#rereading the 1st volume was a mistake

[foolsocracy]

the Ben Urich demons r coming at me fast and hard

[pinelife3]

What is a labyrinth for?

I've been reading House of Leaves for the last ~7 months. I'm interested, but not engaged: all those months of toil and I'm still only 300 pages in (it is really tempting to just read the Wikipedia summary). The book is about a house which is bigger on the inside than on the outside. People find a mysterious passage which leads to endless hallways, rooms leading to more rooms. An expedition is mounted and the group spend close to two weeks exploring the insides of the house's walls. It takes them four days to descend a staircase. They never find the outside, the house never ends. And as the story goes on the house becomes increasingly hostile and it’s driving people crazy, floors are spontaneously opening up and swallowing unsuspecting alcoholics down into bottomless pits.

Throughout the book (or, really, throughout the bit I've read so far - haha how many book reports have been authored by people who have only read a fraction of the book?) there are lots of references to labyrinths and their purpose. Such a cool word - what's the meaning of 'lab'? Labyrith = misspelt start to labia? That would be interesting. Fingers crossed that that's an upcoming twist in HoL. Okay: the etymology - Online Etymology Dictionary:

c. 1400, laberynthe (late 14c. in Latinate form laborintus) "labyrinth, maze, great building with many corridors and turns,"figuratively "bewildering arguments," from Latin labyrinthus, from Greek labyrinthos "maze, large building with intricate passages," especially the structure built by Daedelus to hold the Minotaur, near Knossos in Crete, a word of unknown origin.

A word of unknown origin... Spooky. They go on:

Apparently from a pre-Greek language; traditionally connected to Lydian labrys "double-edged axe," symbol of royal power, which fits with the theory that the original labyrinth was the royal Minoan palace on Crete. It thus would mean "palace of the double-axe." But Beekes finds this "speculative" and compares laura "narrow street, narrow passage, alley, quarter," also identified as a pre-Greek word. Used in English for "maze" early 15c., and in figurative sense of "confusing state of affairs" (1540s). As the name of a structure of the inner ear, the essential organ of hearing, from 1690s.

This is definitely irrelevant, but in Homer, Odysseus’ stock epithet is ‘cunning’ - the first lines of The Odyssey are: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.” Is this twists and turns because he’s cunning and able to confound people with his ‘figuratively bewildering arguments’ - or is this twists and turns because he’s a terrible navigator and we’re about to hear all about his epic, decade-long journey home from Troy?

Anyway, kind of feels pointless to tell the story of the Minotaur and his labyrinth because you definitely already know it, but just briefly:

Tale as old as time, True as it can be, Blah blah blaaaah  Beauty and the beast

After some funny business between Poseidon and Minos (the king of Crete), the queen (Minos’ wife - and also the daughter of Helios, the sun) falls in love with a bull which was originally given to Minos by Poseidon under the proviso that he (Minos) would sacrifice it to honour Poseidon (sweet deal). Anyway, the queen is totally besotted with this bull and decides she wants to kick things up a gear sexually so she has Daedalus (of wax wings fame) make a hollow fake cow so she can get banged by the bull (what could go wrong?). She winds up pregnant and gives birth to the Minotaur - the queen tries to raise him right but he is savage. Because he’s a monstrosity, he had no natural food source and settles upon humans as his food of choice. 

Minos commissions Daedalus to build a labyrinth (I presume the Cretan royalty had some kind of family discount plan) and they shove the Minotaur in there. Why didn’t Minos just kill the Minotaur? The oracle at Delphi said not to. Plus, I guess it might have upset his wife a bit. Why didn’t Minos just kill Daedalus? That’d be too easy. It seems like at the core of most myths there’s a kernel of morality tale:

For Daedalus: just because you can doesn’t mean you should - be more careful about the stuff you build. And don’t enable bestiality 

For Minos: don’t sass Poseidon

For the queen: typical Greek stuff - all women (even the daughters of the sun god) are depraved liars with bizzareo sexual leanings. Even though it was a curse from Poseidon that gave her those impulses, her shame echoes through eternity (which is weirdly her only cosmic punishment - besides, I guess, being separated from her one true love, the bull... actually, I’m not sure what happened there. One assumes that after the Minotaur thing she decided to hit the brakes on her relationship with the bull but maybe they grew old together, lying in the sun in grassy pastures for the rest of their lives)

If you were hoping that this was the only tale of lady/bull romance from ancient Greece, you are shit out of luck. In another story from Crete, ya boy Zeus takes a fancy to a woman named Europa. Rather than woo her using any of the conventional means, Zeus transforms into a huge white bull and abducts her, taking her to the island of Crete. She becomes Crete’s first queen and has some kids with Zeus - it’s unclear whether this goes down with Zeus in bull or human form. It transpires that one of the kids born from Europa’s affair with Zeus is Minos. So Minos’ mother and wife both had unsavoury relationships with bulls. 

That was a long detour - getting back to the Labyrinth: it was built in Crete to house the Minotaur. The idea was that the Minotaur would never be able to escape, and that anyone who entered the Labyrinth wouldn’t be able to escape either. Why not just lock the Minotaur in a prison? Doesn’t have the same ring to it, I guess. It’s a weird idea though, isn’t it - making a really complicated (but still solvable) puzzle and putting something you never want found or freed in it. Why not just make something actually unsolvable?  

So that’s the first/most famous labyrinth. Herodotus, a Greek historian who was kicking around in the 5th century BC also wrote about one in Egypt. He wrote a book called Histories which Wikipedia bills as the founding work of history in the Western literary canon (I initially misread this sentence and thought that they were saying it was the founding work overall and I was about to be all ‘ah, beaucoup problemo, Wikipedia.’ But a quick reread saves me from from making an embarrassing mistake). ANYWAY, in the second volume of Histories, Herodotus recounts his travels around the far flung and exotic land of Egypt. According to Herodotus:

This I have actually seen, a work beyond words. For if anyone put together the buildings of the Greeks and display of their labours, they would seem lesser in both effort and expense to this labyrinth… Even the pyramids are beyond words, and each was equal to many and mighty works of the Greeks. Yet the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids.

Ancient Origins dot net says:

It was named ‘Labyrinth’ by the Greeks after the complex maze of corridors designed by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete, where the legendary Minotaur dwelt. Yet today, nothing remains of this supposedly grand temple complex – at least not on the surface. The mighty labyrinth became lost to the pages of history.

It was actually a mortuary temple, not a labyrinth in the traditional sense of looking like a maze, but it was sprawling, complex and difficult to navigate.The only other Greek historian to see it was Strabo. He was kicking around ~500 years after Herodotus but also reported that the labyrinth was pretty crazy, calling it a “great palace composed of many palaces.” He said:

[I]n front of the entrances are crypts, as it were, which are long and numerous and have winding passages communicating with one another, so that no stranger can find his way either into any court or out of it without a guide.

Apparently the temple was lost over time - Wikipedia is blaming Ptolemy II (who apparently married his sister so that gives you a sense of his respect for preserving the integrity of things like historical sites and the integrity of blood lines) for its ‘demolition’ but he died in 246 BCE so, if he’d destroyed it, how would Strabo have been able to see it in the 1st century CE? It may not have been completely destroyed - it sounds like they perhaps just removed a bunch of limestone columns and blocks.

Fast forward to 1888: a British archaeologist named Flinders Petrie is excavating the site - of his findings he writes: there was nothing but a “vast field of chipped stone, six feet deep... All over an immense area of dozens of acres, I found evidence of a grand building. From such very scanty remains it is hard to settle anything." Petrie also apparently found a bunch of papyrus scrolls - including some which contain parts of the Illiad!

So there was definitely something there. Imagine this though: people found Herodotus’ writings ages ago and are searching around in the sand based on 2,000+ year old testimony from a man who many of his contemporaries considered at best a gullible exaggerator and at worst a liar. 

There was an expedition in 2008 - they have a website talking up their geophysic surveys of the area but they might not have found much because the results page of their website was never completed.

There’s a really weirdly specific Wikipedia article dealing with the (figurative) presence of the Minotaur in HoL - obviously some HoL superfan wrote this article (and it is interesting) but I don’t know why it warrants its own stand alone article - it’s not unusual to have a separate article discussing the themes and motifs of a major text on Wikipedia, but this is a whole article discussing a single motif. ANYWAY I like the analysis in the article about how if the house is the labyrinth, the Minotaur is the awful thoughts that crowd around you as you explore the endless hallways - obviously these are different for everyone. SO the Cretan labyrinth was built because Minos didn’t want to kill the bull - that was its purpose. What is the purpose of the labyrinth in the house? (That’s really why I’m still reading.)

UPDATE: have given up on House of Leaves - it’s on the bookshelf and never coming off. I am a quitter. Feels amazing.

[controledavida]

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[fic-dreamin]

Good but slow at times This one kinda went back and forth from being great to a real trudge. I think my biggest gripe is that I can't stand two of the characters and Jordan spends ALOT of time with one of them. He also paired two of them together and it seems like half of the book focused on those two and they’re both so one dimensional and boring. Go to Amazon

Robert Jordan keeps on impressing The fifth book in the series seems to be a good place to mention some all around positive tones in Robert Jordans excellent fantasy series Wheel of Time. Drawing knowledge from many different disciplines he's able to create vivid and interesting characters, strong female protagonists (like no other novel possibly), and keep on supplying interesting characters back to back. A proper review can't be truly submitted till the series is completed, and while it has moments of dulnesss, it is filled with a sea of epic quotes and rich humanity of someone who has fought the battle of war and love, and I predict it will be very satisfying ending. Go to Amazon

Worth the read... A weaving of character continues. The self-doubts and confidences grow. A good read, if you are committed to the series. Not five stars because the final book alone deserves to be rated as a five, when the whole epic is completed, the final twist knotted in place. I liked the tortured doubts of Rand--there is no hero like a hero with weakness and strength. Go to Amazon

Unlikable Characters, Too Many Flowery Details, and Not Enough Action I've never stopped reading a series of fantasy books right in the middle, but I'm out. So....many....words. Every little detail is spelled out, right down to the thread color in dresses. Good Gawd. Others might like that level of detail, but my eyes start to glaze over and my mind wanders to more interesting things....such as flogging hateful bossy Nynaeve with her waist long, wrist thick braid. Almost every character is either sullen, manipulative, sulky, resentful, hateful, sexist, secretive, spiteful or dull. I've been annoyed with most of the main characters since the first book but thought maybe they'd get better...but no. I don't find myself cheering for the "heroes". I've slogged through the word swamp of five of these books, and I'm throwing in the towel. Give me RA Salvatore's dark elf Drizzt any day of the week, he's a hero I can root for. Go to Amazon

Enjoyed it more than GOT Took me a little less than a year to finish this series only reading a little each day or so, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Jordan wrote with a lot of detail and made the characters really feel like flesh and blood. Rand, Matt, and Perrin and the rest are characters you'll enjoy getting to know and enjoy following through the many turns of the Wheel of Time. I know I'll visit again. Go to Amazon

This is one of the best books you will ever read This is one of the best books you will ever read. Along with the other 13 books in the series. Yes, read them in order, it is a major SAGA. When I started reading this series "Fires of Heaven" had just been released. My husband was reading them and telling how good they were. I told him I would start reading them once Robert was done writing them. Robert got this far. So I read 1-5. And waited 2 years for "Lord of Chaos". Right before #6 was released I re-read 1-5, so the story was fresh in my mind. I did that before every next volume went into print. But there was a long period of time between books. I am an avid reader, most top sellers in a variety of genres. and I would exhaust new releases and get tired of purchasing so many books that I would go back and re-read Robert Jordan AGAIN. I thought that once the series was complete I would stop re-reading them. So far, that hasn't been the case. I'm on my 3rd go round since the final book was written. Robert Jordan did not survive to finish his story, but I think he would be proud of how Brian Sanderson completed it. Robert had left behind enough notes of his story lines to supply enough MEAT for the "LIGHT" to carry the day. Go to Amazon

This is one of my favorite stories but this book has a publishing mistake Great story Rereading these, definitely worth the time. It's very good. Five Stars All of the Wheel of Time books are a must ... Another FANTASTIC WoT! Kydjgdiyyfofiyd higugug If you liked the 1st 4 you should enjoy this one. Five Stars