Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 11:09:55 -0700
From: Michael Andre-Driussi 
Subject: (urth) PEACE: oh wabe!

William Ansley's memory of PEACE is very sharp!

He wrote:
>In the passage from _Peace_ you mention above, Weer is thinking about
>nonexistant races of men. I don't have my book with me and so can't
>remember the details, but from what you say above, it was the
>orange-skinned people who worshiped sundials. The passage continues to the
>effect that, after the threat of legal action allows the "orange tribe"
>into the country club, "they out with strange oaths. What's a wabe?" (I am
>reconstructing the quote from memory.)

This is right.  The only additions I would make are: "wabe" is part of the
strange oath that slips out of an orange guy in an unguarded moment (an
utterance that makes the familiar seeming become utterly alien); and that
the orange tribe seems to worship sundials as "ours" seems to worship
telephone poles (a play on how telephone poles have cruciform shapes due to
utility unrelated to religion . . . another engineering joke).

>----------------------
>The grass plot round a sundial ... because it goes a long way before it,
>and a long way behind it ... and a long way beyond it on each side.
>-----------------------
>
>This is word play. The sound of the word "way" is combined with the sound
>of the common first letter of "before," "behind" and "beyond" to produce
>the word "wabe." (My apologies to everyone who already understood this
>perfectly.)

Hey, does this mean it is pronounced "WAY-bee," to rhyme with "baby"?  I
thought it was "WAYB" to rhyme with "babe"!

Wolfe-content aside, everybody should go out and see Miyazaki's new movie
"Spirited Away"!  Right now!  Miyazaki has several fine movies and this is
one of them.  Many of the people around here have seen it already (I've
seen it twice and might see it again before it gets to video).

=mantis=


Sirius Fiction
booklets on Gene Wolfe, John Crowley
29 copies of "Snake's-hands" until OP!
http://www.siriusfiction.com/



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