{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/3707",
    "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": 3707,
    "subject": "Pick a rest",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2002-12-23T15:34:29+00:00",
    "last": "2002-12-23T15:34:29+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0212-2520@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Nigel Price",
        "address": "nigel.a.price at virgin.net"
      },
      "date": "2002-12-23T15:34:29+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Pick a rest",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 2,
          "text": "Alga wrote:\nI invite you both to do a Google on \"picaresque\nTom Jones.\" Follow it up with \"picaresque\nDon Quixote\" and then with \"picaresque Candide.\""
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Thank you - I did. Loads and loads of references!\n\nIntersting, too, to do a search on the term \"picaresque\". I didn't go\nthrough all these, but most of the ones at the top of list stressed that\npicaresque stories about rogues. I particularly liked this wonderfully\npatronising explanation, taken from some sort of children's reference site:\n\n\t\"Picaresque\" is a technical literary term you are\n\tunlikely to have a use for. It labels a sort of\n\tliterature involving a picaro (Spanish), a lovable\n\trogue who roams the land having colorful adventures.\n\n\t(From http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/picaresque.html)\n\nSo, the term has three inter-related connotations: a story about a rogue, a\nstory in which the hero travels about, and a story which is loosely\nconstructed around episodes generated by travel and chance.\n\nAs I said before, \"Tom Jones\" has picaresque elements (travel, roguery), but\nI would still maintain that these are subordinated to a rigorous plot\nstructure and that this places it generically at a very great distance from\nthe Spanish picaresque prototype.\n\nIn an effort to make some sort of gesture towards more lupine concerns, can\nI ask whether anyone round here would want to describe any of Wolfe's\nstories as picaresque? As in the \"Tom Jones\" example, you could easily find\nplenty of travelling heroes (New Sun and Short Sun, and Soldier too) who, if\nnot rogues themselves, then certainly meet rogues upon the road. But the\nplotting in Wolfe is always tight, whatever his use of episodic models of\nnarrative development (and see his article on Vance's \"The Dying Earth\" for\nhis considered and approbatory thoughts on that subject!), so I wouldn't\nconsider any of his stories in the least picaresque.\n\nThough of course, if I were covering my back, I might refer to their having\n\"picaresque elements\"...\n\nSeasonal greetings, Alga et al.\n\nNigel"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}