(urth) Sorcerer's House Comment

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

The Tarot is not the organizational schema of NOVA, but it's one of
the things used to produce meaning.

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 3:31 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
> 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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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes