The pelagic argosy sights… what the hell is this?

It’s recently come to my attention that this site ranks pretty high if you google “pelagic argosy.” I can only imagine the anguish that must cause people, who go in search of literary revelations for Gene Wolfe’s groundbreaking The Book of the New Sun and are instead cast to this dismal shore, an ill-monikered hinterland of homework assignments and college-mandated Net analysis.

To those unlucky travelers, I emphatically state: Go here! Or even better, go here!

I didn’t mean to use the Autarch’s famous password* in vain; as I have expressed many times in this blog, my slavish admiration of all things Wolfian knows no bounds. If I could, I’d gladly engage in some amateur analysis of Severian’s odyssey, or even better, fill a canvas with the strange peoples and beings that populate the far future. But for the moment, I am bound by obligations I dare not sunder. Until class is over around mid-May, this is a strictly business blog with a knowing wink for a title.

But like I said in the very first post, after then… who knows? Perhaps then the blog’s content will undergo a figurative apotheosis. Or maybe I’ll just get rid of the thing to spare my fellow Wolfe readers the confusion.

*Edit: (SPOILERS!) Technically, I guess it’s Vodalus who first tells Severian to expect the phrase; the Autarch, whose urine is the wine of the people, only speaks it back to him. But since Vodalus is unknowingly in the Autarch’s service, dot dot dot…

~ by pbonaduce on February 11, 2008.