TSACast (SA Podcast)

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MSJ

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« Reply #150 on: March 29, 2016, 11:47:35 pm »
Don't leave me out. I can give no guarantees, but I truly want to do a Cast. Maybe I can squeeze it in this time around.
“No. I am your end. Before your eyes I will put your seed to the knife. I will quarter your carcass and feed it to the dogs. Your bones I will grind to dust and cast to the winds. I will strike down those who speak your name or the name of your fathers, until ‘Yursalka’ becomes as meaningless as infant babble. I will blot you out, hunt down your every trace! The track of your life has come to me,

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« Reply #151 on: March 29, 2016, 11:53:40 pm »
I asked Blackstone if he wanted to do a Cast of his choosing or jump right in with the reread Casts. My ideal Cast for TJE would be yourself, MSJ, and profgrape, H, and Bolivar, seeing as you four are the most active Sloggers right now.

I find out my schedule for next week tomorrow, hopefully, so I'll send out a mass PM to the Cast contenders within a day or two and see if we can't get something going for next week or the week after for TJE.
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Bolivar

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« Reply #152 on: March 30, 2016, 01:20:31 pm »
I'm down for this one, especially if we can get the MSJ debut - it's long overdue!

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« Reply #153 on: March 30, 2016, 02:44:45 pm »
- Sorry, MG, I totally didn't ask you to weigh in on your final thoughts regarding the Moenghus/Kellhus conversation. My bad, friend.

Great cast, all around. Thanks to everyone who participated and those who listen :).

Lol--i said plenty! ;)

Blackstone

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« Reply #154 on: March 30, 2016, 02:52:23 pm »
I'm so stoked that you guys started a podcast. I've been looking for a way to get a TSA fix at work.

I just finished the WP reread and have to say I'm with Wilshire about Moe. After cutting swazond into his arms, he had no choice but to head south to the Fanim. In a way, a Dunyain is like a child in that they had no conception into the outside world. Kellhus probably would have made the same mistake if Moe hadn't (inadvertently) prepared the way with Cnauir. Moe tried having other children that could complete his domination, and they weren't capable due to their "human" half, so he had to call for Kellhus. Had he not chosen the wrong path, he would not have needed Kell.
IIRC the Psukhe is the most primitive of the magics. So the shortest path would have been learning the Gnosis. Ergo, Moe failed to chose the shortest path.
IMO :)
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Wilshire

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« Reply #155 on: March 30, 2016, 03:02:46 pm »
Always good to have new castees. We'll put you on the list (its a very short list, don't worry). Interest in doing a cast from someone new generally makes having a cast far more likely. Otherwise... its just the same people talking to eachoher about the same topics, and that gets old ;). We need fresh perspectives to keep things lively.
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MSJ

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« Reply #156 on: April 01, 2016, 01:50:36 am »
I'm down for this one, especially if we can get the MSJ debut - it's long overdue!

Sent from my SCH-I605 using Tapatalk

Thanks Bolivar! Yea, I'm excited as I have been the last two times I thought I'd be able to. Squared away with the wife and that day I will answer zero phone calls from work. Its on!
“No. I am your end. Before your eyes I will put your seed to the knife. I will quarter your carcass and feed it to the dogs. Your bones I will grind to dust and cast to the winds. I will strike down those who speak your name or the name of your fathers, until ‘Yursalka’ becomes as meaningless as infant babble. I will blot you out, hunt down your every trace! The track of your life has come to me,

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« Reply #157 on: April 06, 2016, 03:29:37 am »
TSACast #9 Notes:

- Finally. Apologies to H (and geoffrobro, MG, GJ, and Wilshire) that I took so, so long doing these notes.
- A few questions... (White Lord thread again ;)).
- Rankine TDTCB Cover Art
- Mild Panic about Overlook possibly not publishing the book: TPB post, Save Bakker's The Unholy Consult, Emailing Overlook/Orbit on a publication date, Wertzone: TUC Delayed
      - "Overlook is very committed to the series"
      - Hats off to the illustrious MG, as noted in the Cast; died laughing at your "Mr. Agent person, contact me, we can do it!"
- One of the threads wherein, contemporary of the Cast, H starts championing ideas regarding Cishaurim/Water/Psukhe.
- I know there were other posts by Duskweaver that elucidated the concept of "thaumaturgy" vs. sorcery but this breakdown is the best I can find at the moment.
- geoffro paraphrasing Ciphrang POV in TTT:

Quote from: TTT, p365, Small Canadian Paperback
The manling made noise in terror, then unleashed his own light: a thread of raw energy. With one hand, Zioz grasped the thread curious. When he pulled, the soul was yanked from the manling. The light vanished. The meat slapped the floor.

Quote from: TTT, p407
Zioz swept burning threads into his fist, wrenched the souls from their housing meat.

- H mentions a thread about Atrithau and Sakarpus surviving the First Apocalypse.
- Thread about Titirga and his Mark (spoilers for The False Sun).
- geoffro paraphrases two quotes:

Quote from: TJE, p494, Small Canadian Paperback
"Of course... Think on it, my mortal friend. The dark is oblivion made manifest. And oblivion encircles us always. It is the ocean, and we are naught but silvery bubbles. It leans all about us. You see it every time you glimpse the horizon - though you know it not. In the light, our eyes are what blinds us. But in the dark - in the dark! - the line of the horizon opens... opens like a mouth... and oblivion gapes."

Quote from: TDTCB, p513
Scylvendi children were told that the sky was a yaksh, impossibly vast and pricked by innumerable holes. "See, Nayu?" he had said, "see the thousand thousand lights peeking through the leather of the night? This is how we know that a greater sun burns beyond this world. This is how we know that when it's night, it is truly day, and that when it's day, it is truly night. This is how we know, Nayu, that the World is a lie."

- Quote from H:

Quote
“Think of the way a fire will shroud the world in the course of illuminating a camp. Often the light of what we see blinds us, and we come to think there is one angle and one angle only. Though they know it not, this is why the Cishaurim blind themselves. They douse the fire of their eyes, pluck the one angle they see, to better grasp the many they recollect. They sacrifice the subtle articulations of knowledge for the inchoate profundities of intuition. They recall the tone and timbre, the passion, of the God’s voice—to near perfection—even as the meanings that make up true sorcery escape them.”

- Quote from geoffro referencing Iyokus' blinding:

Quote from: TTT, p87
"Shhhh, Iyokus. Do you remember what it is to see? ... The words," Eleazaras hissed. "Do you remember the words?"

In sorcery, everything depended on the purity of meaning. Who knew what blinding might do?

"Y-yessss."

"Then you are whole."

- Quote from geoffro referencing Achamian's notation to Esmenet regarding the Cants of Compulsion:

Quote from: TTT, p167
"Think of the soul as a network of innumerable rivers. With the Cants of Compulsion, the old banks are swamped, dikes are washed away, new channels are cut ... Sometimes when the floodwaters recede, things resume their old course. Sometimes they don't."

- Quote from H + MG:

Quote from: TTT, p484
"I am dying, Nayu." Hot whispers in his ear. "I need your strength ..."

- Meppa is X, Meppa is X (II)

- H mentioned that Bakker said Meppa was his favorite character to write; actually Malowebi.

- Lol; I think I heard Chickshire chastising Odin.

- Quote regarding Inrau's "dream" introduction (which for my money was always a guess about Achamian compulsing Inrau to meet him):

Quote from: TDTCB, p93
In his dream, Inrau walked through canyons of burnt brick, through faces and figures illuminated by rags of torchlight. And he heard a voice from nowhere, crying through his bones, across every finger's-breadth of his skin, speaking words like shadows of fists striking just beyond the corner of his eyes. Words that battered whatever remained to him. Words that walked with his limbs.

He glimpsed the sagging facade of a tavern, then a low, golden-dim enclosure of smoke, tables, and overhead beams. The entrance enveloped him. The rising ground tipped forward, directed him toward a malevolent blackness in the far corner of the room. It too enveloped him - another entrance. Everything rushed into the bearded man, his head slack against the chapped stucco, his face on a lazy, upward angle, but tight with some forbidden ecstasy - light spilled from his working mouth. Flakes of sun in his eyes.

Achamian...

- Lol - apparently, there is so much retread in the TTT Reread Cast; thanks for profgrape for providing a difference in that particular roundtable.
        - verbatim in some parts.
- Quote from geoffro regarding Moenghus' comment about Inrithi/Fanim children not born to their antithesis:

Quote from: TTT, p408
"It is their nature to beieve as their fathers believed," the darkness continued. "To desire as they desired ... Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi...

Split him in two, and he would murder himself."

- MG - so funny (I honestly don't remember what exactly he said but I died).

- Quote from MG regarding the Cishaurim "seeing" Achamian and Xinemus:

Quote from: TWP, p643
When they passed near the camps of the enemy, they could feel the Cishaurim's plucked eyes - brilliant, pure, like a lamplight before a silvered mirror - search for them from beyond the horizon. Many times Achamian felt that otherworldly light throw shadows from their shadows. Many times Achamian thought they were doomed. But always those eyes turned away from their inhuman scrunity, either deceived or ... Achamian could not say why.

- Quote from H regarding "pinprick souls:"

Quote from: TTT, p242
One night during the infancy of the Holy War - and for reasons Cnaiur could no longer recall - the sorcerer had taken a crude parchment map of the Three Seas and pressed it flat over a copper laver filled with water. He had poked holes of varying sizes throughout the parchment, and when he held his oil lantern high to complement the firelight, little beads of water glinted across the tanned landscape. Each man, he explained, was a kind of hole in existence, a point where the Outside penetrated the world. He tapped one of the beads with his finger. It broke, staining the surrounding parchment. When the trials of the world broke men, he explained, the Outside leaked into the world.

This, he had said, was madness.

...

The bead had broken - there could be no doubt of that. According to the sorcerer, madness all came down to the question of origins. If the divine possessed him, he would be some kind of visionary or prophet. If the demonic...

- Quote from GJ regarding No-God taking part in battle:

Quote from: TTT Glossary, p518, [b]Apocalypse[/b]
According to extant accounts, not once did the No-God expose himself to battle during this time. It was the years of attrition that forced him to intercede in the Battle of Mengedda.

- H's Breakdown of The Four Revelations
- Someone's cell phone goes off. Lol.
- Quote from GJ regarding "whole nations are damned" interview answer:

Quote from: Bakker, 2011
Damnation is not local. There is a right and wrong way to believe in Eärwa, which means that entire nations will be damned. Since the question of just who will be saved and who will be damned is a cornerstone of The Aspect-Emperor’s plot, there’s not much more that I can say.

- "Fifth Tribe" notation:

Quote from: TTT Glossary, p635, [b]Xiuhianni[/b]
One of the Five Tribes of Men, who, according to The Chronicle of the Tusk, refused to follow the other four tribes into Earwa.

- MG paraphrased Bakker regarding a quote about the mountains being the "edge of the world." I do know which quote he's talking about, I just can't find it - if someone can that would be great. But two others that mark the same notation:

A Divine Wind?:
Quote from: Bakker, 2005
Leaving the rest of the world unexplored was actually a self-conscious decision on my part. In ancient times, roads ended rather than forming a self-contained network. The worlds of our ancestors were fenced by ignorance and mystery. One of the things I don't like about Martin's or Erikson's worlds is that they feel global, which is to say, modern.

Fantasy Hotlist interview, 2011:
Quote from: Bakker
But way back, I wrote this paper on the difference between ancient and modern roads (in the context of a philosopher named Levinas). The signature conceptual difference, I argued, was the way modern roads enclose the globe, the way civilization, in a sense, never runs out for us the way it did for the ancients. At the time I decided the best way to remain true to the ancient headspace I was trying to conjure was to make sure all the roads in Earwa run out, to make the terra incognita in my world absolute.

- Lol - I pop in a second time to fuck shit up and prolong the Cast. I was just finishing up the second hole of my second eighteen that day - which was the reason I couldn't actively partake as I was golfing with some of the grounds crew. I forgot to note the noise event earlier in the Cast because I was laughing too hard when it happened but I was definitely driving a golf cart while listening to the Cast being recorded (not waiting for the bus like Wilshire guesses offhand).

- The Cleric Suicides... thread

- And I leave the way I came; letting GJ to do a commendable job of closing up in Wilshire's absence :).
« Last Edit: April 06, 2016, 03:32:57 am by Madness »
The Existential Scream
Weaponizing the Warrior Pose - Declare War Inwardly
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Wilshire

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« Reply #158 on: April 06, 2016, 10:57:15 am »
What a rag tag group of attendees we manage. It always seems a small miracle they happen at all. Thanks for the copious notes Madness.
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Madness

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« Reply #159 on: April 06, 2016, 02:55:55 pm »
No problem, friend. I'm just happy to have these notes done finally.

And it's my experience that all endeavours feel rag-tag from the inside ;).
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Madness

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« Reply #160 on: April 22, 2016, 02:40:06 am »
TSACast #13 Notes:

Today got away from me, as per usual. Notes are done - I just need to go through them, format for links, and find the quotes for our rambling paraphrasing over the episode. I'll try and get them done before work tomorrow - I'll edit this post - or do them piecemeal over the next couple days.

EDIT: I got some done tonight because it bothers me that they aren't done.

But yeah...

EDIT EDIT: And done 8).



- Pat's Fantasy Hotlist: The Darkness The Comes Before Review
- The Prince of Nothing & The Aspect-Emperor by R. Scott Bakker: The Reviews That Come Before
- Geek's Guide to the Galaxy
- PON/TAE Narrators: DeVries/Orton
- Wert's The Maps of R. Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse
- The Great Amazon Ordeal thread
- MSJ mentions absurb ebook prices: related comment by Bakker about Canadian "e-rights"/Pat mentioning that he asked Overlook to put the ebooks on sale (doing the good work, thanks Pat!)
- New Recorded Books TGO Digital release
- Missing: FB/Duskweaver inception for TSACast - the thread where they talk about talking via podcast must be in the quoted portion of the forum and, therefore, seemingly immune to normal search methods...
- I bring up the "Prologue Prologue" in which Drusas Achamian claims:

Quote from: TJE, p1
I) To have had sexual congress with our Holy Empress on the eve of the First Holy War's triumph over the heathen Fanim at Shimeh.
II) To have learned certain secrets regarding our Holy Aspect-Emperor, to whit: That He is not the incarnation of the God of Gods but rather a son of the Dunyain, a secret sect devoted to the mastery of all things, body and spirit.

...

III) That our Holy Aspect-Emperor's war to prevent the resurrection of the No-God is false. Granted, this is merely implied, since the text was plainly written before the Great Ordeal.

- Embassy of Suicides:

Quote from: TJE, p370
"They said, 'The Aspect-Emperor bears you greetings, Great Satakhan, and asks that you send three emissaries to the Andiamine Heights to respond in kind.'"

...

"With that, the three men produced razors from their tongues and opened their own throats!" He made a tight, feline swiping motion with his left hand. "They killed themselves ... right there before us!

...

The Aspect-Emperor had sent us three suicides! That was the message to my father. 'Look! Look what I can do! Now tell me, Can you do the same?

- TWP - "The Warrior-Prophet Shall Come Before You:"

Quote from: TWP, p719
There was a moment of astonished silence, for the Kianene could scarce believe the bearded wretches before them could author so much woe. Then, before the first ritual declaration, the twelve men cried out, "Satephikos kana ta yerishi ankapharas!" in unison, then drew their knives and cut their own throats.

....

"Th-they said," the ashen-faced man stammered, "'the Warrior-Prophet shall... shall come before you...'"

...

When he demanded to know just who this Warrior-Prophet was, no one could answer him.

- Zsoronga quote regarding Kellhus fighting on "all fronts:"

Quote from: TJE, p371
"I think that's what the devil wanted! I think that was his trap. The provocation of rebuilding Auvanshei, followed by this mad diplomatic overture. Think of what would have happened, what a disaster it would have been, had we taken the field against his Zaudunyani hosts.

- Sorweel about the Aspect-Emperor:

Quote from: TJE, p31
For Sorweel's entire life, it seemed, the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour from the South.

...

The Unification Wars. The Thousand Temples. All the innumerable nations of the Three Seas. And the coming of the False Prophet who preached the end of all things.

- MG offhand mentions the two dogs metaphor:

Quote from: WLW, p57
The Sakarpi tell of a man who had two puppies in his belly, the one adoring, the other savage. When the loving one nuzzled his heart, he became joyous, like the father of a newborn boy. But when the other gored it with sharp puppy teeth, he became desparate with sorrow. Those rare times the dogs left him in peace, he would tell people he was doomed. Bliss can be sipped a thousand times, he would say, whereas shame need only cut your throat once.

The Sakarpi called him Kensooras, "Between Dogs," a name that had since come to mean the melancholy suffered by suicides.

- What does Kellhus/his children think of Sorweel?
- Wilshire paraphrasing some of the Excerpt - The Unholy Consult, Chapter Three (Summary).
- Blackstone mentions Porsparian wiping "spit" on Sorweel's face (TJE, p449, Small Canadian Paperback).
- GJ in and out somewhere there for a small moment (never returned to sign off) sounding like he's rooting through a fridge for beer ;).
- Psatma's "Falling Disease:"

Quote from: TJE, p161
It began as it always did, with a curious buzzing in the ears, as though dragonflies swarmed about her head. Then the ground bucked and flopped like cloth thrown over a fish, and watercolour haloes swung about every living form. And she saw her, though she could not turn to look, a shadow woman, spoked in sun-silver, walking where everything and everyone exploded like clay urns, a silhouette so sharp it cut eyes sideways. A hand reached out and pressed the side of her hooded head, irresistibly gentle, forcing her cheek down to the pungent earth.

"Mother," she gasped.

The shadow held her, as though pinning her below unseen waters. "Be still, child."

...

- Yatwer in the Catacombs:

Quote from: TJE, p177
Silence. The very air seemed animate. The excavated hollows that surrounded them, hall after honeycombed hall, hummed with emptiness, the deadness of space. Watching her sisters, Nannaferi could see it slacken the last of their eyes, the comprehending, the standing underneath what they had lived the entirety of their shallow lives. The Goddess, not the name they used to sugar their lips, not the vague presence that tickled their vanity or itched the underbelly of their sins, but the Goddess, the Blood of Fertility, the monstrous, ageless Mother of Birth.

Here, lending her fury to the blood dark.

- Aside from these two quotes, I believe the only other time the Goddess explicitly expresses her agency is with Porsparian and Sorweel in WLW; feel free to quote others I might have missed.

- Lmao - At 42m I bring up that we still have yet to talk about the titular “Judging Eye” character, Mimara, on the TJE Reread Cast.

- Quote by Achamian “maybe we don’t teach adult students because...:"

Quote from: TJE, p307
He hadn't the heart to tell her the truth: that the reason the sorcerous Schools were loath to take adults as students had to do with the way age seemed to diminish the ability to learn languages.

- Missing quote: Mimara reflecting on not wanting to learn sorcery anymore (may be in WLW).
- Wilshire linked threads regarding Mimara's POV: mimi's verbs/Mimara
- Lol @ MG's "fucking awesome!" regarding Blood Meridian and its influence on TJE.
- Blood Meridian
- Aporos quotes for those surprised like MG:

Quote from: Cu'jara Cinmoi, 2005
The Aporos is something I want to flesh out further in future books. The basic idea is this: the Quya first developed the Aporos in the prosecution of their own intercine wars, but it was quickly forbidden. The arrival of the Inchoroi allowed several renegade Quya to pursue their sorcerous interrogations, leading to the production of tens of thousands of Chorae, which were used throughout the Cuno-Inchoroi wars.

The Aporos possesses a contradictory, or negative, semantics, and as such is able only to undo the positive semantics of things like the Gnosis, Psukhe, Anagogis - even the Daimos. Aporetic Cants have no other effect. Salting is actually a kind of side effect. I would rather wait until TTT comes out before discussing the metaphysics - it has to do with the Mark.

Quote from: TTT Glossary, p545
After the disaster of Pir Pahal, the Inchoroi had seduced the practitioners of the Aporos, who had been forbidden from pursuing their art. Poisoned by knowledge, they devised the first of the Chorae to render their master immune to Cunoroi magic.

- Quote regarding Aporos notation from Cuno-Inchoroi Wars TTT Glossary entry:

Quote from: TTT Glossary, p541
Overmatched by the Inchoroi and their weapons of light, the Nonmen of Viri were driven back with horrendous losses. Only Cu'jara-Cinmoi and his Ishroi Chariots saved them from utter destruction ... Eventually, all but the most powerful of the Inchoroi were overwhelmed by the valour, sorceries, and numbers of the host of Siol.

Quote from: TTT Glossary, p544
More terrible still were those few Inchoroi who ventured out into battle, hanging above the tumult, sweeping the earth with their weapons of light, apparently unaffected by the sorceries of the Ishroi. After the disaster at Pir Pahal, the Inchoroi had seduced the practitioners of the Aporos, who had been forbidden from pursuing their art. Poisoned by knowledg, they devised the first of the Chorae to render their masters immune to Cunoroi magic.

- Quote regarding "Grafts" from Pat's R. Scott Bakker interview (part 2) (2011):

Quote
Is Aurang special amongst the Inchoroi in his ability to use Sorcery? Or were all Inchoroi, his brother included, amongst the Few?

The Inchoroi only possessed the Tekne when they arrived in Eärwa. All of the Inchoroi are the products of successive Graftings, species-wide rewrites of their genotype, meant to enhance various abilities and capacities, such as the ability to elicit certain sexual responses from their victims (via pheromone locks), or the capacity to ‘tune sensations’ and so explore the vagaries and vicissitudes of carnal pleasure. The addition of anthropomorphic vocal apparatuses is perhaps the most famous of these enhancements.

The Grafting that produced Aurang and Aurax was also devised during the age-long C no-Inchoroi Wars, one of many failed attempts to biologically redesign themselves to overcome the Nonmen. But they had been outrun by their debauchery by this time, and had lost any comprehensive understanding of the Tekne. The Graftings had become a matter of guesswork, more likely to kill than enhance those who received them. The Inchoroi filled the Wells of the Aborted with their own in those days.

Aurang and Aurax are two of six who survived the attempt to Graft the ability to see the onta.

- Mimara seeing the Chorae with the Eye:

Quote from: TJE, p611
The Judging Eye has opened.

She feels it leaning through her worldly eyes, pressing forward, throwing off the agony like rotted clothes, snuffing fact from sight, drawing out the sanctity and the sin. With terrible fixation it stares into the oblivion spilling from her palm...

And somehow, impossibly, passes through.

She blinks on the far side of contradiction, her face and shoulders pulled back in a warm wind, a breath, a premonition of summer rain. And she sees it, a point of luminous white, a certainty, shining out from the pit that blackens her grasp. A voice rises, a voice without word or tone, drowsy with compassion, and the light grows and grows, shrinking the abyss to a rind, to the false foil that it is, burning to dust, and the glory, the magnificence, shines forth, radiant, blinding...

And she holds all... In her hand she holds it!

A Tear of God.

- Quote about God’s time being not linear/Mimara pregnant all at once (WLW, p89):

Quote
"But I do know," Achamian hastily adds, "that the Judging Eye involves pregnant women."
Mimara gawks at him through tears. A cold hand has reached into her abdomen and scooped away all warring sensation.
"Pregnant..." she hears herself say. "Why?"
"I don't know." He has flecks of dead leaf in his hair, and she squelches the urge to fuss over him. "Perhaps because of the profundity of childbirth. The Outside inhabits us in many ways, none so onerous as when a women brings a new soul into the world."
She sees her mother posing before a mirror, her belly broad and low with the twins, Kel and Sammi.
"So what is the curse?" she fairly cries at Achamian. "Tell me, old fool!" She rebukes herself immediately afterward, knowing that the Wizard's honesty would wither as her desperation waxed. People punish desperation as much out of compassion as petty malice.
Achamian gnaws his bottom lip. "As far as I know," he begins with obvious and infuriating care, "those with the Judging Eye give birth to dead children."
He shrugs as if to say, See? You have nothing to fear...
Cold falls through her in sheets.
"What?"
A scowl knits his brow. "The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn... The eye that watches from the God's own vantage."
A cleft has opened about their path: a runoff that delivers them to a shallow ravine. They follow the stream that gurgles along its creases—the water is clear but seems black given the gloom. Monstrous elms pillar the embankments, their roots like great fists clenched about earth. The stream has wedged the trees far enough apart for white to glare through seams in the canopy. Here and there the water's meandering course has gnawed hollows beneath various trees. The company ducks beneath those that had fallen across the ravine, trees like stone whales.
"But I've had... had this... for as long as I can remember."
"Which is my point exactly," Achamian says, sounding far too much like someone taking heart in invented reasons. He frowns, an expression Mimara finds horribly endearing on his shaggy old features. "But things are always tricky where the Outside is concerned. Things do not... happen... as they happen here..."

"Riddles! Why do you constantly torture me with riddles?"
"I'm just saying that in a sense your life has already been lived—for the God or the Gods, that is..."
"Which means?"
"Nothing," he says, scowling.
"Tell me what it means!"

- Cleric's awesome exercise of sorcery in Cil-Aujas:

Quote from: TJE, p583
And beyond, in the distance, as though peering into a well without walls, she sees Cleric shining, afire in sorcerous light. Javelins explode like birds against the curve of his Wards. Sranc throng and heave before him, cut and rent by the glittering fury of his song. Three Bashrag close with him, stump-haired obscenities that lurch untouched through weaving geometries of incandescence, each bearing echoes of the absence that pockets her left breast. The Nonman leaps out of their monstrous reach, sails into the midst of more Sranc, his sword falling in an oblique arc. Sorcerous lines mirror his every stroke, and smoke spits from everything they trace. The very air seems to shriek. White light etches the pillared hollows of the gallery, the graven vaults, the panelled surfaces, revealing a floor clotted with hosts of Sranc, aisle after aisle, packed as thick as wind-tossed wheat...

And Cleric laughs and sings and exacts his dread toll, the last heir to Cil-Aujas.

- Mimara sees the slave pens of the Emwama:

Quote from: TJE, p617
She finds herself almost whispering in his ear. "Akka. Listen to me carefully. You remember what you said? About this place... blurring... into the Outside?"

"Yes. The treachery... the betrayal that led to its fall..."

"No. That's not it. It's this place. This very room! It's what they did - the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas... It's what they did to their human slaves!"

Generations bred for the sunless mines. Used up. Cast away like moaning rubbish. Ten thousand years of sightless torment.

- Lol - I mention something about Mimara seeing skeletons in the Emwama cages that line the wall; no such bones remain in the descriptions. Well, aside the "iron bones of a dragon" (WLW, p607).
- Quote about Yatwer being the goddess of slaves:

Quote from: TJE, p527
Somehow, simply thinking her name, Yatwer, had become a kind of premonition. And it shamed him. She was the Goddess of the weak, the enslaved, and now she was his.

- MG quote about "wandering into hell" (it's stretched out over a couple pages in my TJE starting on p509):

Quote from: TJE, p511
If Cil-Aujas indeed plumbed the World to its very limit, as he had told Mimara, might they not simply wander into the precincts of Hell?

- To Madness... thread quote about "building up associations:"

Madness, regarding your comment on "the maddening combinations", is this just to say that while the series contains plenty of hints as to where the series is going, the sheer number of possibilities make it near-impossible to predict?

Bakker has clearly had a story he has wanted to tell... I don't think he's lying when he says he's had the end of TSTSNBN decided for years. But the man had the patience and the stamina to tell us PON first. With TJE and WLW, he has spent five books establishing associations in our mind, building up the world.

This all becomes increasingly clear in the sixth volume. I told Bakker I likened it to him establishing the toys in the sandbox. This is finally his chance to play around. I'm glad his writing has had the chance to grow just enough with each tale.

Truth - a lesser author would have just written TUC and TSTSNBN and that would have been it.

EDIT: To be clear, it's the way he uses all of these associations in combination... it's nothing less than a mind-fuck.

- Speculative Atrocity Tales
- I believe Blackstone mentions an a show-down between the Orthodox Threesie and a Zaudunyani Judge in Caraskand; unfortunately for Blackstone's guess about Lord Soter, Mr. "Steely-Eyed" Zaudunyani Judge dies, though he is immediately avenged:

Quote from: TWP, p621
The man's sparkling gaze darted from Fustaras's eyes to the club, then back.

...

He hoisted the club high, then struck. The man fell to one knee. Blood trickled across his right temple and cheek; he raised two glistening fingers to Fustaras, as though to say, See...

Fustaras struck him again. The Judge fell to the cracked cobble.

- MSJ quote about "Seeds:"

Quote from: TJE, p480
"Ishual," Celmomas said, smiling at his own wit - or lack of it. He reached for his chalice of apple mead. "That's what I call it."

Seswatha shook his head. "Is it stocked with beer or with concubines?"

"Seeds," Celmomas replied, his eyes smiling over the rim of his cup.

- Sauglish Dream without Seswatha:

Quote from: TJE, p462
The Library of Sauglish burned beneath him in his Dream, its towers squat and monumental within garlands of flame. Dragons banked about might plumes of smoke. The glitter of sorcery sparked across the heights - the blind calligraphy of the Gnosis.

Its wings threshing the air, Skafra bared corroded teeth, shrieked out to the horizon, to the whirlwind roping black across the distant plains. A rumble deeper than a final heartbeat.

And Achamian hung unseen, an insubstantial witness... Alone.

Where? Where was Seswatha?

- MSJ is wrong about Celmomas being dead before the Advent of the No-God (fights the No-God):

Quote from: TTT Glossary, Apocalypse, p517
In the spring of 2143 the No-God, summoned by means unknown, first drew breath.

...

Celmomas and his Second Ordeal were destroyed on the Fields of Eleneot in 2146.

- And though I've avoided finding this three separate times it came up in my notes  because it is in WLW (MG, MSJ, and someone else bring it up separately over the course of the Cast), I relent because it will bug me that the notes are "incomplete" by my own frightening metric:

Quote from: WLW, p517
The Goddess smiles...
« Last Edit: April 25, 2016, 07:30:31 pm by Madness »
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« Reply #161 on: May 04, 2016, 02:23:16 pm »
CASTING CALL!

So...

If profgrape, H, geoffrobro, or Bolivar, are interested, I'd like to do a TJE Part II Cast with all or any of you four. I'd like to get to a WLW Cast too while it's fresh in the minds of the Sloggers. We have plans to do Casts for the Atrocity Tales (though, I actually think we should skip Four Revelations, given that H's introduction cast includes a fairly indepth discussion).

Also... I would like to do a general Cast in the next couple weeks for many important reasons: Grimdark Mag's forthcoming excerpt and review, Pat's Fantasy Hotlist forthcoming interview and review (and possibly excerpt but there's been little word on that), and - quite possibly - MG's bakkerfans review (8)!!!). Obviously, that Cast will look to include members who actually want to interact with those fragments of insight.

And, thankfully as I start school again next Monday, I've switched around my schedule quite a bit and will have all of the evenings free!!!

Cheers.
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« Reply #162 on: May 04, 2016, 03:08:38 pm »
I might be able to Monday the 9th, around 7 Central.  The kids seem to only have one baseball game that night and it should end at 6:30.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

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« Reply #163 on: May 04, 2016, 05:19:07 pm »
Congrats on getting your nights back Madness!

I should be free evenings next week as well probably after 6pm Eastern. I'm likely taking some days off soon too, so earlier might work as well. Will try to stay in the loop.

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« Reply #164 on: May 04, 2016, 08:17:39 pm »
Next week evening time is good for me as well.