{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2863",
    "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": 2863,
    "subject": "Epic",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-12-10T15:19:33+00:00",
    "last": "2001-12-10T15:19:33+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0031-urth.v031.n013.2@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Alice K. Turner",
        "address": "aturner3 at nyc.rr.com"
      },
      "date": "2001-12-10T15:19:33+00:00",
      "subject": "Epic",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "There's an essay in the already famous New Yorker of last week (famous for\nits wonderful \"Middle Eastern\" cover map of New York--look for it soon in a\nposter shop near you), by Anthony Lane, the magazine's intelligent,\nliterate, British-born movie critic. It's about LotR, not the imminent movie\nversion, but about the books and what they meant to him and his kind when he\nwas growing up. I thought I'd quote from a somewhat apt paragraph for this\ngroup:\n\n\"There is so much that is wrong and flabby with the book, but there is one\nbig thing that Tolkien got right: he got rhythm. His instinct for the\nprocedures of Dark Age saga was as reliable as his indifference to the mores\nof the machine age, and he soon established a beat--a basic pulse, throbbing\nbelow the surface of the book and forcing you, day after day, to turn the\npage. We can no more leave Frodo stranded on his mission than his friends\ncan. Not all works of literature share that pulse: the Odyssey has it,\n\"Ulysses\" doesn't. This is a way of suggesting that \"The Lord of the Rings\"\nmay be the final stab at epic, and there is invariably something risky, if\nnot downright risible, in a last gasp. Tolkien believed that he could\nreproduce the epic form under modern conditions, and that there was no call\nto update the epic vocabulary; hence both the mockery that met his\nenterprise and the more charitable amazement that anyone could strive for\nsuch a thing. (Read the comentaries of Tolkien scholars and you find them\nplaintively torn between crying up his serious literary credentials and\nclaiming him for a man of the people, and Aragorn-like leader who will\noutwit the snares of the elite.) It is a book that bristles with bravado,\nand yet to give into it--to cave into it, as most of us did on a first\nreading--betrays a certain nerdishness, a reluctance to face the finer\nshades of life, that verges on the cowardly.\"\n\nIt goes on a bit, mostly with affection.\n\n-alga"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}