Peter Gabriel said it best in his ironic song "Big Time:" I've been stretching my mouth To let those big words come right out I love word-craft and clever language, but sometimes that fascination can get the best of me. Those big words are my nemesis because they can spell death for any hope of creating good writing. … Continue reading Big Words
Tarot Miscellany
A New Wrinkle On An Old Face
As I've mentioned before, I'm presently reading Caitlin Matthews' new traditional tarot book, Untold Tarot. In it she talks about the subject of "significator" cards, and mentions that Etteilla was the first to designate a unique significator for his Book of Thoth deck, a blank card - or "carte blanche" - that he immodestly called … Continue reading A New Wrinkle On An Old Face
Paper Tiger
Those of us who post regularly (critics might say interminably) in online blogs run the risk of self-parody, becoming mere "cardboard cut-outs" of our formerly ferocious literary personae. Conventional wisdom asserts that a blogger must publish frequently to maintain an interested and engaged following, but this can sometimes mean unintentionally plowing (or, if you're British, … Continue reading Paper Tiger
Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #3
Here is the third installment of my "Rubaiyat as Tarot Cards" visual narrative. I have a hunch this is going to get difficult due to the sheer number of iterations. As expected, I'm finding more situations where the pictorial story-telling vignettes in the RWS minor cards dovetail at least as vividly with the text as … Continue reading Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #3
Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #2
This is the second of my episodic attempts to translate the quatrains of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam into the visual language of the tarot cards, approximately one card per quatrain. I'm looking for logical transition points in the flow of the text so I can limit these posts to four or five related paragraphs … Continue reading Omar’s Picture Book, Episode #2
“Better a Live Sparrow”
In my ongoing (and lately intermittent) attempts to transform classic English-language poetry into visual narrative via the tarot cards, one work stands out as the "Holy Grail" of my lofty aspiration: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It is one I have been reluctant to tackle because it is so heavily laden with metaphysical imagery (the … Continue reading “Better a Live Sparrow”
Not If, But When
For those of us who believe that tarot divination is an effective tool for identifying future possibilities and tendencies in an individual's personal reality, the question of "when" looms large on the predictive horizon. There is a divergence of professional opinion on the subject of how long a reading is "good for." Some people say they have … Continue reading Not If, But When
Ulalume and Thoth: A Perfect Pair
Edgar Allan Poe's somber, stately poem, To -- -- --. Ulalume: A Ballad may represent the peak (or pit, depending on your opinion of Poe) of tarot symbolism above all his other works. It embraces the Moon foremost, but also the Star, the Tower and the Devil, as well as many of the harsher Thoth Minor Arcana … Continue reading Ulalume and Thoth: A Perfect Pair
Invictus and the Tarot Triptych
In honor of William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus, which started me down this road with the line "My head is bloody, but unbowed" and its perfect complement in the Waite-Smith Tarot's 9 of Wands, I decided to render the entire poem in tarot cards. Although the text is structured in four-line stanzas, the three-card triptych made for … Continue reading Invictus and the Tarot Triptych
The Jabberwocky and the Thoth Tarot
There is something slightly dismal about the opening and closing stanzas of the famous Lewis Carroll nonsense poem that reminds me of some of the more unsettling cards of the Thoth deck (must be those flimsy, miserable, shabby-looking birds described by Humpty Dumpty). I took on the interesting challenge of finding correlations between the cards and the rest … Continue reading The Jabberwocky and the Thoth Tarot
