{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/5010",
    "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": 5010,
    "subject": "Seven American Nights Time Gaps",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2008-05-08T11:50:38+00:00",
    "last": "2008-05-08T11:50:38+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<4822E90E.4030009@gmail.com>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dave Tallman",
        "address": "davetallman at msn.com"
      },
      "date": "2008-05-08T11:50:38+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth)  Seven American Nights Time Gaps",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Since I proposed my own theory for the supposed \"missing night\" in SAN, \nI should address some of the other theories. They are full of excellent \nanalyses, but in the end I decided that I couldn't agree with them.\n\nPeter Cash (posting on August 22, 1997) finds eight nights or more. His \ngap point is almost the same as mine (the second day does not include \nthe trip to the ruins and the theater), but he uses Nadan's emotional \nstate to find more:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "No. On the second day, he ambles around the North of the city, gradually\ncoming to realize how deformed the Americans are. The crucial thing is\nthat the \"fear\" passage cannot have been written any earlier than the\nthird day. This is because he speaks of the fear as coming on him the\nprevious day. This cannot have been on the first day--the day of his\narrival--for his narrative of that day is clearly upbeat. It may have\nbeen on the second day, which ends with his realization that the\nAmericans are more deformed than he had thought. There may even be one\nor more entire days missing here; there's no way to tell. But one thing\nis sure: the \"fear\" passage _cannot_ have been written earlier than the\nthird day. Everything follows from this."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Nadan is capable of concealing his feelings from the reader. \"In \nrecording these several pages I have managed to restrain my enthusiasm.\" \nHow \"upbeat\" is that first chapter, really? By the end of it Nadan has \nmade an enemy in Mr. Tallman, a man with local connections, wealthy \nenough to afford first-class travel. He has reason to begin to feel \nuneasy, along with whatever strange things he sees on arrival in the \nport. But he started writing with the idea that he would show the \njournal to his mother and Yasmine, so he's deliberately upbeat: \n\"America! America! Dull days are no more!\" By the next evening he's so \nfearful that he changes his mind about letting Yasmin read it and puts \ndown his true feelings. If the arrival day was entirely happy, why does \nhe imagine he was drugged on the ship, rather than by something he ate \nafter getting to shore?\n\nRobert Borski, writing on May 6, 2002 has a very clever theory about the \nmissing day being caused by excision of pages. That could work for my \ntheory too, because the account around evening 2 is very choppy, cutting \nfrom a description of going out from the hotel to the late-night fear \npassage. It would be reasonable for Nadan to have some material about \nhis art-stealing mission early on in his journal.\n\nBorski gives reasons for his later interpolation point:"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Ardis, in turn, then asks Bobby, \"Was it very bad?\" To which the actor\nresponds, \"It was frightening, that's all. I thought I'd never get out.\" But\nif he was arrested late the night before, and released the following day,\nperhaps being confined, at the most, 16 hours, this hardly seems to warrant\na comment about never getting out. In addition, when Bobby says, \"I hear you\nmissed me last night,\" Ardis responds, \"God, yes.\" But if Bobby has actually\nbeen confined in jail for a day-and-a-half, Ardis may well be commenting on\nthe poor performance of his stand-in (the fact that Bobby has been missed by\nher is obviously communicated by someone else). A longer period of\nconfinement also allows more time for Bobby to rue his imprisonment and\nrecover from his beating, as well as for the police department to do the\nnecessary papershuffling involved with his release. But because Nadan's\njournal is now missing his account of the Gallery visit--the second day of\nBobby's confinement--he can never directly mention how long the actor has\nbeen incarcerated."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "I think the dialog is well-explained by the original text. Sixteen hours \nunder the harsh treatment of the police is more than enough for Bobby to \nworry that he would never get out. As for the \"I hear you missed me last \nnight\" referring to the poor performance of a stand-in, that happened: \n\"Bill -- someone you don't know -- tried to go on for him in the third \nact tonight. It was just ghastly.\"\n\nThe quick release of Bobby can be explained in my theory. The F.E.D. was \nalready interested in Nadan when he went to their offices. They used the \ntime he was tied up by the bureaucracy to  search his room. No wonder it \nseemed like a \"solemn ritual of deception\"  to Nadan. Once they had what \nthey wanted they pulled the necessary strings to free Bobby.\n\nThere is one more theory of Robert Borski I'd like to address -- the \nidea that Ardis had a burn scar between her breasts, revealing that she \nwas the werewolf Nadan tried to kill. If the description of that scene \nwere real and not forged, I agree that would be the inescapable \nconclusion. But it's too neat. It would mean that Ardis was a \nfull-fledged (or full-furred) morph-with-the-full-moon werewolf.  The \norigin of such a creature could only be magical, not genetic damage \ncaused by eating food laced with growth hormones.\n\nI believe the creature that attacked Nadan was a mutated human; it \nalways looked the way he saw it. The beggar in the ruins described them: \n\"We sleep here, to be shut behind strong walls from the things that come \nat night.\"\n\nThe reader of the forged account is supposed to believe that Nadan, \ndespondent over having loved a werewolf and possibly crazed by the \ndrugged egg, has set out alone for the interior of America. I believe he \nwas captured and killed by the F.E.D. instead."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}