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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 4, 2019 17:20:21 GMT -5
Yes, this scenario is quite logical and I am sure that Daniel Handler wanted most people to think so, and then they would be confused feeling that something is still strange in this story. The tip to get out of this puzzle is to accept the fact that the ship called Beatrice actually sank. Daniel Handler insisted on making this clear through the poster. So the vessel that Violet did emergency maintenance was not Beatrice. Beatrice sank shortly after they left the island, as they were still using those paddles used in the hotel's tanning sections as oars. Another detail ... The person who wrote the letter BB to LS # 3 had to pay for a service called yakride to get to Lemony's cave, which was in the mountains. On the other hand, the person who wrote BB to LS # 5 was very happy to have the information that Klaus wrote about mountain climbing.
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Post by Foxy on Jun 5, 2019 11:51:41 GMT -5
So the vessel that Violet did emergency maintenance was not Beatrice. Beatrice sank shortly after they left the island, as they were still using those paddles used in the hotel's tanning sections as oars. I know it is not very practical, but couldn't they have kept using the fly swatter ores even after the voyage back to the mainland, maybe every time they used The Beatrice? I don't know why you wouldn't want to ride a yak if you had the opportunity to do so. No, but really, was she using the yak to get through a mountain? Or was it some other kind of terrain to get to the cave?
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 5, 2019 14:12:18 GMT -5
I know it is not very practical, but couldn't they have kept using the fly swatter ores even after the voyage back to the mainland, maybe every time they used The Beatrice? It's just like you said ... It does not seem realistic to believe they would use these things if they had ever gotten to mainland. I fully agree! No, but really, was she using the yak to get through a mountain? Or was it some other kind of terrain to get to the cave? She used the yak to climb the mountain to reach the cave. On the other hand, the person who wrote BB to LS # 5 used a yak to get back to City after having climbed to a cave.
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Post by Dante on Jun 5, 2019 15:52:29 GMT -5
Yes, this scenario is quite logical and I am sure that Daniel Handler wanted most people to think so, and then they would be confused feeling that something is still strange in this story. The tip to get out of this puzzle is to accept the fact that the ship called Beatrice actually sank. Daniel Handler insisted on making this clear through the poster. So the vessel that Violet did emergency maintenance was not Beatrice. Beatrice sank shortly after they left the island, as they were still using those paddles used in the hotel's tanning sections as oars. Another detail ... The person who wrote the letter BB to LS # 3 had to pay for a service called yakride to get to Lemony's cave, which was in the mountains. On the other hand, the person who wrote BB to LS # 5 was very happy to have the information that Klaus wrote about mountain climbing. The point is, Jean Lucio, that there is an enormous gulf of time in which these emergency repairs might have taken place, on any number of hypothetical vehicles or tools. It doesn't even matter if the boat sank eventually, if sinking later was sufficient for its passengers to survive where sinking earlier was something which required serious emergency repairs to save their lives. The yak ride and the mountain climbing aren't contradictory, either; there's nothing to state that Beatrice didn't have to climb a mountain to reach the area from which she was able to procure a yak, or only needed the confidence of having such information in case she needed it. You're taking momentary glimpses as representative of entire journeys or periods of years.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 5, 2019 16:03:00 GMT -5
Yes, this scenario is quite logical and I am sure that Daniel Handler wanted most people to think so, and then they would be confused feeling that something is still strange in this story. The tip to get out of this puzzle is to accept the fact that the ship called Beatrice actually sank. Daniel Handler insisted on making this clear through the poster. So the vessel that Violet did emergency maintenance was not Beatrice. Beatrice sank shortly after they left the island, as they were still using those paddles used in the hotel's tanning sections as oars. Another detail ... The person who wrote the letter BB to LS # 3 had to pay for a service called yakride to get to Lemony's cave, which was in the mountains. On the other hand, the person who wrote BB to LS # 5 was very happy to have the information that Klaus wrote about mountain climbing. The point is, Jean Lucio, that there is an enormous gulf of time in which these emergency repairs might have taken place, on any number of hypothetical vehicles or tools. It doesn't even matter if the boat sank eventually, if sinking later was sufficient for its passengers to survive where sinking earlier was something which required serious emergency repairs to save their lives. The yak ride and the mountain climbing aren't contradictory, either; there's nothing to state that Beatrice didn't have to climb a mountain to reach the area from which she was able to procure a yak, or only needed the confidence of having such information in case she needed it. You're taking momentary glimpses as representative of entire journeys or periods of years. Ok ... So how do you explain this sentence: "Without Sunny's extensive knowledge of making snacks from wildflowers and weeds, I would never have found the strength to return once more". Beatrice is grateful for Sunny's extensive knowledge of preparing food. She does not say she was grateful that Sunny wrote recipes ... Sunny's help was essential in returning from mountains to city. Without Sunny's extensive knowledge, Beatrice would not have had the strength to return. The setting in which Beatrice II remembers details of recipes, story details, travel details, is not consistent with the statement that Beatrice II says she remembers only (emphasis on only) a few fragments of memories about her adoptive parents. In addition, Beatrice II was in the cave in the sleet season, which I believe is the winter. In the winter there are no wild flowers blooming on mountains, which could be used as food for Beatrice II.
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Post by Dante on Jun 6, 2019 16:11:47 GMT -5
Ok ... So how do you explain this sentence: "Without Sunny's extensive knowledge of making snacks from wildflowers and weeds, I would never have found the strength to return once more". Beatrice is grateful for Sunny's extensive knowledge of preparing food. She does not say she was grateful that Sunny wrote recipes ... Sunny's help was essential in returning from mountains to city. Without Sunny's extensive knowledge, Beatrice would not have had the strength to return. The setting in which Beatrice II remembers details of recipes, story details, travel details, is not consistent with the statement that Beatrice II says she remembers only (emphasis on only) a few fragments of memories about her adoptive parents. In addition, Beatrice II was in the cave in the sleet season, which I believe is the winter. In the winter there are no wild flowers blooming on mountains, which could be used as food for Beatrice II. To be honest, I'm not troubled by the idea that Beatrice may have had some notes anyway, and simply didn't describe Sunny's communications in this manner so as not to be repetitive. But there is another possible explanation for a general statement, and that is that this information was disseminated generally - through multiple forms of media. Consider that we know Beatrice heard Sunny discussing her recipes on the radio. (How plausible this is isn't particularly relevant; it just matters that Beatrice believes it was Sunny.) Beatrice thus might have had access to Sunny's extensive knowledge from multiple different sources and means of communication. It's not an exhaustive library she needs to have received from Sunny's mouth personally - though as Sunny's biography indicates, it's possible for quite young infants in ASoUE to become quite capable as participants in the world, so it's not inconceivable that Sunny might have ensured that even as a baby Beatrice was memorising this information. Equally it's reasonable for the information we've been given by Beatrice about the Baudelaires to be more or less the sum total of those "fragments" of memories; she shares them because they're all she has to share. And lastly, it's also possible she plays up her impoverishment of happy memories with her family in order to gain Lemony's sympathy; it's clear, after all, that she doesn't have the years of memories with the Baudelaires she might have had, and by comparison even up to a couple of years' memory might seem inadequate, if it's from across long years without them.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 8, 2019 15:48:17 GMT -5
Another question that I must raise again here is with the letter to the editor em TBL. Lemony wrote: “It was quite some time before I received the first of Beatrice Baudelaire’s letters that I realized that all of Beatrice Baudelaire’s letters of was not just in the first Beatrice Baudelaire but in the second Beatrice Baudelaire and that perhaps if I gathered the remaining letters of the first Beatrice Baudelaire with the first letters of the remaining Beatrice Baudelaire, the Beatrice letters could explain the Beatrice letters and even the letters of Beatrice, no matter wich letters they are, and no matter what order the letters are in. I immediately began work on the file. ” Lemony clearly informs that there are letters coming from the two beatrices in the file. I know the expression "Beatrice Baudelaire’s letters" can be dubious. However, I think the expression "letters of Beatrice" is not dubious. At the moment my English specialist is not close to me, and I will still investigate this detail with him. However, I consulted the dictionary. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/of —used as a function word to indicate origin or derivation. So I think Lemony wrote there were letters written by the two Beatrices in TBL when he wrote: " "if I gathered the remaining letters of the first Beatrice Baudelaire with the first letters of the remaining Beatrice Baudelaire... I immediately began work on the file."
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Post by Dante on Jun 10, 2019 12:40:15 GMT -5
"Derivation" refers to obtaining something from a source which is not necessarily its true origin, so it's acceptable to understand "letters of Beatrice" (to put it shortly) as "letters belonging to Beatrice", which Lemony's own letters to her were, until at some point he presumably re-obtained them. Of course, the fact that the narrative comprises letters to and from Beatrice is partly to disguise the chronology of the text, and I don't truly believe we were meant to think too hard about how Lemony recovered the letters he sent; I've always thought that they must have been returned to him by Beatrice after their relationship ended (the telegram in particular was surely never delivered). But this is TBL, so we also can never be sure when "letters" is being used to mean "correspondence" and when it's being used to mean "initials" (or "characters"), so it's equally plausible for this just to be a poetic way of referring to the letters of Beatrice's name or indeed to any text written by the first Beatrice - of which we do have an example in My Silence Knot.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 22, 2019 8:19:40 GMT -5
Please explain to me what you think of Beatrice's use of "My Silence Kot" in BB to LS # 1. Do you think it was a simple coincidence that young Beatrice used that expression? And what is she talking about when she states that there is certainly at least one person with the same initials as her? I think Daniel Handler made a serious attempt to show tips that the two Beatrices were alive at the same time, and who made a point of making that understanding difficult to easily recognize. But in the letter to the editor he stated that the secrets contained in TBL would be understood by a few. I think this is strong evidence that the most obvious interpretation is not correct. The most obvious interpretation of the text carries no notion of a great hidden secret that can be dangerous. But my interpretation of TBL exposes secrets of Lemony Snicket and Beatrice I.
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Post by Dante on Jun 22, 2019 16:14:46 GMT -5
There's nothing remotely surprising about the idea that young Beatrice would know who her namesake is and has been told things about her or even done independent research on her. It's clear from BB to LS #1 that she knows the broad outlines of the story, but needs somebody who was actually there to fill in the details, indicating that she's working entirely on second-hand information. Harking back to My Silence Knot, doubtless another bit of trivia she or someone else dug up from the past (who says the Baudelaire children never knew about that play?), is because she expects that title to resonate with a person who knew Beatrice, and because it's meaningful to her own experiences; the shallowness of young Beatrice's understanding is pretty clearly indicated in the way she co-opts the anagram "baticeer" for herself without actually doing the slightest bat-rearing of her own. These are also other ways in which young Beatrice serves as a metaphor for an ASoUE fan; constantly begging the author for details of the backstory, adopting phrases from the series for their own personal use...
The thing that a lot of the grown-up fans of this series often fail to understand is that ASoUE has always been, frankly, too easy; and that's because it's ultimately for children. It wants its puzzles to by and large be easy enough for children to solve and feel good about themselves, not for adults to lose themselves in endless convoluted spirals of forgotten details and improvised plot points. This is obvious in the way almost all the canon examples of Sebald Code come pre-circled, or the way Lemony explicitly spells out that V.F.D. stands for Volunteer Fire Department in The End even though he'd already made it very clear. And yes, TBL does have a secret - it's that the letters take place in two different time periods, rather than forming a linear chronological exchange. Your theory, Jean Lucio, is just a complicated way of falling for the text at face value.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 22, 2019 17:13:30 GMT -5
Dante, I am sympathetic to your general view, but I am not sure why you think young B never trained a bat. She was at a VFD school, and was in the end able to penetrate its secrets; why might they not have taught her bat-training, something which clearly is a VFD skill?
More generally, it's worth remembering that this came out before The End, and so much was mysterious that would not be so after TE. We did not know for sure that Beatrice was the Baudelaires' mother, though there had been clues; we did not know anything about Kit's child=, except that there would be one. Even if we made the leap to concluding the child would be a girl and would be called Beatrice, it was still a mystery why she was called Beatrice Baudelaire - you'd expect either Snicket or Denouement. We had no clue from the series itself that there was more than one Beatrice, though it had been mentioned in a couple of web promotions. So this book initially presented us with a complex mystery, but one which in retrospect is clearly answered.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 24, 2019 6:34:09 GMT -5
the point in question is: why are these secrets dangerous? "The secrets contained here are like all secrets - dangerous to those who discover them and harmless to those who fail to notice them." Daniel Handler did not make the interpretation of the LSTUA text for children easy at all.Why would TBL be any different? The general feeling I feel about reading ASOUE is that we are being mistakes. Daniel Handler pretends to be writing for children only. But there are deeper layers. When I first read TMM it was that I realized it. Dr. Owell's death was not intended to be read only by children. Then death Madame Lulu. This is a description of graphic violence. I do not think these adult layers were left there to be really discovered by children. They were simply in Daniel Handler's mind. He must have had fun imagining parents reading to their children about cruel murders, serious injuries, use of biological weapons of mass destruction, corruption of moral values, etc. Daniel Handler in the end was writing more about the distorted view of his world than trying to make children sleep when they heard a story.
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Post by Hermes on Jun 24, 2019 10:48:25 GMT -5
No good book is meant to be read only by children. Not Winnie the Pooh, not Narnia, not Harry Potter.... There will always be something for adults to appreciate. As for death and destruction, many children's books, from The Hobbit to, again, Harry Potter, include them; that's not surprising.
If VFD exists and is engaged in a conflict with villains, of course knowing about it will be dangerous.
TUA, I will grant, is not a children's book; it is is a treat for the fans. Bear in mind, though, that a lot of what it contains is confirmed in the main series later; it is the first book actually to deal with VFD as an organisation, and the next book after it, TCC, confirms in clearer terms what it tells us. Note also that there are hints some of the documents may be forgeries, which means that when things remain mysterious, we can't guarantee a definite solution.
It has occurred to me, though, that there is at least one case where there is a mystery in the books waiting to be solved. Many of the mysteries are solved in the books - who is Beatrice, what is VFD, who is the survivor of the fire, and also, it strikes me, who is JS - and people who demand a further solution are in my view overinterpreting. Others, most obviously the Great Unknown, aren't meant to be solved; they represent the ongoing mysteriousness of the world. But there is one exception; the sugar bowl. Handler has said that there is an answer to this, which one can work out, and sometimes people write to him with the right solution; but it certainly isn't right there on the surface.
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Post by Optimism is my Phil-osophy on Jun 24, 2019 19:44:02 GMT -5
Hermes, how good that you agree at least in part with me. I seriously believe that the reason for the sugar bowl mystery is so difficult, but still possible to be solved, is because to solve the mystery of the sugar bowl it is necessary to leave aside conventional interpretations about ASOUE. If more people were to open their minds about not-so-obvious interpretations, the enigma of the sugar bowl would be more easily solved. Here's what I propose with my theory: All ASOUE books were written many years after the events. This proposal is not non-canonical, for Lemony wrote this directly in some passages. The second proposal: there are two sugar bowls, one contains information and another contains a weapon. This, too, is not non-canonical. In the letter in TSS Lemony states that information on an item of a tea set could free him from the charge of being an arsonist. On the other hand, Kit Snicket clearly says that only the fact that the deadly fungus falls into Olaf's hands would be worse than Olaf owning the sugar bowl. Besaid that Hal claims that sugar would be better than mushrooms, showing that both the Micelyum Medusoide and the sugar bowl have the same basic function. But for this interpetration to work, it is necessary to recognize that the letter in TSS was not for Kit. But this is also not non-canonical, for in THH it is explained that comrades who have the same goal are also called brothers and sisters. It is also necessary to recognize that the Hotel D had already been rebuilt at the time TSS was written. But that too is not non-canonical, because the TBB The Rare Edition talks about the construction works of a certain hotel. I think that many people can not have access to understand what's in the sugar bowl simply because they can not accept that Lemony actually wrote the books many years after the events recorded in them. Regarding the TGU, I do not think it's something impossible to be discovered. Lemony clearly gives two options. One of the two options must be right, or both, if I am right and there are two entities in the form of a question mark in the oceans of ASOUE. I do not like to ask people to simply agree with me. I'd like to ask them to open their minds to new possibilities, or new angles, and start thinking, "What if Daniel Handler really has an answer to each of the mysteries? And I did not realize becouse I was looking in the wrong direction?"
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