{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2993",
    "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'"
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  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2993,
    "subject": "literary analogy",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-02-25T20:16:42+00:00",
    "last": "2002-02-25T20:16:42+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0202-228@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "maa32",
        "address": "maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu"
      },
      "date": "2002-02-25T20:16:42+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) literary analogy",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I was just sitting around reading Borges' Selected Non-fictions when I came \nacross his review of Eberhard's chinese fairy tales.  Does this sound familiar \nor what?!\n\n\"The problem is simple.  The European fairy tale, and the Arab, are all \nconventional.  A ternary law rules them .... The Chinese Fairy tale, however, \nis irregular.  The reader begins by finding them incoherent.  He thinks that \nthere are too many loose ends, things that don't come together.  Later - \nperhaps suddenly - he discovers why these gaps exist.  He realizes that these \nvagaries and anacoluthons imply that the narrator totally believes in the \nreality of the wonders that he tells.  Reality is neither symmetrical nor \nschematic.\" (Borges 183).\n\nan anacoluthon is a sudden shift in direction like \"Good coffee.  Thank God \nfor Fidel Castro\" or \"I should kill you, but I have a cricket game to play.\"\n\nDoes that sound like one of Wolfe's novels or what? Peace, Short Sun, \nCerberus, etc.\n\nAlso, Wolfe once quoted Chesterton to me, saying that \"Life is a million \nlittle detective stories\" or something similar.  \nI think these two ideas, one of the Chinese Fairy Tale and one of Life being a \ndetective story, certainly inform us on Wolfe's artistic aesthetic (or at \nleast help us to think about how we should go about reading his texts).\nMarc Aramini"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}