Sorcerer's House Comment

Fred Kiesche · 07 May 2012, 20:47 · from 2012-May.txt.gz

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From: godelescherbach at gmail.com (Fred Kiesche)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2012 16:47:30 -0400
Subject: (urth) Sorcerer's House Comment
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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> 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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