Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Anyway, as I had wanted to say before becoming distracted, :P , about coins or pentacles; per Wikipedia :
It corresponds to the Suit of Diamonds in standard decks.
The suit represents the Third Estate (town-dwellers).
Also: The Suit of Pentacles (also known as Coins or Disks) is representative of the element of Earth. The Suit of Pentacles Tarot card meanings cover material aspects of life including work, business, trade, property, money and other material possessions. The positive aspects of the Suit of Pentacles include manifestation, realisation, proof and prosperity.

Hmm, these cards are darn complex if you want to "represent" yourself with them - for example, the first cup that the first traveler represents himself with, is an 'emotional' one do to with water, and the Clergy, but Calvino seemed to rather derive the attributes from what the illustration on the card looked like, since the attributes he seems to draw from it are "his wealthy station, his inclination toward luxury and prodigality" whereas, coins, rather than cups would appear to represent attributes such as wealth and luxury. I wonder why he is subverting the traditional meanings.

Maybe Disha can help us out with that...

Ah, okay, I suppose the knight of cups makes sense after all - the man is out adventuring and potentially looking for a wife. ;)

Ok, next: king of coins. Hmm, let's just mention that there are 4 minor arcana, just as there are 4 suites in traditional playing cards. I'll do some more research, but I feel pretty sure that our usual 52- cards deck was derived from tarot cards.

Ah, yes, I'm right: The Minor Arcana (or Lesser Arcana) are the 56 suit cards of the 78-card deck of tarot playing cards. The Minor Arcana comprise four suits with 14 cards each. Although there are variations, the Minor Arcana commonly employ the Italo-Spanish suits: Wands (alternatively, batons, clubs, or staves), cups, swords, and pentacles (alternatively, coins, disks, or rings). In contrast, the French suits are spades (♠), hearts (♥), diamonds (♦) and clubs (♣).

Each Minor Arcana card in a suit is numbered one (ace) to ten, except for the court cards (or courts)—page, knight, queen, and king—which are comparable to face cards. In one variation, princess and prince cards replace the page and knight cards. Some Italian decks add two more court cards: the maid and the mounted lady.

Since contemporary decks of French playing cards replace both the knight and the page with the jack or knave, such decks only have 52 cards. The remaining 22 cards in a tarot deck are the Major Arcana. Traditionally, the Major Arcana are more significant, but the Minor Arcana are what allow Tarot readers to understand the subtleties and details that surround the major events and signifiers in a Tarot spread; in general, the Major Arcana represent large turning points and the Minor Arcana represent the day-to-day insights.[1]

Minor Arcana cards in contemporary tarot decks are usually illustrated—a convention popularized by the Rider-Waite tarot deck ca. 1910. Non-illustrated cards bear symmetrical arrangements of pips. [wikipedia]

Suite of cups. Why the water theme in the image above? (I wondered myself - I'd become rusty on tarot symbology) - well, apparently the suite of cups stands representative of water and hence emotions.
I found an explanation online:
The Suit of Cups is representative of the element of water.

The Suit of Cups Tarot card meanings deal with the emotional level of consciousness and are associated with love, feelings, relationships and connections. Cups are about displays of emotion, expression of feelings and the role of emotions in relation to others. The Cups Tarot cards indicate that you are thinking with your heart rather than your head, and thus reflect your spontaneous responses and your habitual reactions to situations. Cups are also linked to creativity, romanticism, fantasy and imagination.

The negative aspects of the Suit of Cups (i.e. when the Cups cards appear reversed) include being overly emotional or completely disengaged and dispassionate, having unrealistic expectations and fantasising about what could be. There may be repressed emotions, an inability to truly express oneself and a lack of creativity.

The Suit of Cups traditionally represents the west and autumn. If using an ordinary deck of playing cards, Cups are represented by the Suit of Hearts.

..and per Wikipedia:
Additionally, cups were the symbol of the clergy in feudal times, and thus cup cards can also be interpreted as having to do with spiritual or religious matters.
The suit represents the First Estate (the Clergy).

..and specifically about knight of cups: Knight of Cups: A young man on a horse with a winged helmet offers a cup. The card can indicate a sensitive male, unmarried, a suitor who seeks the hand of a lady. He is honest and truthful, as well as is heartfelt. It can also indicate a matter of an emotional nature.

One of the things that intrigued me about this work, is Calvino's use of the Tarot. The Tarot deck of cards is something that had intrigued me for a long time, and it's really a very interesting phenomenon. The suites as well as the denominations (King, queen, knave, etc. ) are symbolic enough, and archetypal enough, for it to be applied in a wide variety of uses.

Let me grab a bit of background from Wikipedia:

"The tarot (/ˈtæroʊ/; first known as trionfi and later as tarocchi, tarock, and others) is a pack of playing cards (most commonly numbering 78), used from the mid-15th century in various parts of Europe to play a group of card games such as Italian tarocchini and French tarot. From the late 18th century until the present time the tarot has also found use by mystics and occultists for divination.

Like the common deck of playing cards, the tarot has four suits (which vary by region, being the French suits in Northern Europe, the Latin suits in Southern Europe, and the German suits in Central Europe). Each of these suits has pip cards numbering from one (or Ace) to ten and four face cards (King, Queen, Knight, and Jack/Knave) for a total of 14 cards. In addition, the tarot has a separate 21-card trump suit and a single card known as the Fool. Depending on the game, the Fool may act as the top trump or may be played to avoid following suit.

François Rabelais gives tarau as the name of one of the games played by Gargantua in his Gargantua and Pantagruel; this is likely the earliest attestation of the French form of the name.

Tarot cards are used throughout much of Europe to play card games. [These game are not extensively played in English-speaking countries, where tarot cards are now used primarily for divinatory purposes.]

Occultists call the trump cards and the Fool "the major arcana" while the ten pip and four court cards in each suit are called minor arcana. The cards are traced by some occult writers to ancient Egypt or the Kabbalah but there is no documented evidence of such origins or of the usage of tarot for divination before the 18th century.

I myself own 2 or 3 tarot decks because of the interesting art work - they come in very interesting "styles".
The first story deals with the Knight of Cups. Let's see if we can find some interesting versions of that one.







Here are some depictions of the knight - from reasonably traditional to reasonably way out. :)

Okay, I've finally managed to locate my mislaid copy, and started reading. So far, so good; I really like the narrative style, which feels rich but not too dense, and certainly gives the air of a fairy tale being told; I also appreciated the ambiguity of the setting (Tavern or castle?), which lent an air of intrigue for me.

As readers above have mentioned, the Chaucerian layout is of course obvious from the page of contents already. Pah, and now I'm wishing The Canterbury Tales (of which I do not have fond memories) were not quite so thick - I might want to at least glance over its intro again, to see how far the similarities stretch.

More later. :)

Phil wrote: "Traveller wrote: "Poet Gentleness wrote: "Our colleague and her fan was the first to open debates, with this pearl (something around the lines):
"Clarisse lived in the same building my mother did a..."

I'm with you as well, but that said, I often start wondering why an author did something in a certain way, which will prompt me to reading up more background. I am also not against reading up some general socio-cultural historical background first (not spoilers about the book's plot though, which "biographical details" tend to do), especially when one is dealing with works of historical importance.
...but I do prefer to leave the extraneous reading for after or even for while I'm reading the primary source.

Take my reading of Soldiers of Salamis, a novel by Javier Cercas for example. I had always wanted to know more about the Spanish Civil war, and this novel prompted me to do so. By the time I had finished with the Cercas book, I had read at least 3 non-fiction books dealing with the SCW, and I must say that I found it a very enriching experience! ...but reading about the war would have been a lot less interesting if I didn't have the novel as motivation, if you see what I mean.

That looks like a riot! ;)
I especially love: " Life of Magnum PI ". :D (Magnum PI is a TV show about a private investigator named Magnum)

That's very interesting, Matt! I admit that I don't know much about the lives of German writers and poets, but it's very interesting cultural history, so thanks for enlightening us!

I basically just knew that he was a famous German poet from the nineteenth century, and that was about it... :P

I'm not sure if the WorldCat is without permission, though. I had assumed that Amazon would have given them permission, and at least they acknowledge where they're getting the reviews from, so I suppose I don't mind too much about that one, except that maybe then I wouldn't want to have my reviews attributed to "Traveller".

I'm starting to seriously consider using my real name, which I have not been doing partly because I'm known across several websites as Traveller and partly for reasons of privacy and partly because I have a pretty common name which kind of makes people confuse me with other Jennifers. :P

Mmm-hmm, doesn't look very legit to me. Ok, will do. :)

Okay, thanks for the heads up. I must have been away from GR when that specific info went round...

Amy, per the google search, I also found reference to it on this site, which looks pretty dodgy to me: http://www.urbanartifacts.com/thread-...

@Cecily, maybe they have since removed it? I haven't seen it, myself...

Yeah, they weren't very open about the extent to which they would be using our reviews, but I can certainly understand now why so many members got so het up. There are many people around here who work very hard at their reviews and put a lot of work and/or unique artistry into their reviews.

Okay, looks like our reviews are being "used" without our consent, and I suppose that is what part of the whole recent fight around Goodreads has been about lately.

So, then, did Amazon change the TOS to make our content theirs to use anywhere as they please? I had thought they could only use it on the Amazon site, but it looks like they have been selling our reviews to all and sundry.

I googled some unusual wording from a review of mine, and it showed up on at least two sites, one of them claiming that I am one of their users, and I see friend Jeffrey Keeten's reviews also made it there; see here and here:
http://www.worldcat.org/title/turn-of...

and
http://www.allyoucanbooks.com/ebook/t...

I see they seem to have made it onto a pirating site as well.
If they're going to "use" my reviews in this way, I might want to consider changing to my "real" name. Sigh.

The first thing I did was to check if she'd plagiarized any of my reviews, and was relieved to find not. But it has set me to wondering if people might indeed not be plagiarizing our stuff w/out us even knowing about it...

Well, maybe she simply could not string together the necessary to write something there? She's not using my name or my images; she rated a bunch of books all on one day (she joined August 2015) and no reviews. ...but she's been posting selfies of herself and a friend in sexy poses, so that makes it feel even more ...weird...

I have no idea why she decided to use specifically my profile for that, though. I have never heard of her in my life before, and my profile is certainly not one of those, er... "looking for a date" ones, so...

It's a very weird and horrible feeling; as if someone had broken into your bedroom and stolen your clothes and underwear and been wearing it without your knowledge.
Or, like someone had managed to get hold of your private correspondence and been passing it off as something they themselves had written.

Now I start to understand how celebrities must feel when unauthorized nude photo's of them are distributed on the internet...

Well, gee, at least you know about it, right? :P

What I mean to say, is that since I'd read Hesse at age 16 already, it feels rather weird when people have no clue that he ever existed...

Thanks, Derek. Will mail them there. :)

Guys, do any of you know where/how I can contact GR to report a user? Someone stole my profile write-up, but has not posted any reviews which I can use to 'flag' her. Surely there must be an email via which one can contact them to report abuses of this kind? I mean, it's identity theft and plagiarism! Believe me, it's a very weird feeling to read your profile info on somebody else's profile....

Heinrich Heine ? Wow, that's just... weird...

Heh, speaking of German authors: recently a family member accompanied me to a flea market book sale, on which I bought, among other things, Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend by Hermann Hesse .

The family member looked at me quizzically and asked: "Hermann Hesse, the Nazi? "
Er... I'm sure he must have been thinking about Rudolf Hess, so I just said: "Um, no, the author. You know, the guy who wrote Steppenwolf and Siddartha? " ...and was met with a blank stare. Oh, the humanity...