From: leo@ph.tn.tudelft.nl (Leo Breebaart)
Subject: Re: lots o' questions&annotations for Mort
Reply-To: leo@ph.tn.tudelft.nl
Organization: Delft University of Technology
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 12:16:22 GMT

ST102315@brownvm.brown.edu () writes:

> In the last Annotated Pratchett file, there was a request for more
> Mort annotations.  So I read Mort again, and came up with the
> following annotations (hopefully not all obvious) and questions.

Why thanks! This should go a long way towards insuring that the next
APF version will be 5.0 and not 4.1. I hope more people will follow
your example (hint hint hint), because I get many annotations, but
only seldom do people work their way through an entire book and jot
down everything they notice.

> Actually, most are questions, which is why I posted this to the list
> and didn't send it directly to the AP compiler.

No problem. I've seen them, they have been filed, and I'll follow the
corrections or answers as they come in.

> p.66..."Granny Weatherwax's Ramrub" Granny Weatherwax appears in
> several Discworld books, in particular _Equal Rites_ and _Wyrd
> Sisters_ (and probably other books I haven't been able to get ahold
> of yet).

"Witches Abroad" and "Lords And Ladies".

I am not very enthousiastic about including in the APF every cameo
appearance by a character or a character's name, because there are so
many of them, and pointing them out really doesn't seem very useful.

It's different for very minor characters, like Ly Tin Weedle and
Casanunda or Mr Ixolite, so those do get a mention.

> p.110-111...Ysabell here lists off a fair number of tragic romances,
> some of which sounds familiar.  In particular, "And then she thought
> he was dead, and she killed herself, and then he woke up and so he
> did kill himself" seems to be a sort of reversed Romeo and Juliet.

It's an older, Greek tragedy (that Shakespeare couldn't come up with an 
original plot idea if his life depended on it :-).

The actual names of the protagonists escape me at the moment (Thisbe and
Pallisander, I think), but *she* escapes from a lion by throwing it
her scarf and fainting. *He* sees the lion with the scarf and her lying
there and thinks she's dead and kills himselfs. And then *she* wakes
up, sees him, takes the knife, and kils herself as well.

Or at least, that's how I think this goes.

Interesting factlet: this play is performed as play-within-a-play in
Shakespeare's "Midsummernight's Dream", which in turn gets royally
spoofed in "Lords and Ladies", *including* the play-within-a-play. But
I digress.

>   ...swam the river every night, but one night there was this storm,
> and when she didn't arrive he...", but I can't remember the
> references, although for some reason the Hellespont is associated in
> my mind with the latter.

Hero and Leander, I think.

> p.140...Is it Cleopatra who bathed in milk and killed herself by
> sitting on a poisonous snake?  (On the DW, Queen Ezeriel did.)

Definitely the milk bit. Don't know about the poisonous snake, though.

> p.168..."When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-
> deep slurry."  Something or someplace has a motto, "When you're
> tired of ____, you're tired of life" or some such.

London.

> p.222..."Is this the face..."  A reference to Helen of Troy, over
> whom the Trojan War was started.

That's Helen of Tsort :-)

-- 
Leo Breebaart  (leo @ ph.tn.tudelft.nl)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.pratchett