{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/718",
    "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": "whorl",
  "thread": {
    "id": 718,
    "subject": "Babbie",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1999-11-09T15:18:46+00:00",
    "last": "1999-11-09T15:18:46+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<whorl-v0010-0162@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Robert Borski",
        "address": "rborski at coredcs.com"
      },
      "date": "1999-11-09T15:18:46+00:00",
      "subject": "(whorl) Re: Babbie",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "There is a mystery here, as well, or part of one. When Seawrack vanishes\nfrom Horn's boat, he begins to doubt that she was ever really there. To\ndetermine if she was real, he turns to Babbie. \"I questioned him then,\nand\nfrom his answers knew that the young woman I had seen had been real.\" The\nmystery is, just how intelligent does Horn think Babbie is? He often\ntalks\nabout him as if he were an animal, albeit highly intelligent, but here\nHorn\nseems to regard Babbie as having an almost human ability to communicate\n(unless this \"conversation\" was actually a hallucination)."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Given that \"Babbie\" does mean \"baby\" (OED), and that he can \"talk,\" could\nthis be punster Wolfe's tip of the hat to the wonderful \"Babe\" movie of\nseveral years ago, with its titular talking pig? Hus do appear rather\nporcine, if octuple-legged. And what, given the Circe/Mucor connection,\nmight be the connection between Babbie and blind Pig, the likes of whom we\nhave yet to meet? (I don't trust Wolfe's use of the word \"must\" when, in\ndescribing how Seawrack and Babbie may have eventually returned to Pajarocu\nin a fixed boat, he has Horn write: \"They must have arrived much too late\n[to see the lander take off], if indeed they arrived at all.\")\n\nLastly: has anyone ever figured out the etymology of \"hus\"?\n\nRobert Borski \n\n*This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun."
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}