{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2393",
    "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": 2393,
    "subject": "focus on PEACE",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-09-26T14:12:15+00:00",
    "last": "2000-09-26T14:12:15+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0029-0224@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at sirius.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-09-26T14:12:15+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) focus on PEACE",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Fellow Wolfe-readers, I'm going to be chatting here about PEACE.  Not all\nat once, in one message, but over a period of time.  Since I have the old\nBerkley paperback, that's the source for page citations--but if necessary,\napproximate page numbers for different editions can be provided.\n\nTimelines are important.  I like them a lot, I enjoy seeing them, I enjoy\ncreating them; from this flows my sense that they are important.\n\nThe first timeline I saw for PEACE was created by Gregory Feeley in the\nearly 90s.  I saved it but didn't comment on it at the time because I was\nworking on more Urthly things; I didn't have the time to re-read PEACE with\ntimeline in hand.  It looked okay, the timeline did: the trick about PEACE\nis that there are so very few historical markers in plain sight.  Feeley\nlatched onto the most prominant one, which appears in the last section\nwhere we are told that the coldhouse prank which resulted in the young\nman's death happened in 1938; in the text Den tells Dan French that he was\ntwo years out of college at that time.\n\nSo Feeley plugged these points together, ran forward and back, and created\nhis timeline (barest outline here): Den was born in 1915 and thus injured\nBobby Black in 1919, did various things and was working at the plant as a\nyoung engineer in 1938, died in 1975.\n\nNext timeline.  William Schuyler, Jr. (having not yet seen Feeley's)\npresented his own timeline in NYRSF #91 (March 1996).  (At this point I\nstill hadn't read PEACE a third time, but I had read \"The Changeling\" (a\nshort story set in the same town, published before PEACE) and made a\ntimeline of that.)  Schuyler gets points for finding another historical\nanchor in the text, the death of Yuan Shih-k'ai; but unfortunately for\nother reasons (complications arising within the timeline) he has to discard\nthe 1938 anchor as being ten years off, so rather than having two solid\nhistorical anchor points, he has the one.\n\nAnyway, another barest outline: Den born in 1904, coldhouse prank in 1928,\ndied in 1974.\n\nWouldn't you know it, at this late date I've just created an outline of my\nown.  And here is how I did it: on one page I made a list of Den's life,\none line per year of age, entering what we know and including fuzzy areas\nfor things that are not given in precise terms; on a separate page I wrote\nthe calendar years from 1900 to 1980, flush right, and then added\nhistorical notes, like \"Yuan Shih-k'ai dies; Chinese Warlord Period \\/\n1916\" (the down-arrow meaning \"begins\"), and \"Prohibition \\/ 1920\" (since I\nwas curious about Julius Smart's attitude toward alcohol), etc.\n\nThen I put the pages side by side and move Den's life up and down the\nhistory line.\n\nI found two more \"solid\" historical anchors, both of a fuzzy variety.  The\nfirst stems from my timeline on \"The Changeling,\" which I had placed as\nhappening in the early 1960s.  Den makes reference to the protagonist of\n\"The Changeling\" as living on the island in the river, which is where Pete\nis at the end of the story, and says Pete was living there at the time of\nDen's visit to Dr. Van Ness (Van Ness makes comments suggesting that Den is\n40 to 45 years old).\n\nThe second anchor I found comes from examining the magazines in the two\nwaiting rooms of Doctor Black and Doctor Van Ness.  \"Life\" magazine is no\nhelp, since it has been published throughout the period in question, but\nah--\"Liberty\" magazine!  It was only published from 1924 to 1950; and Den\nwas four years old when his mother took him to Doctor Black and she read\n\"Liberty\" magazine while they waited.\n\nMy timeline uses four historical anchors: Chinese Warlord Period (fuzzy:\n1916-1930), Liberty Magazine (fuzzy:1924-1950), Coldhouse ghost 1938\n(precise), and Crazy Pete (fuzzy: around 1963).  Used together, they seem\nto lock tight into the following briefest form: Den born 1920; visits Dr.\nBlack 1924; the year of Olivia's egg hunt is 1929; Den is 18 years old (the\nliar!) in 1938 when the prank kills the other 18 year old fellow; Den is 43\nin 1963, when Crazy Pete is on his island; Den has his non-lethal stroke in\n1980.\n\n===\n\nIn the same issue of NYRSF that had Schuyler's timeline there was an essay\nby Damien Broderick which had a number of good and useful points.\nBroderick ended by asking a question about the mysterious events reported\nby Aunt Bella, in her non-fiction ghost chaser piece: \"A tiny, beautiful\nenigma.  I'd like to learn what other readers have made of its\nsignificance.\"\n\nAs chance would have it, I wrote to Schuyler about his timeline, and in his\nreply he also mentioned that he thought that scene was set in 1909 and was\na glimpse of the future (she was seeing night automobile traffic), just as\nthe other side was happening, too: a glimpse of the past (future visitor\nseeing the hovering candle lights of Aunt Bella's vigil).\n\n(This might be axed if the date of Bella's adventure is 1925). But anyway,\nDamien, there's one response.\n\n===\n\nItems to come: \"The Princess and Her Four Suitors\"; what does Den see in\nLois, anyway?; unlocking the Tale of ben Yahya and the marid; Frametale in\nthe House of the Ax; and others.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}