City on Green

Lee Berman · 02 Jan 2011, 08:01 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 03:01:04 -0500
Subject: (urth) City on Green
Message-ID: <SNT123-W52C57FC023D00169F6153FCF060 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff-Other than the Augean Stables, has anyone compared Hercules' 
>chores/feats/tasks/miracles one for one with Severian's?

I gave it a preliminary shot. I think I had comparisons for five or six of
the twelve labors. Some were awfully metaphorical: Hercules captures the deer
with golden antlers= Severian's relationship with Dorcas (name means "gazelle").  
Hercules, like Severian, carries the weight of the world on his shoulders when
he subs for Atlas. etc.

I think "one for one" may be too much to ask...it would be like Typhon having 100 heads 
like his mythological namesake. Too direct and obvious a borrowing for Wolfe. Still, 
Nessus, a twin, disguised parentage, mysterious strengths and indominability are pretty
good clues. I think there are others, not yet discovered.

Someone recently mentioned The Town That Forgot Fauna. I think there is much there which 
reflects on the founding of Nessus. It is on a river. It has grand walls and towers. There
are black beans mentioned. We never learn the "grand name" of this city but its nicknames
"Urbis" and "Pestis" are highly evocative of the name "Nessus" to me.

Unexplored, I think, is the name of the owner of the original piece of land, Fauna. This 
Roman goddess is significant to me in that she is the daughter of the god Faunus. As I 
have noted elsewhere, an epithet for Faunus is Innus, derived from the copulatory verb,
"inire" and a name associated with monkeys. BotNS does have a male and female character 
who are both very old.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net