{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3502",
    "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": 3502,
    "subject": "PEACE: embedded stories",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-10-22T15:30:27+00:00",
    "last": "2002-10-22T15:30:27+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0210-1905@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Michael Andre-Driussi",
        "address": "mantis at siriusfiction.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-10-22T15:30:27+00:00",
      "subject": "Re: (urth) PEACE: embedded stories",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Roy wrote:\nWhat, then, is the relevance of Arabella's magazine article to Weer? I mean,\nmost, if not all, of the imbedded stories in PEACE, ghostly or not, can be\nshown to have some bearing on his life, or afterlife, even if only\nindirectly as the story pertains to someone close to him, such as Olivia.\nArabella's ghost story is inserted into the middle of the account of Weer\nand Lois going to Gold's to pick up the fake Boyne diary. And Weer heard\nthat story when he was six, when he and his mother went to her father's for\nChristmas. How is that ghost story related to either of those events?"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "My current position on the embedded stories has shifted dramatically from\nmy previous position.  The green book stories are blueprints for Weer's\nlife, and this because the book is magical.  The two story fragments we\nhave concern the most important people to Weer: Olivia and himself.  The\nother stories are not in the same category, and while they have importance,\nI was wrong to try using the same skeleton keys that work on the green book\nstories with any of the other stories.  So I've gone back to seeing the\nstories as reflecting the teller, for an immediate purpose as well as an\nunderlying purpose.\n\nAs for Aunt Bella's article.  I'm not entirely sure, but I will offer a few\ncomments.  In the past we have said it illustrates the timewarping nature\nof haunting (taking what she sees as being a typical automobile congested\nstreet scene of decades in her future).  What I thought was funny and\ntelling this time was grampa's argument -- at first one thinks he will say\nthere are no such things as ghosts, but what he really says is that ghosts\nhaunt houses and burial grounds!  This seems significant.  Also Bella's\ninsistance that it was true, and that there was more that she did not write\nfor fear that it would not be believed.  (And also to point out that Santa\nClaus had really visited at grampa's house, when the ghost-expert had not\nbeen there! <g>)\n\nThe timewarping nature is touched again in the same section (\"Gold\") when\nGold reads from the Necronomicon, and the litch tries to banish the unborn\nshades of the future from the light of his day.\n\nThere are story-tellers, like Kate Boyne, and there is a forger, Lou Gold.\nWeer is a writer, not a forger; but he is still just a beginning writer,\nonly hitting his stride a few centuries after his death.\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}