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Post by Isadora Is a Door on Oct 2, 2013 14:53:43 GMT -5
I think something different, though. what exactly? Okay, thanks for clearin that up for me This is also true for me Ah, that is interestin. Bein only........ 6/7 at the time, i woudlnt really ahve known that. My mum told me it was sirius balcks' brother, ad i didnt beleve her. In the German version it was FF, which was easy to guess. What does that mean in English? I agree. There's a possible clue to this in TNN (though I know that's not canon). Not bein familiar with the nameless novel, what exactly is this clue? And why is it not canon? --Chapter Two-- Not many thoughts from this chapter, but, to be fair, not much really happens. Is more of a basic setting of the scene. The fountain of victorious finance and the measuring tape all obviously recall UE A very twisty road / the air had such a curious smell - wait….. Lousy lane? The masks…. this one of the rather obscure aspects that initially made me wary of ?1. In this chapter particularity there is an awful lot of in-your-face strangeness, rather akin to TMM Lemonys friend who knew all sorts about marine life - Fiona's mother?
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Post by Hermes on Oct 2, 2013 15:13:29 GMT -5
I agree. There's a possible clue to this in TNN (though I know that's not canon). Not bein familiar with the nameless novel, what exactly is this clue? And why is it not canon? There is a picture of the burning house from TBB, accompanied by the quote 'fire can solve every problem in the world', which is said by the sinister duo in TSS. It's not canon because not everything in it was written by Handler. PS. There is a transcript of TNN in Dastardly Documents.
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Post by Kit's tits kick ticks on Oct 3, 2013 4:43:40 GMT -5
In the German version it was FF, which was easy to guess. What does that mean in English? What? FF is VFD, that's what we were talking about... I don't know if I understand your question right now. Sorry. General question: Does the language in the English version seem somehow old? Because in German it does. There are just words and groups of words that nobody under the age of 50 would ever use. That's probably the reason why most children wouldn't like to read it. Chapter 2: - Stain'd-by-the-Sea is called „Schwarz-aus-dem-Meer“, which means „Black-out-of-the-Sea“. The „by“ in the English name can have 2 different meanings: 1. The town has been stained by the sea, and 2. The town is just called Stain'd and it is/used to be by the sea. None of these versions has been translated for German, but I think they did something more interesting: The word „aus“ can also have two different meanings, which is „coming from“ or „made of“. The „black“ is a good idea because of the ink and also because it just seems to fit. - They kept the thing that the thing Theodora says after „What does the S stand for“ always starts with an S. - „Clusterous Forest“ = „Klausterwald“. „Wald“ is just forest, „Klauster“ is a word which was used ages ago in some dialects for some kind of lock, but I don't think anyone thought of that when they translated that, they just something that sounds similar to „Clusterous“ but also somehow German.
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Post by Dante on Oct 3, 2013 6:02:07 GMT -5
Lemonys friend who knew all sorts about marine life - Fiona's mother? Or Josephine. I think Snicket also makes a reference in this chapter to something "being difficult to tame, like leeches," which I take as an implication that V.F.D. actually had made the attempt. With the Lachrymose Leeches, perhaps? What? FF is VFD, that's what we were talking about... I don't know if I understand your question right now. Sorry. I think Mister M was asking what F.F. abbreviates, i.e. the German words, and what those literally translate to. Snicket's language is often unusually formal, archaic, even stilted, but I would say that that's part of the appeal. It doesn't feel modern, not exactly, but it has the kind of nostalgic sense you might get from reading an old novel. Black-out-of-the-Sea, interesting - or perhaps Black-from-the-Sea? "X-by-the-Sea" or similar is a recognised form for the names of some towns in England and France (in French, obviously), so I wondered if this was actually true in Germany as well, for town names to have a kind of hyphenated description like that. If not, it might have been better not translated literally. So are there are also two readings of the whole Black-out-of-the-Sea name - as in, you can read the Black as being separate from the sea or a part of it (out of the sea or made of the sea, if you like)? It also sounds kind of like the sort of name I might give to a town in an imitation of H.P. Lovecraft's weird fiction.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Oct 3, 2013 16:00:19 GMT -5
If I can manage my time better, I hope to participate in this tomorrow. I'm eager to see more of your translations, too, Anka.
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Post by Isadora Is a Door on Oct 3, 2013 16:04:14 GMT -5
No notes today, as the third chapter is longer than i had thought. I would appreciate your participation, Sherry Ann
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Post by Hermes on Oct 3, 2013 16:06:42 GMT -5
I'm very glad of the opportunity to reread WCBATH, which I have been meaning to do all year, but stuff kept getting in the way, as it does.
Chapter 1.
There was a lot of discussion of the false parents at the time it came out, and I remain completely confused about what is going on here.
'With all the tea on all the tables, it looked like one of her pockets was steaming' - which, of course, it was, since she had put Lemony's tea in it (though the false mother still says 'drink your tea' after this).
It's interesting that Theodora signs herself 'S', despite not actually using that name. This is the start of an ongoing mystery.
I believe that in fact 'roadster' doesn't just mean 'car', but specifically two-seater.
'an excellent reader, a good cook, a mediocre musician and an awful quarreler'. The last, of course, is ambiguous. We know from ASOUE that he is a musician, and implicitly, given all the references in his work, that he is a reader, but it's interesting that he is also a cook - an art which is clearly important to VFD.
'I would never have found myself... destroying the wrong library'. This is disturbing. And does it imply that there is a right library to destroy?
Chapter 2.
'it was in Stain'd-by-the-Sea that I spent my apprenticeship' - which is a good clue that the other books will also take place there.
As I've mentioned before, the bat-shaped tape-measure-holder is an interesting false clue, making us think of Beatrice instead of Kit - and one that only a relatively few readers could have spotted in the first place.
'I wondered where the water had gone when they drained this part of the sea, and I should have wondered.' So, where? Into the City's underground sewer system? I begin to wonder if Stain'd-by-the-Sea has something important to do with the history of VFD.
Were the ink-extracting machines already there before the valley was drained - and hence were they at the bottom of the sea?
'Our first client lives here' - which implies Theodora intends to take on more than one case in Stain'd. This, perhaps, confirms the theory that she's really here to keep Lemony out of the way. (Though in that case, why hasn't Kit been removed as well?)
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Post by Dante on Oct 4, 2013 1:33:50 GMT -5
There was a lot of discussion of the false parents at the time it came out, and I remain completely confused about what is going on here. Here's how I read it: Lemony is being chaperoned to his meeting with Theodora. His chaperones don't want him to meet Theodora and instead are planning to snatch him and take him elsewhere. Theodora either gets wind of this or guesses it - maybe he isn't meant to require chaperones at this stage at all - and intervenes to alert him. It's a set-up which requires a number of assumptions. That Lemony's false chaperones don't know that he's going to be taken to Stain'd, thus getting him out of the way anyway. That they don't recognise the organisation's lowest-ranked chaperone. That Theodora does recognise them as a threat, somehow, although I get the impression she's mistaking their intentions somewhat. It's hard to read the allegiances of the false parents, really. I suspect the situation is mostly staged - by Snicket the author, that is - for dramatic purposes, but it gets a lot of the important issues on the table, not just in terms of internal friction in V.F.D. but in terms of the kind of themes and atmosphere we're dealing with. I think she probably signed herself S. here simply because volunteers generally use only their first initial, especially in covert communication. One variant on the theories about Theodora's forename is that it's not really a secret, she's just concealing it owing to her interpretation of tradition. One possible interpretation is that there's never a right library to destroy, so it will always by definition be the wrong one. I'm pretty sure I read comments somewhere by a non-ASoUE-reader who nonetheless interpreted Lemony's female associate as being a possible love interest (before the revelation that she is not), so I think some of the clues dropped in this direction... well, while they're obvious Beatrice indicators to ASoUE readers, we were not wrong to read it that way. We were meant to think it. And even if we hadn't known about Beatrice, we would have inferred her existence. Well, we do later learn that Killdeer Fields has been flooded... No good opportunity to do so, perhaps. Maybe her chaperone's work cannot be separated from residence in the city. She appears to work at the Fourier Branch, as I recall it, and I imagine that's something that Kit's chaperone has no intention of being removed from simply to get her apprentice out of the way.
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Post by Hermes on Oct 4, 2013 15:51:57 GMT -5
There was a lot of discussion of the false parents at the time it came out, and I remain completely confused about what is going on here. Here's how I read it: Lemony is being chaperoned to his meeting with Theodora. His chaperones don't want him to meet Theodora and instead are planning to snatch him and take him elsewhere. Theodora either gets wind of this or guesses it - maybe he isn't meant to require chaperones at this stage at all - and intervenes to alert him. Good, but this does not seem to explain why the chaperones are pretending to be his parents (and why Lemony seems to be going along with it). OK - I guess that's possible. It's a puzzle to what extent VFD does use initials for internal purposes - some things, like the Building Committee transcript, and L's letter to Beatrice, suggest it's done a lot; and indeed some characters like R. (and K. until quite late) are known only by their initials; yet in fact it's clear that often real names are known: Hector, for instance, refers to Monty and Haruki, not M. and H. Of course it may be that S. is unwilling to given her real first name because Lemony is in some way a suspicious character.
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Post by Kit's tits kick ticks on Oct 5, 2013 5:40:03 GMT -5
Here's how I read it: Lemony is being chaperoned to his meeting with Theodora. His chaperones don't want him to meet Theodora and instead are planning to snatch him and take him elsewhere. Theodora either gets wind of this or guesses it - maybe he isn't meant to require chaperones at this stage at all - and intervenes to alert him. Good, but this does not seem to explain why the chaperones are pretending to be his parents (and why Lemony seems to be going along with it). Because it's normal for a child to be chaperoned by parents, and they want to seem as normal as possible. Chapter 3: - The letter that S. Theodora Markson gives to Mrs. Murphy Sallis makes me think that somehow this is not even really a real case, but just something for Lemony to learn, and they are really all just acting. Like everyone knows what is happening and the letter maybe tells people what to do. - „Bombinating Beast“ = „Bordunbestie“. Bestie is just beast, and Bordun is some bombinating sound which was somehow used for music in the middle ages or something. I would have never heard that word before if I hadn't done music as a big important subject for the last two years of school. But nice translation, keeping the alliteration and meaning more or less the same. - I still don't understand how the hat looks like an a. - „The Stain'd Lighthouse“ = „Der Schwarze Leuchtturm“ / „The Black Lighthouse“. Of course, because of „Schwarz-aus-dem-Meer“
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Post by Dante on Oct 5, 2013 9:49:39 GMT -5
- The letter that S. Theodora Markson gives to Mrs. Murphy Sallis makes me think that somehow this is not even really a real case, but just something for Lemony to learn, and they are really all just acting. Like everyone knows what is happening and the letter maybe tells people what to do. Not that people didn't think the same thing about ASoUE, but it seems a little excessive. What I think is really interesting is that Mrs. Murphy Sallis (or rather, Sally Murphy - or rather, her employer, Hangfire) knew about and how to contact V.F.D., which is otherwise very secretive in this series. "Bombinating" is much the same; I don't know that any of us had ever heard the word before ATWQ introduced us to it. So that's actually a fairly careful translation, it seems. I think it's more just the roudned top, although you may also want to read the middle line as representing the hatband. Just kind of imagine typing a big "a" over it and try to line everything up.
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Post by Hermes on Oct 5, 2013 10:50:38 GMT -5
- The letter that S. Theodora Markson gives to Mrs. Murphy Sallis makes me think that somehow this is not even really a real case, but just something for Lemony to learn, and they are really all just acting. Like everyone knows what is happening and the letter maybe tells people what to do. Not that people didn't think the same thing about ASoUE, but it seems a little excessive. What I think is really interesting is that Mrs. Murphy Sallis (or rather, Sally Murphy - or rather, her employer, Hangfire) knew about and how to contact V.F.D., which is otherwise very secretive in this series. I think it's notable that Theodora's activities as a detective are quite open, although the organisation she works for is kept secret. Might 'detective' be her cover identity, as it was later to be Jacques's? Yet her letter to Mrs Sallis does seem to have VFD insignia on it - which is curious. Well, I knew the Rabelais quote, though of course that's in Latin: I've never heard 'bombinating' as an English word. I'm not sure where we're up to now: we seem to have lost a couple of days. Can we have some guidance? Chapter 3. Yes, it is a long chapter, isn't it? Two quite separate episodes. One thing I have noticed in this reread is that that, rather as in ASOUE, things move a lot more quickly than one might naturally think. So far as I can see, the whole action of the book, except Chapter 13, takes two days. 'A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that -' 'What? For I know not yet what you will say' 'Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.' (A.E. Housman, 'Fragment of a Greek Tragedy'.) Mrs Sallis reminds me rather of Anka, in her conviction that her enemies are nice people and determination that they should not be harmed. Of course, it's really all a pretence, and they aren't her enemies at all, but that was my first impression. The 'six rings' theme already begins in this book, though I did not remember it. Another ongoing mystery. One notable thing about this series is the large number of parents who are inactive for one reason or another - first Mr Mallahan, then Mr Bellerophon, and later the Knights. This may just be a device to enable their children to operate independently, rather as J.K. Rowling chose to set here series in a boarding school so that the characters wouldn't have parents constantly checking on them, but it may have a deeper thematic meaning as well. Why is attention drawn to Moxie's eyes? We are later to hear about Ellington's as well.
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Post by Dante on Oct 5, 2013 11:17:55 GMT -5
One notable thing about this series is the large number of parents who are inactive for one reason or another - first Mr Mallahan, then Mr Bellerophon, and later the Knights. This may just be a device to enable their children to operate independently, rather as J.K. Rowling chose to set here series in a boarding school so that the characters wouldn't have parents constantly checking on them, but it may have a deeper thematic meaning as well. I'm fairly sure that it's of vital thematic importance, but I'm not quite sure how yet. It is partly a device, but the fact that it's so transparently employed for every young character I can think of suggests to me that there has to be more to it than that. I think that perhaps it's partly owing to the continuing theme in Snicket that children are the innovators and the ones really attuned to the problems of the world, and that adults are, if you like, useless simply because they don't tend to take their children seriously - but there's more to it than that. Mr. Mallahan is clearly suffering from depression, the Bellerophon's father is ambiguously and perhaps dubiously sick as well, Ellington never even mentions a mother. Which implicitly reveals that fathers are the main focus of the theme - deficient fathers and absent mothers (or, in Ellington's case, an absent father and a non-existent mother, which is a kind of exaggeration of the same thing). I suspect that it's going to be hard to draw any conclusions about this until we have the rest of the series on-hand, but what exactly a good parent or guardian is is also an unspoken theme of ASoUE.
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Post by Hermes on Oct 5, 2013 11:46:01 GMT -5
Of course, Lemony's own parents are also absent, and while we'd expect that anyway because of the structure of VFD, there is some distinct suggestion that they have been rendered inactive in some way as well. No doubt we'll come to that.
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Post by Isadora Is a Door on Oct 5, 2013 17:50:53 GMT -5
I hope snickets 'real' parents turn up at some point, but i doubt it. woah woah woah id missed this comeptley. I think... willt eh library thats *is* desotryed ybt eh one in staidn by thes ea? I think... i find the first 4 chapters to be particularly staed and stilted.... i dont think its intentional on handlers part, but its just a lot of set up needing to take place. I had heard of it before in a chidrens book i once had. That doesnt mean i knew what it meant fo course Apolo9ies - ive been pursin the ATWQ Seciton of 667 to see what people thouht of the book, and this ahs taken up mroe of my timee than actual readin. I hoep to catch up on monday, however The fourth chapter could also be divided, i think, though maybe not as cleanly (although wasn't that hwo it was shown in the preview). I will take note if i see any more evidence of moments where a chapter could be split in two.... was it always to be 13 chapters? CHAPTER THREE As if she was preparing herself for an important performance - which, of course, it is. A very clever piece of foreshadowing there Why didn't you call the police? ‘because she called us’ - So, unless i am misunderstanding here, she did call the police, and they contacted VFD in some way? The butler, of course, mimics the birds calls exactly. Why does Theodora always ring the doorbell six times? I know its been discussed before but… why? Maybe its somehow related to the S (six… but then why not seven) Theodra is hilarious. Does she believe that someone would think lemony and her could be married? Her line immediately after ‘let the children play’ instantly shatters nay hope of that being convincing. Also im unsure how to take lemony s line 'a woman of Theodora's age’ How old is she is exactly? Moxie is my favorite character Where has all the ink gone ? Who is the person who was interested in the items? I don’t remember if this is revealed later on CHAPTER FOUR I hope to do two chapters on Monday, therefore Putting us back on course. I just want to take this moment to praise the artwork in the series. The small tiny details are incredible. Ink Inc makes numerous apperances from the outside, but is ever actually seen… I wonder if there are any such palces liek this for later books… I think the fourth book will heavily feature the clusterous forest. It think prosper lsot is working for hangfire. What is the statue outside the 'city hall' supposed to be of?
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