(urth) Sorcerer's House Comment

[David Stockhoff]

I think I know that mountain. Legend says its summit stands unseen above 
the clouds and may be reached by no man or woman.

I'll have to read NOVA; I find the Tarot interesting as the basis for an 
organizational scheme.

On 5/7/2012 4:47 PM, Fred Kiesche wrote:
> Tarot: Read a long time ago was NOVA by Samuel R. Delany. I just got a 
> hardcover of the "first" edition (SFBC, long story as to why that is 
> the hardcover). Much of the story revolves around the Tarot; I have 
> not read this in years and will be putting it on Mount Tobereread.
>
> On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 12:49 PM, Darth Ed <darthed77 at gmail.com 
> <mailto:darthed77 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On May 4, 2012, at 11:32 AM, Gwern Branwen wrote:
>     > The book *is* dedicated effusively to Gaiman by Wolfe; it's not
>     > unreasonable to think that Wolfe targeted it at Gaiman or simply
>     gave
>     > Gaiman some hints or something.
>
>     I concur. That's my feeling as well.
>
>     > I took a quick look at the first 6 or 7 chapters. I don't see any
>     > obvious correspondence with the letter titles and the order given in
>     > Wikipedia, but 'magician' does seem to align with the fish part
>     of the
>     > plot. Possibly the trumps are a skeleton key to figuring out the
>     > unscrambled order of the letters? I don't remember anyone
>     pointing out
>     > any interesting problems with the ordering and giving a
>     revealing true
>     > ordering.
>
>     I don't think the letters/chapters are out of order per se with
>     regards to
>     some canonical ordering of the Major Arcana and that we need to
>     reorder the
>     chapters/letters to fit that canonical ordering. In a Tarot
>     reading, the
>     cards are shuffled and the ordering of the cards is significant to the
>     person who is being read by the reader. And I don't think the
>     titles are
>     necessarily related to the Major Arcana, but rather the principle
>     characters and/or action that takes place in each letter/chapter
>     can be
>     matched to each of the Major Arcana. In that respect, I'm keen on
>     David
>     Stockoff's interpretation which identified several such matches for a
>     handful of the letters/chapters. He also incorporated the
>     mirroring nicely
>     into his interpretation. His identifications seemed quite
>     reasonable to me,
>     and I think further study is warranted and may come up with additional
>     identifications between the letters/chapters and the Major Arcana.
>     I'll
>     certainly be looking for such connection on my next reading of
>     TSH, but I
>     suspect that's probably years from now, unfortunately.
>
>     In a sense, we, the readers of the book, are like the Tarot reader who
>     reads the past, present, and future of a person/character. The
>     cards/chapters represent the past and the present; the reader
>     interprets
>     them and uses them to foretell the future of the person/character.
>
>     Later,
>     Ed
>
>     My WolfeWiki profile:
>     http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Profiles.DarthEd
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>
>
> -- 
> F.P. Kiesche III  "Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book. 
> Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?" (The Duke of Gloucester, on 
> being presented with Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman 
> Empire.) Blogging at The Lensman's Children 
> (http://theeternalgoldenbraid.blogspot.com/).
>
>
>
>
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