Latro keeps forgetting what they
>>>>> have gone through together, their friendship builds. “The heart remembers,”
>>>>> Latro says, “even when no trace of face or voice remains.” This man comes
>>>>> running up to him, “shouting, his arms in the air,” and though Latro does
>>>>> “not know where we met or why I love him (though no doubt those things are
>>>>> written somewhere on this scroll),” he can’t stop smiling. “Without
>>>>> thinking at all about what I should do,” he tells us, “I embraced him as a
>>>>> brother.”
>>>>>
>>>>> This passage comes to mind when Wolfe, over the phone, tells me about
>>>>> grappling in his own life with the complicated questions of memory and
>>>>> truth that he has long been thinking through in his novels. His wife,
>>>>> Rosemary, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease; she died in December, 2013.
>>>>> “There was a time when she did not remember my name or that we were
>>>>> married, but she still remembered that she loved me,” Wolfe recalled. His
>>>>> narrators may be prophets, or liars, or merely crazy, but somewhere in
>>>>> their stories they help to reveal what Wolfe most wants his readers to
>>>>> know: that compassion can withstand the most brutal of futures and exist on
>>>>> the most distant planets, and it has been part of us since ages long past.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ---
>>> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
>>> http://www.avast.com
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Urth Mailing List
>>> To post, write urth at urth.net
>>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Urth Mailing List
>> To post, write urth at urth.net
>> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20150424/dba8b0f7/attachment-0003.htm>


More information about the Urth mailing list