And that tarot wish-list item iiiiisss.... THE HOLY GRAIL TAROT!! Found a brand new, as yet unopened copy of the box at the second-hand book-shop down the road from us, at RATHER less than the normal shop price. And would you have it, I don't have the cash available yet. Let's hope it's still there when I go and collect it.
This is the first blog on doing on request, by the way. I'm so happy for the request! My thoughts have been doing the loopies for a while on what to put up here and being asked for something just seemed to help the loopies straighten out a little bit. Whooppeeeee!!!
It's taken me up to now to figure out what a blog is in any case, and for the life of me, I wouldn't be able to explain it to anyone if I were asked to. I always saw the advertisement on TV with this woman talking about how her kids are blogging about this and that (you know, the one where she's walking between the fridge and the work-counter and looking like her kitchen gets disinfected every time she steps outside). Now I get it. So, who else has a blog?
I have a rather interesting graphic novel (classed under "manga') called the "Tarot Café". The artist is the Korean Sang-Sun Park and I have to say, her style is incredibly distinct from most manga art styles I've come across. She likes bold lines and lots of detail and if you don't keep track of how the story flows, you can get lost. Her characters are also very modernly dressed and really easy to fall in love with.
Anyway, the main story focuses on Pamela and her quest to die by collecting the beads from Belial/Berial's necklace (as the story goes on, so the first L is replaced by an R). Pamela is immortal and became so at eh death of her lover, the red dragon Ash, some 800 years ago. It turns out she was hit on the forehead by the first drop of blood out of his heart as he died.
Pamela was born with the gift of Sight and uses this amazing gift to help the "after-midnight" customers that come through her door. These customers range from a rare wish-granting cat named Butterfly to the human lover of a Welsh lake faery; a blinded vampire and and various other supernatural beings also count among her special clients. During the day, she's just Pamela, the owner of the titular Tarot Café who happens to read tarot cards for her clients as well (think Tea & Tarot on the way to Muizenberg and Kalk Bay).
What particularly struck me when I initially looked at the "TC" manga was that Pamela used a rather obscure tarot deck called the Aquarian Tarot, done by the artist David Palladini. The Aquarian Tarot is very close to my heart for the simple reason that I also own one; in fact, the AT is my primary and oldest deck (in terms of being in my possession). It was a gift from my aunt when I turned fourteen and Goddess knows, it's stuck by me through thick and thin. Especially the thin.
The AT is not the only tarot deck Pamela uses in her travels and readings, though. From her mother she inherited a copy of the Visconti_Sforza Tarot (arguably the oldest known documented tarot deck), while travelling in Turkey a few hundred years later she uses an appropriately-themed deck to read the fortune of a sultan's ghost. The title of each chapter is a card from various different tarot decks with the cards' faces replaced by the focus character's face for the chapter. Make sense?? The deck each card is from is given, and the card's meaning is listed under the main image. Among the most unusual (to me, at least) were images out of the Master Tarot and out of the Herbal Tarot.
Besides the chapter covers' meanings being listed, the cards used throughout the main story itself are also interpreted. It's lovely to see how listed meanings for cards we all know and love differ slightly from author to author.
OK, enough BABBLING about the "Tarot Café".
I've been thinking of writing a good old-fashioned LETTER!! But would you believe, very few people even have postal addresses nowadays. With e-mail and SMS technology making up the bulk of our communication, the pen-and-paper letter has fallen by the wayside. I mean, I remember getting a letter or a parcel in the post and tearing open the envelope or the wrapping to get to what was inside. Why did we stop doing that? The only letters we bother with anymore are the business or legal kind, or even, heaven forbid, advertising. I challenge everyone who reads this to send me a letter in the post. You'll have to get hold of me on Facebook for my address, though - definitely not leaving it on here for all sorts of weirdos to get hold of!!!
And for every letter I get, I'll write one back (^_^)
I'm signing off now. I do believe this may be my longest blog to date. Please let me know what you think and don't forget to ask me for my address, heh?
Dee out!!
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