[Dragaera] Gift Shop

[Davdi Silverrock]

On Jan 15, 2008 5:02 AM, Steve Rapaport wrote:
> Nobody's asked for my opinion,

Well, inasmuch as this text is being posted to a public mailing list
for the purpose of comment and discussion, your right to express your
opinion is as great as anyone's, I nearly think.

> but I like this one better than the others in
> some ways -- I was always unhappy with the parenthetical details about the
> food and holiday.

Ah.  Alas, while I was originally of the same mind as you, I find that
at this point, those phrases and clauses have a certain charm of their
own.  You perceive, I see Paarfi as taking the bald and insipid
sentence of filial disappointment and expanding the narrative, as it
were, that exists in the spaces of said sentence.

In addition, of course, there was my desire to modify the text so that
it used vocabulary sufficiently similar to what Paarfi is actually
recorded as using.  While I liked "cusp", being as it is a tolerably
erudite word, Paarfi, as best I can tell, never uses it, despite being
tolerably erudite himself.  Thus, the modification you might have
observed.

And so on and so forth.

> I'd modify it a little to sound less breathless though,

*Shrugs helplessly*  While Paarfi is usually not as breathless as the
current revision of the text might imply, he most certainly has on
occasion been nearly so, and it is his most egregious efforts that I
wish to mimic, and perhaps extend.

As his noble translator has observed, "The sonofabitch is completely
out of control."