Talk:Book:Snuff/Annotations

well, more notes and observations than annotations

p90 Miss Pickings and her companion... Terry has introduced the idea of a gay subculture on the Discworld in previous books: the gender-ambivalent beauticians who attend to Granny Weatherwax (Maskerade), Mr Harris and the Blue Cat Club ("un-natural acts are only natural..." - Rosie Palm) and the ambiguous Pepe, and Bengo Macarona, in Unseen Academicals. It's nicely done: it accepts and acknowledges there are gay people, and that being gay is never all that defines a person - sexual preference is only part of anyone's makeup. So far, though, he's only done gay men: this is the first time overtly lesbian characters have appeared in a Discworld book. Another barrier falls... (Although in this light you do wonder about Miss Butts and Miss Delcross at the Quirm College for Young Ladies, who have a similar Bloomsbury Group aura about them.) if this can be expanded into an Annotation proper, it might revolve around Miss Picking's, er, companion being described in terms that fit the fairly out bohemian lesbians of the 1920's on Roundworld: social historians have speculated that the boom in numbers and visibility of of gay women in that decade was due to the massive change in outlook after WW1, and the stark fact that the male population had been so depleted by the ravages of war that there simply weren't enough men to go round. Social liberalisation and the fact not every woman could find a husband, even if she was willing or inclined, led to the opportunity for many women to find a different way of looking at life. (Josef Stalin ordered a crackdown on female homosexuality in the aftermath of WW2, concerned at the perceived threat to the morality of the Soviet Union posed by the fact so many men had died in the war that there were ten women to every eight men in the 18-45 age demographic... this strongly implies Russia went through a similar understated social upheaval, caused by necessity and sudden opportunity).

"A strict-looking lady with short hair and a man's pocketwatch" implies she had a man's pocket to put it in, ie a certain amount of cross-dressing was going on. This brings to mind notorious lesbians and bi-curious women of the period, such as author and poetess Virginia Woolf and dancer Isodora Duncan. Now if Miss Pickings and friend can be demonstrated to be a Discworld version of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West - who shared a cottage in the Cornwall countryside - it's certainly one for the Annotations, but if not, just a general note to go here. After all, Pratchett is dealing with analogues of famous British authors here who choose to live in rural seclusion - he's just done Jane Austen and given her a Discworld makeover, and I suspect Felicity Beedle is a thinly disguised version of eminent childrens' authoress Jacqueline Wilson, a woman who has been criticised for touching on difficult things and writing books the kids really want to read... --AgProv 02:20, 15 October 2011 (CEST)

The Colonel

An eminent Victorian author, who lived and wrote in a semi-rural setting, was Charles Makepeace Thackeray. As the opening pages of Snuff are liberally peppered with shout-outs to great British authors and poets over the centuries, is this another one to add to Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf/Vita Sackville-West and Jacqueline Wilson (with a hint of Roald Dahl)... Now wait till I find Thomas Hardy, Tennyson, and the Lakeland poets... --AgProv 04:39, 15 October 2011 (CEST)

There may be a shout-out to Trollope's novels of rural England, the Barchester Chronicles, in Makepeace-Thackeray finding the voice and the resolve to over-rule his domineering wife... this is a feature of the Bishop of Barchester's home life, his wife making his decisions for him, until he finds the resolve to say "no".

Thackeray's great work was Vanity Fair, a satire on the foibles and venalities of the English nobility and monied classes, taking its title from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and its depiction of a never-ending fair in the town of Vanity, where the seven deadly sins are welcomed and celebrated. The shenanigans of the monied and noble classes in the Shires bordering Quirm and Ankh-Morpork appear to be a Vanity Fair all of their own... greed, pride, envy, and anger cerainly get referenced and there may well be direct character correspondences.

Clocks

I haven't looked but I believe she had a clock featuring an owl which looked left and right with the ticks. I think Death found it odd; he'd be hard to drive nuts. --Old Dickens 01:36, 16 October 2011 (CEST)

The disc moves

And speaking of falling barriers, Sam and Sybil are allowed some fairly adventurous lovemaking, by Terry Pratchett standards, in Mad Jack Ramkin's aphrodisiac bathroom. Hmm... conception of a sibling for Young Sam, or has the biological clock by now ceased ticking?

Ew! Gross! Old people? --Old Dickens 04:15, 16 October 2011 (CEST)

(Deep resigned sigh) I'm afraid so. You'd think people in their fifties would have the common decency... and Young Sam isn't even of an age to get embarrassed at what his parents get up to. But this will perhaps come, in the difficult teenage years... an endearing feature of Snuff is all the little details that point to Sam and Sybil being such a close couple and enjoying such a happy marriage, of which the goings-on in the bathroom are a minor but very telling point. Of course, they were both late starters, earlier dalliances with Ronnie Rust and Mavis Trouncer being so slight as to be discountable... so both had a lot to catch up on.--AgProv 17:33, 16 October 2011 (CEST)

page 185 and onwards

"Pessimal is talking from actuarial, biological and pragmatic grounds rather than moral or ethical". No. Pessimal is speaking from a consequentialistic perspective. Most likely utilitarian, since he being an accountant and then doing some moral mathematics (very funny joke, up there with the watch training new officers in the old lemonade factory =). The thoughtexperiment with starvation on a ship and canibalism, are probably known by most philosophy students. I can give a source to a swedish book by Torbjörn Tännsjö where he uses almost the exact thoughtexperiment, though I don't know if it'll do much good being in swedish and all. I'm going to see if i can find an english version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism

I can't find any good links for moral math.--Ttias 21:34, 24 October 2011 (CEST)

Wow...this one could run and run. Any thoughts on Swift's satire? (And please - any Irish readers of what I wrote must have got the point and appreciated I'm bang alongside Swift on this one?)--AgProv 09:40, 25 October 2011 (CEST)

A worrying thought...

Is it me, or am I the only one who is a little bit disconcerted at what Sam Vimes is apparently turning into? Owing to a past brush with a quasi-demonic entity which has apparently accepted him as its Master, he can now see in the dark every bit as well as any deep-down dwarf, and he can interrogate the darkness itself as to what it saw and receive a complete and factually correct witness statement from it.

Not one super-power, but two. Plus an incredibly powerful "genie" working for him. (how would Mustrum Ridcully take to a "civilian" with such a powerful familar spirit?)

This kind of elevates Sam from an ordinary Joe doing a tough job in trying circumstances - ie, merely human, if laudably so. He has now become what in Marvel Comics would be a superhero, a member of the Justice League. He's had his brush with the bite from the radioactive spider that has turned "peter Parker" into "Spiderman"... If any of us wrote a character like this, cold, into fanfic, he'd be seen as implusible, a makebelieve Marty Stu. The bit about being able to interrogate the darkness itself could potentially make him more omniscient than Havelock Vetinari. (who will no doubt be really pleased when he sees the implications of this).

And these gifts have come with none of the corresponding drawbacks that would re-introduce human frailty and weakness - which I'd see as an absolute prerequisite for balancing out the character.

His climactic battle with Stratford, for instance, who comes across as sort of Carcer-lite, lacked the dramatic bite of Night Watch - we all knew Sam would come out on top there because of narrativium, but Carcer was the sort of genuine edge-of-the-seat villain who had us all wondering until the end.

Stratford... well, lacked. Sam effortlessly out-thought, out-manoevred and out-fought him at every turn without breaking sweat. The dramatic tension was there, but very much muted. (Although having an eqwually nasty person inhume him at the end, outside the constraints of Law, was a neat touch).

Sam needs a defeat or a setback or some sort of check or correction to restore him to human again... things are coming to him just too easily. We know he's pretty much incorruptible, but these new powers are surely going to strain that? --AgProv 09:40, 25 October 2011 (CEST)