[Dragaera] Seventeen Maybe Different Jhegaala Spoilers

Mark Mandel cracksandshards at gmail.com
Sun Jul 20 12:39:10 PDT 2008


I don't think we have any spoilers here.

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:26 PM, Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu>
wrote:

> alpha
> beta
> gamma
>

With your letter, Gmail is giving me sponsored links for fraternity and
sorority materials.

On Sat, 19 Jul 2008, Mark Mandel wrote:
>
>  On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 4:30 AM, Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  12. I don't understand how the text snippets get into the Text if
>>> Vlad is reading into a box.  Do the Six Parts Water bits reflect Vlad's
>>> memory of relevant moments from the play, hence the reference
>>> to "merchant" at the end?  AFT, maybe this is a hallucinatory link.
>>>
>>>
>>>  They're added by Brust the
>> translator<http://www.cracksandshards.com/cracks.html#Brusts>,
>> possibly in line with the equivalent of marginal notes by Vlad: "By the
>> way,
>> the mannerist murder comedy I was thinking of was Miersen's 'Six Parts
>> Water'" -- which Brust the T then finds a copy of. Ditto for Oscaani.
>>
>
> This implies that we need to read this material as commentary on Vlad's
> account rather than an integral part of it, so one might find the
> selections e.g. externally ironic.  The task of interpreting the full
> Text is very difficult.
>

Or we can even suppose that Vlad told Brust tT "Here are the quotes I want
in these places." -- Of course, that means attributing an artistic intention
and planning to Vlad, which might complicate things even further. Have fun!


> Incidentally, I can't put my hands on my copy of Michael Swanwick's
> _Vacuum Flowers_ - can someone confirm to me that the heroine is
> sort of named Elizabeth Bright Mudlark?


Vacuum Flowers <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_Flowers>From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia

*Vacuum Flowers* is a science
fiction<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction>
novel <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel> by Michael
Swanwick<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Swanwick>,
published in 1987 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987>. It could be described
as cyberpunk <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk> (some critics credit
it as one of the pregenitor works of that genre), and features one of the
earliest uses of the concept wetware <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware>.

The protagonist of the novel is Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, the recorded
personality of a dead woman. The recording has become the property of a
corporation which intends to sell it as entertainment, but Rebel takes over
the body of Eucrasia Walsh, a woman who rents herself out for temporary
testing of new wetware programming. Soon she is being hunted by the very
corporation which last programmed her, eager to recapture or destroy her
valuable wetware. At the same time, Eucrasia's latent personality is
beginning to reassert itself.

> I've read no Nero Wolfe stories at all.


I read some of them, years ago. Wolfe is often described as weighing
"one-seventh of a ton", which would be pretty close to 300 pounds.


Mark A. Mandel, proprietor, Cracks and Shards
http://www.cracksandshards.com
a Steven Brust fan website



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