Five of Cups

[prog]

Finally back to work. I took a week off, more or less, fleeing to Maine over the Labor Day weekend. I almost didn't go but last-minute consultation with a dear advisor over IM convinced me I could use a vacation.

I spent a lot of time with friends whom, in some cases, I haven't seen much of lately, and this was very nice. (I owe a post, sometime soon, to the topic of my current friend-network; it's developed in surprising directions over the last six months or so.) On my return I geared up to speed without hurry, and today made a plan of attack regarding the payment system. I thought I already had one, two weeks ago, but it turned out that my head wasn't all the way around it and I had to start over.

Now I know I'm really on the right track because as I look over the plans I get that feeling of mortal dread that presses down on me whenever I sense that I have once again found the path, and feel overwhelmed with thoughts of how very long it is and how very little time I have.

The card that has always affected me the most deeply in the Robin Wood Tarot is the Five of Cups. What particularly affects me in her version is the background, with a wide, overcast sky reflected in gray-green hills and gray-blue water. By the castle and standing stones in the far distance it's clearly meant to be some sort of Europe, but as a native New Englander I know exactly the sort of chill, damp day that's being depicted, and my bones almost ache to think of it. But what really puts a shudder into my heart is how the cloaked figure watches as the only color in the world, the bright red wine, spills away from him; in moments it will be gone.

I have chronic low-level fear of plenty of things, but Lost Opportunity is special among them in that it also acts as a motivator. The near-somatic feeling I get when I look at this card is the same as the dreadful weight I feel when I know that I'm on the right path. It is a hand that at once presses me down towards the earth even as it shoves me forward. What a strange mix!

---

In other news, I can't stop reading the latest Tim Powers novel, Three Days to Never. (Wow, what a cheesy title, though; I had already forgotten it.) I am halfway through and anything could happen, but unless it pulls a Miéville on me (and I don't think it will) I think it will turn out to do for Tim Powers what The Saddest Music in the World did for Guy Maddin: it's the work first work by an artist I admire that I actually like. Well, that's not entirely fair; I liked The Drawing of the Dark a lot, but it's by a much younger author and it's very fluffy. This book is a feast. I'll have more to say when I'm done with it.

It's funny that it comes on the heels of my reading PKD's Clans of the Alphane Moon, which I really enjoyed for all its utter incomprehensibility. More than any other Dick I've read, it felt the most like magical realism, with characters who could fly or reverse time or were slime molds from Ganymede, all taken for granted by the protagonist (a hapless PKD stand-in, as always). I am seeing some underlying similarities between the two books, even though they're so different in execution. I don't think this is entirely a product of the recency illusion; Powers is a student of Dick. But, again: I'll save a longer analysis for later.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

new Tim Powers novel? Gotta go find one!

[jazzfish]

Surprisingly little fanfare about this one, at least in the net.circles I move in. I wouldn't've known except that someone on the Powers LJ community said something like "So, has no one picked up _Three Days to Never_ yet?" and a zillion people responded with "OMG it's out?!"

(I've had my copy for a month now and still haven't read it. I am requiring myself to read _The Prestige_ first, before the movie comes out. From the jacket it looks to be another like _Declare_, though, which is fine and dandy by me.)

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

I really liked The Prestige, although it was quite sad in parts. Only found out about a week ago (probably here in prog-land) that it was to become a movie.

[jazzfish]

Heh. Whereas I saw the trailer, and showed it to a friend, and then she found a copy of the book (of whose existence I'd been previously unaware) and bought it for me.

I'm about five pages into it, and it is totally different from what I was expecting, since my sole exposure to it previously was the trailer. It's certainly keeping my attention, though.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I only knew about it coz Zarf brought it to the office.

"The Prestige" what? [Google] A 1996 novel by Christopher Priest? OK, I was worried it was a Powers book I somehow had never heard of.

The Prestige

[jazzfish]

Also a new movie directed by Christopher Nolan ("Memento," "Insomnia," "Batman Begins") starring Christian Bale, and with David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. The trailer (available on Apple.com) appears to contain no less than 75% of your USRDA of awesome.

Re: The Prestige

[prog.livejournal.com]

But now I don't wanna watch it coz I wanna read the book first aaagh.

Re: The Prestige

[jazzfish]

Heh. uilos is refusing to read the book first "because I want to /enjoy/ the movie, not nit-pick it."

[elphie.livejournal.com]

The other, more uplifting part of the message I get from that card is that there are still two full cups, if only the figure would look at them, so even in this desolation all is not lost.

I know what you mean about the mortal dread, any time I have some experience that I feel gets me back on my path, it is immediately followed by ooh that's scary, i just want to hide and play video games.

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

Clans of the Alphane Moon is cool on so many levels. First of all, it's a cool concept. Second of all, the diagnoses and symptoms of all the disorders are totally archaic, so it's entertaining. Third, it's actually a cohesive story from start to finish.

But I always wondered... what's with the hebephrenics? His depiction could be interpreted as racist to a population completely unrelated to hebephrenia if you know what I mean...

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yes, you mean the "Heebs", of course. That name did raise a flag with me, partially because I remembered you describing running into this before and feeling uncomfortable about it. (I didn't remember the novel you were talking about, so it was a surprise to run into it on my own.)

However, I am willing to believe that it stops at the name. To the best of my knowledge, being completely disorganized and living in heaps of garbage isn't a widespread stereotype about Jews, and I certainly don't think that Dick was trying to invent a new stereotype either. This begs the question of why he used the name at all, then. Satire? Naivete? Failure to think of an alternative nickname for the tribe?

The afterword by some other author (name already forgotten) in the edition I read made an aside suggestion that it was some kind of benign social commentary, but I don't really see that either.

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

It wasn't just the name "Heebs", but also the names of the Heebs themselves, which were more archetypically Jewish than any of the other characters' names. I was a little more vigilant to this anyway since reading Man in the High Castle, in which a character who is Jewish but gets plastic surgery to look more Aryan is describing one part of his surgery as making his big greasy Jewish pores smaller and such. I was like, huh? What a strange description! In general and as far as I've seen, PKD does not seem to take on a very positive or even neutral tone when writing about things Jewish.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

i...t's the work first work by an artist I admire that I actually like.

You don't like The Anubis Gates? What's wrong with you, man!? It's the archetypal plot-driven novel. Pure fun. Pretty much everything he's written since is a pale shadow, although the one about Byron was ok.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I couldn't take that one seriously! I thought it was a lot of fun, but the evil magic-using bad guys were (because of rules about the supernatural that the book laid down) so vulnerable that the story felt like a series of the protagonist finding each one and bopping him on the head.

It would make a hell of a movie, though.