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Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2002 01:29:43 -0700
From: maa32
Subject: (urth) male hyacinth
A couple months ago I posted on the evidence for a male hyacinth, and I was
taken aback to discover that someone else thought that up independently - it
was kind of a joke. Let me briefly go over why I thought so: right before
Silk meets Hyacinth for the first time, he finds all kinds of statues of boy
toys for the gods: Ganymede and Catamitus, both boy lovers that I normally
associate with Musk. But Hyacinthus is the same kind of mythic figure: male
lover of Apollo, stricken dead by the jealous wind. But instead of Musk, he
immediately meets Hyacinth, who has fake breasts. Then later, in Calde of the
Long Sun ,Patera Quetzal, when Silk claims that he slept with a woman, says he
doesn't believe that his augur has done that. It sounds like nothing, but
Wolfe has a ton of those double entendres in his work. I'm just surprised
that someone else came up with the same thematic idea - the evidence isn't as
sketchy as the evidence that suggest that Patera Pike is Blood's father, but
it's pretty sketchy. I don't see the chem part as convincing, but I think
Hyacinth could certainly be an ex-male who had a little transformation enacted
and it explains the sterility of Silk's relationship.
I don't know how seriously to take these things, really. Not as seriously as
a take a lot of the other stuff I post.
Marc Aramini
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