{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/835",
    "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": 835,
    "subject": "Authors as torturers?",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-06-19T16:16:21+00:00",
    "last": "1998-06-19T16:16:21+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0014-0058@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "adam louis stephanides",
        "address": "astephan at students.uiuc.edu"
      },
      "date": "1998-06-19T16:16:21+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Authors as torturers?",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "On Wed, 17 Jun 1998 William H. Ansley wrote:\nSomewhere in TBotNS there is a passage where Severian compares the\nrelationship between torturers and their clients to that of men to women\nand authors to their readers. (Maybe I am combining two separate passages.)"
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Could you be thinking of the passage in Shadow, ch. 33, in which Severian\ngives us his thoughts on authorship?  But here he compares the\nrelationship between authors and readers not to that between torturers and\ntheir clients but between executioners and their spectators.  And he\nat least presents himself as wanting to please his readers, not torture\nthem.\n\nIncidentally, it's interesting to compare what Severian set forth here as\nthe principles of writing he's following with his actual practice as a\nnarrator.  IMO there's a pretty poor match, except for his final\nself-imposed requirement that \"he must add to the execution some feature\nhowever small that is entirely his own and that he will never repeat.\"\nThis the book fulfills in spades.\n\n--Adam"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}