But simply because neither of us is performing wow-dude, New Age, hermetic, astro-numero-kabbalistic gymnastics to position tarot cards in magical Egypt, it doesn't mean tarot is "completely devoid of occult origin." Tarot is a vibrating, living, literal myth, an echo of Rome's foundation story and the occult disciplines embedded there. So Rosemont is dead wrong: Divining occult knowledge was always a resonating component of tarot from the creation of the very first deck.

merovingian

Late last night, I went down to Porlock and knocked on the man's door angrily. He came out to the door in a bathrobe and fuzzy rabbit slippers.

"What?" he said, rubbing his eyes.

"I want the rest of Kubla Khan," I said.

"No," he said, "I don't have it."

"You do too," I said, "You interrupted Coleridge on your dumb business and distracted him from his opium-filled visions and he forgot his poem. By the Law of Conservation of Beauty, the poem must have gone somewhere, and you're the most obvious suspect. So pony up, person from Porlock. I want the rest of Kubla Khan! Now!"

"First of all," he said, "that was over two hundred years ago, so I'm most certainly dead by now. Second, if I could give it away, don't you think I already would have done? Third, you don't even know where Porlock is. Last and most important, there is no Law of Conservation of Beauty. Beauty is limitless, and it is created and destroyed all the time."

I didn't go all the way to Porlock to get a reasonable deferral, or to have my irrational expectations go unmet!

"Aye, ahm no daft." Rab picked his way down into the crater, holding his arms out, careful to show he was watching for disruptors. Beyond the woods, blocks of flats loomed up, grey against the grey Edinburgh sky, satellite dishes proudly on show, all pointing the same way—probably towards the Mogadon Cluster. He walked the length of the spaceship, looking inside the bubbles. Most were full of brown, sludgy liquid, but one smaller bubble was clear. He peered in. "Hey, Gordie, there's a wee bald gadgey in here."

"Whit colour eyes?"

"Eh?"

"The eyes. If they're yellow then it's an Armenian. They're the worst in the whole Cluster, the Armenians. They can kill you wi' telephonists."

Rab recoiled. "Ah cannae see its eyes," he said, trying to conceal his panic. "It's got a mask on. Whit dae telephonists look like?"

Gordie snorted. "Jeez. Telephonists. Like energy waves frae their big roond heids. Ye cannae see them withoot laser vision. Or ye happen to be half-Armenian, like Data."

"Data's no an Armenian, he's a robot."

"Data's no a robot, you divot." Gordie gave him a big self-satisfied smirk. "He's an android. Where dae ye hink they make a' the androids? Armenia, that's where. Dinnae argue wi' the dish."

"Ah dinnae hink it's an Armenian," Rab said. "It's got a flat heid."

"Whit, like E.T.?"

Rab looked closer. "A wee bit," he replied. "But it's no got a lightbulb on its finger, so it's no an E.T." He was feeling more on solid ground. He'd seen E.T. last Christmas and his big sister Kylie had cried and he'd hooted and threatened to tell her boyfriend Patrick, then hit her with his action-man-jungle-intruder-craft until his dad had told him to stop or he'd get skelped. Besides, E.T. was plastic-looking, not like the proper aliens he'd seen on Sky when he was round at Gordie's. Not like this thing. A silvery mask enveloped almost all of its face, but it had a whole bunch of tentacles, like wee willies, hanging from its chin.

Gordie had arrived with a branch he'd found. "Dinnae hink the Federation ken aboot this one," he said, squinting through the bubble. Then he lowered his voice so he sounded like Captain Picard. "We are boldly going, Rab. Boldly going." He smashed the branch against the bubble.

Reminder: if you want to submit a story to Strange Horizons before our summer closure, you need to do so in the next few days, by the end of April!  We'd love to see some exciting new fiction, so send 'em if you've got 'em.  SH will reopen to fiction submissions in July.

It's been a long time since I read John Gardner's On Becoming A Novelist, but I remember thrilling to his portrait of writing as a noble calling, a life of meaning and artistic purpose.  It was rich stuff: principled, passionate beliefs combined with a practical nuts-and-bolts approach to the technical craft. 

And of course, I am still a complete sucker for the romance of it; see this bit from On Becoming a Novelist:

If, on the other hand, you miserably fail, you have only three choices: start over, or start something else, or quit.

Finally, the true novelist is the one who doesn't quit. Novel-writing is not so much a profession as a yoga, or "way," an alternative to ordinary life-in-the-world.

But the one set of drafts that meant the most to me was that of Grendel. A boxful. I wanted to see that wonderful first sentence, the first time he came up with the cascade and cadence of it.

The first draft didn't have it. It was a different sentence, a bad one. Laughably bad.

Later, he pencilled in what would become the first sentence, but it was nowhere near what I presumed--foolishly--was the original. It was just as clunky and atrocious as the other one. Draft after draft, he'd crafted that opening so it seemed natural, seemed to flow from Grendel's throat and his pen effortlessly.

I'd heard how hard writers worked at revising, but here was concrete and heartening proof. I'd been impatient with my work because my early drafts lacked depth and precision; now I realized I had completely misjudged them, and misjudged the effort required to write well. It was not brilliance or facility that was necessary, but the determination to bear and even enjoy the dull process of wading into one's own bad prose again, one more time, and then once again, with the utmost concentration and taste, looking for opportunities to mine deeper....

In her opening remarks, Mrs. Clinton said she was “very glad” Mr. Obama had made his speech, given that she said that race had been a “complicated” issue in America that had been marked by “pitfalls” and “detours.” Asked why she was glad, she said that issues of race and gender are “important” and twice called them "difficult issues".)

She'd vaguely imagined that as soon as the gunshot rang out, the police, or at least security, would surround her. She hadn't made a plan beyond the shooting, so in the absence of one, she just kept walking home, where she waited for the police at the kitchen table, the gun in her lap.