{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1621",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 1621,
    "subject": "Utter agreement",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-05-07T12:39:21+00:00",
    "last": "1999-05-07T12:39:21+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0026-0095@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jonathan Laidlow",
        "address": "laidlojm at hhs.bham.ac.uk"
      },
      "date": "1999-05-07T12:39:21+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Utter agreement",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Ah Nigel, as I'm off to join the Ascians on Sunday and will not be on \nUrth again until June, I thought I'd offer a revision of my last \ncomments to you. \n\nDon't worry - I haven't been driven off by the frightening reaction \nto my 'infamous' posts. not really. I just need a holiday.\n\nI don't think you need to refute my posts on modernism/. I'm entirely \nin agreement with you. I don't think that modernism suggests a \ndisassociation with the 'real' in any way. Rather, it's an attempt to \nreconnect with it in a new and interesting way. 'Realist' fiction \npresupposes an easy connection with exterior reality. Modernist \nfiction sees that any connection with reality is problematic, and \nattempts to find a new solution.\n\nBy stating that he was a Modernist I really wanted to draw the \ndiscussion away from analysing the cryptic surface details (important \nthough they are) and towards the implications of these details on teh \ngreater story. When I stated that I couldn't picture Severian I was \ntrying to argue that the actual details of his appearance are less \nimportant than the resonances of the way he is described, and the \nthings he actually does.\n\nI think one of the mistakes in Peter Wright's Foundation essay \n(despite my agreement with him on many points) on Wolfe's God-Games \nis that while proposing that the BotNS plays with metafictional games \nhe then approaches the hieros family behind those games in a \nquasi-realist way: they are JUST aliens messing with Urth's \ncollective head. He can't accept the implications of the religious \nimagery, or the story about the cock and the archangel (who is closer \nto God, but knows no more than the animals what his intentions are): \nthat, as you so correctly say 'the possibility remains that it may \nstill serve a greater, divine, purpose.'\n\nI intend to write some kind of longer essay for the website or \nelsewhere on what I really mean by Wolfe's Modernism. i seem to have \nbeen so misunderstood because of my ill-chosen words that I ought to \nclarify it with a full examination of theories of modernism in SF.\n\nHave a great May everyone, talk to you all in June.\n\nJonathan\n\nCarry on Torturer\nFrankie Howerd IS the Autarch\n\n********************************************************\n\nJonathan Laidlow\nModern Languages Office - Muirhead Tower 408\nUniversity of Birmingham\nEdgbaston\nBirmingham\nB15 2TT, England\n0121 414 5976"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}