{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2451", "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": 2451, "subject": "PEACE: Maggie & prank", "messages": 1, "voices": 1, "first": "2000-11-09T14:15:58+00:00", "last": "2000-11-09T14:15:58+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi", "address": "mantis at sirius.com" }, "date": "2000-11-09T14:15:58+00:00", "subject": "(urth) PEACE: Maggie & prank", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Roy wrote:\nBut being, like most men, at heart a hopeless romantic, that answer, too,\nleaves me dissatisfied, which brings me to where I didn't really want to go,\nback to the coldhouse. If Den was the irresponsible party who let that 18\nyear old kid die--and, like it or not, I don't see the point of including\nthat segment if he wasn't--then, unlike the case of Bobby Black, he _was_\nmorally culpable. He was too old to excuse his behavior. The company may\nhave tried to cover it up, and was successful enough to quash criminal\ncharges and perhaps a concomitant civil suit (or maybe they paid off the\nkid's family; who knows?), but too many people knew about it to keep it a\nsecret, especially since the plant was probably, even then, the town's\nlargest employer. Again, one way or another, Margaret would have known about\nit. That's not the kind of man a woman wants to marry or to father her\nchildren." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I can go along with this very easily . . . =if= Den were 18 at the time of\nthe accident!\n\nThe problem is: the courtship started in high school; something pivotal\nhappened at the picnic; the picnic happened in the \"age of the bicycle\"\nwhich we =know= happened before Den got his car (junior year in college).\n\nWe can try to fix it a bit. Say that the pivotal event was Den proposed\nmarriage, and Margaret gave a conditional yes (he gets college degree,\nmakes x amount of money, whatever shade of practicality/gold digging you\nneed). Then, (4? 6?) however many years later (years she is waiting, mind\nyou), Den pulls the prank and Maggie chucks him for it.\n\nWell, maybe, but it seems forced. Den would have a clear goal in mind, at\nleast during those college years, and it doesn't seem evident.\n\nMeanwhile, I've been mulling over the 1954 cluster, and I've realized again\nthat for me this date is highly inelastic: the further it creeps away from\n1954, the less palatable the whole thing is.\n\nHere's a segment from Roy's EZ Timeline:" }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "1928 L. Gold leaves Breslau. (p.197)\n\n1929 circa, L. Gold meets Sally. (p.214) [1]\n\n1929 October, Stock Market crash, begin Depression.\n\n1929-1934 circa, Olivia dies. [1]\n\n1933 End Prohibition.\n\n1938(summer) Coldhouse prank , Den age 24. (p.230)\n\n1939-1945 W.W.II.\n\n1950-1953 Korean War.\n\n1954-1959 Time frame for the Lois/Gold affair. Den age 40-45. Sherry Gold is\n16. Lois is close to 35.\n\n1963 circa, Den becomes president of the company at about 49. Crazy Pete on\nisland.\n\n1974-1975 Den's death; PEACE published.\n\n[1] There is a problem here. Two events are linked in that they both\noccurred 25 years before the time of the Lois/Gold affair--Vi's death and\nGold meeting Sally--yet other factors seem to separate these two events by\nseveral years." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "As background reminder: we (Roy and I) spent a lot of time trying to\nseparate the siamese twins \"1963: Crazy Pete on Island/new President Den\"\nfrom \"Sherry is 16/Gold Hunt\" clusters. We did that, but an unfortunate\nside effect was that \"Sherry is 16/Gold Hunt\" became unanchored in time.\n\nBecause of that blasted \"bobbysoxer\" line, we want it to be in 1954, the\nearliest it could be according to other things in the text (OED says it\nfirst appeared in the '40s).\n\n1954 works well for the Gold Thread, too. And for the Philips farm.\n\nBut it plays complete hell with Olivia's death, since \"25 years ago\" would\nmean that Den was 14 or 15--far too early (where we usually take either the\nages of 20 or 25)!\n\n(25 from the Chinese Garden dream; 20 is probably from the same tangle that\nsuggests Den is 45 at GOLD HUNT, and 45 minus 25 equals 20.)\n\nAnd as I say, I find myself feeling fatigue if the Gold Hunt date moves\nmuch beyond 1956 . . . as it crawls back toward \"1963: Crazy Pete on\nIsland/new President Den,\" I begin to think, well, what was the point in\nseparating them at all? \n\nWhat a devil, that 5 year imp! You try squishing it out in the birth year,\nand it just reappears later on in the timeline . . .\n\nTry fiddling with 1920:\n1920 -- Den born\n1924 -- \"Liberty\" magazine (yay!)\n1929 -- YEAR OF THE EGG HUNT (yay!)\n1938 -- COLD HOUSE PRANK (Den 18; yay!)\n1958 -- GOLD HUNT: Den 38 (At age 9 Den saw Phillips farm being built;\ntells Lois it was about 30 years ago, maybe more) [3]\n1963 -- Crazy Pete/new President Den (Den's age 43) [4]\n\n[3] = age 38 minus 25 years . . . so Olivia died when Den was 13? Not\nlikely, yet that's not much different from the numbers already being\ngenerated in EZ.\n\n[4] = well, this seems to violate the \"poor man at 40, rich man at 50\"\nline, unless one is willing to look at the phrase literally and see that he\nmight have become \"rich\" as early as age 41!\n\nMORE ABOUT SHERRY:\n\nHey, she's wearing some boy's class ring! Did she get married to him? If\nshe is pregnant, it seems like she was putting on the weight before her\ntryst with Den, another pointer towards quick marriage or eek, something\n\"back alley\" from the town's alchemist?\n\n=mantis=" } ] } ] }