{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3607",
    "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": 3607,
    "subject": "BotNS Nabokov connection",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-11-25T18:40:30+00:00",
    "last": "2002-11-25T18:40:30+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0211-2237@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Jerry Friedman",
        "address": "jerry_friedman at yahoo.com"
      },
      "date": "2002-11-25T18:40:30+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) BotNS Nabokov connection",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Here's a paragraph from Chapter 2 of _Invitation to a Beheading_,\nby Vladimir Nabokov, translated from Russian by Dmitri Nabokov (his\nson) in collaboration with the author.  Only one sentence is\nrelevant as far as I can tell, but I'm including the whole thing so\nno one feels deprived of context.  In a bizarre totalitarian state,\nCincinnatus C. has been condemned to death for (thread-convergence\nalert) gnostic turpitude, i.e., being an individual.\n\n\"He was not angry at the informers, but the latter multiplied and,\nas they matured, became frightening.  Cincinnatus, who seemed\npitch-black to them, as though he had been cut out of a cord-size\nblock of night, opaque Cincinnatus would turn this way and that,\ntrying to catch the rays, trying with desperate haste to stand in\nsuch a way as to seem translucent.  Those around him understood\neach other at the first word, since they had no words that would\nend in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an\nupsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences.\nIn the dusty little museum on Second Boulevard, where they used\nto take him as a child, and where he himself would later take his\ncharges, there was a collection of rare, marvelous objects, but\nall the townsmen except Cincinnatus found them just as limited and\ntransparent as they did each other.  _That which does not have a\nname does not exist._  Unfortunately everything had a name.\"\n\nReminds me of the Ascians and Severian's comment that one could\noften predict the ends of Foila's sentences from their beginnings\n(not that I could do that).\n\nAlso, according to D. Barton Johnson in _Worlds in Regression_,\nthe upsilamba (sic) translates the name of an archaic Cyrillic\nletter, the \"izhits\" (if I remember correctly).  It looked like\na curvy V or a stylized bird (see the last letter at\n<http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ocslavonic.htm>).  An \"upsilamba\"\nwould presumably look something like a Y, and thus like a stylized\nbird or child's \"catapult\" (which we Americans call a slingshot).\nThis play with letter shapes reminds me of a serpent in the last\nletter but one and a sword in the last.\n\nJerry Friedman"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}