{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2475",
    "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": 2475,
    "subject": "PEACE, JBC, 5HC, etc.",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2000-11-28T13:17:59+00:00",
    "last": "2000-11-28T13:17:59+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0136@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at sirius.com"
      },
      "date": "2000-11-28T13:17:59+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) PEACE, JBC, 5HC, etc.",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "So Roy,\n\nAbout Tilly and Smart--so what do you think Smart's middle name is: \"Tilly\"\n(or \"The\"<g>)?\n\nRe: the gift and the giver, in the cases of the Chinese Egg and the pearls\nof Grandfather Christmas.  Now Roy, I want to keep up with you here, but\nplease remind me the difference between \"Olivia gives the Egg to Macafee on\nhis birthday in August\" and \"Olivia gives the Egg to Macafee on Christmas\nin December\" (aside from this being a detail pointing to Den's\nunreliability).  I mean, we know she had it first; we know she gave it to\nhim at some point; and then there's the \"sexual favors\" angle which you\nmentioned with regards to the pearls (Mr. Elliot/Mab) but also seems to\napply (weirdly) to the Egg (Olivia/Macafee).\n\nEverybody,\n\nPEACE mentions James Branch Cabell's JURGEN.  I just read JURGEN, the\nsecond JCB book I've read (the other being FIGURES OF EARTH).  Both JCB\nbooks in the end are sort of circular and linear at the same time (a\ncondition we sometimes see in PEACE).  JURGEN has a couple of ways of =not=\nshowing things: there are the naughty scenes that happen in the dark so you\ncan't \"see\" anything, you just have the innocuous dialogue of a man and\nwoman alone in a dark room (this was the meat of the obscenity trial, as I\nunderstand it); and then there are certain mythic scale heroic episodes,\ntrials of mystery, which are completely missing from the text--you have all\nthe stuff leading up to it, and all the stuff after, with only vague and/or\ncoy hints as to what actually happened.  (Some of them are apparently long\nrunning jokes throughout the various novels.)\n\nWe struggle to piece together the \"fictional\" and the \"biographical\"\nelements of PEACE into a coherent whole.  We do the same thing with THE\nFIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS when we look at \"`A Story' by John V. Marsch\" not as\na fiction but as a veiled autobiography of the prisoner in \"V.R.T.\":\nMarsch's journal in \"V.R.T.\" tracks its hero into the outback, where he is\nkilled and replaced (at which point the journal becomes fictional, but with\na certain toe-hold on reality); \"A Story\" tracks its hero out of the\noutback; the police are probing certain big grey areas, like the missing\nentries in the beginning of the journal, and the missing time (years spent\nin the field) implied by the end of the journal.\n\n(5HC also alludes to James Branch Cabell.  Hmm.)\n\n(Speaking about that journal, as I've put an awful amount of time into\nthinking about Annese time, calendar, length of day, length of year, and\nthings of that sort, from time to time I wonder about the dating system\nused in the journal: because, of course, it is a bit difficult to fit\n365.25 days into a 402 day year unless one adds new months and/or adds more\ndays to existing months . . . so how many days in the months Marsch writes\nabout: March, April, the missing May, and June?)\n\nTimeline for \"A Story\"\n\nDAY  EVENTS\n 1   Walking across desert from Sliding Stones\n 5   Arrives at Thunder Always\n 6   Meets/joins Shadow Children\n 7   Oasis, meets Seven Girls Waiting\n 8   Dreams of Flying Feet killed, jumps in river, flows along\n 9   Marshmen hunting Shadow Children, tables turned\n10   Sandwalker captured\n15   Sandwalker put into sand pit (after being held five days)\n\nIf I take \"A Story\" as veiled <ahem> autobiography, then I'm tempted to see\nthe incarceration at the sand pit as being V.R.T.'s stay in the prison;\nthis makes \"hillmen\" as Annese and \"marshmen\" as Croixans; the trip down\nthe river becomes the trip across space between the two worlds.  Eastwind,\nthe castrated (i.e., non-reproductive) twin locks in as clonal Number Five\n(I mentioned before how the text makes these two strangers some kind of\ntwins at a few points).  Even those weird hints that V.R.T.'s mom is in the\nprison with him are validated (since his mother is with him in the sandpit\nof \"A Story\").\n\nThis feeds into all the Veil noodling: that all the characters are abos,\njust that some (like Number Five and his \"family\") have become stuck in\nhuman form/mentality.\n\nIf the river-trip is the voyage between planets (have we decided that\nbefore?), then it implies that the Shadow Children were met and joined on\nSte. Anne sometime after the murder of Marsch (the mummified priest in the\ncave matches up with V.R.T.'s claim to have put the body in a cave); then\nanother group of Shadow Children was met and joined on Ste. Croix, where\ncrimes were committed (a trap for Shadow Children backfired and the hunter\nwas blinded then killed).  This feeds into the police version of spies and\nconspiracy (with Maitre as the spy-catcher/hunter).\n\nRobert Borski has written about how Veil might be an abo; in this case I'm\ndescribing, she would be specifically a Shadow Child (I think that's what\nRobert says in his own piece, following different threads, iirc).  But if\nhillmen:marshmen as Ste. Anne:Ste. Croix, then Shadow Children might be\nwhat they claim to be, that is, true humans.  So in the political/espionage\nmode, they really might represent a human faction on both twin planets, a\ngroup that is trying to influence/subvert the faux-humans (full validation\nof the police paranoia)\n\nWell, anyway . . .\n\nPart of the challenge of PEACE, it seems to me today, is that it is being\nwritten by a single perspective, a first time author.  It shifts through\nfive major modes (each section being a different genre), and many minor\nmodes, yet through it all there is a sense of fragmentation,\nincomplete-ness.  Whether the editorial filter is Wolfe himself (maybe\nsomething like \"this would be an interesting tidbit to add, but it wouldn't\npropel the main story, so I'll just allude to it\") or Weer dodging around a\npainful incident, sometimes both, sometimes neither, case-by-case . . .\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}