Cat* said:
Now that's easy. You have 42 decks? You just do the spread 42 times.
<interested> I've just had a better idea. I could do the spread 42 times.
<horrified> Hey, an awful thought has just occurred to me. What if I did the spread 42 times? My head would explode!
Or at least, the day would be Full of Tarot.
Cat* said:
Or, in case you feel just a teensy bit overwhelmed by that, you could use one deck for each of the five(?) parts of the trilogy.
Yep, that's right. Your standard trilogy has three parts. A really superior trilogy has five parts. And this is it.
Hmmm ... I could pick different decks to suit the themes of the different books. Interesting. I might ask Davros 10. He probably wouldn't be a lot of help, though - he only knows science faction, not Tarot. Still ...
Cat* said:
Or, if you wanted to go for the bare minimum, you could draw one card each per position from both the Rumi and the Granny.
I met my Rumi deck for the first time several hours ago, and at the moment the poor dear is shellshocked - such a spiritual deck falling into my hands, you can't blame the poor thing. Now that I've met it, I really don't think I'm heartless enough to involve it in this enterprise. On the other hand, the Tarot of hte Dead has a sense of humour, if not a Sci-fi slant. The Quantum, much though I love it, is not up for it. And as I've been getting to know Rachel Pollack in an internet messaging sense and I've been discovering a well of humour in her that I didn't really expect, perhaps the Shining Tribe?
Oh, the choices. I could just thrust my hands under the cover of my Tarot basket and grab the first wrapped deck that my fingers touch.
Cat* said:
(Me? I'm waiting for Nisaba's Vogon Poetry Spread.
)
<gravely> I don't think it should be done. Terry Pratchett in the Discworld series had a character called Nanny Ogg, a rude, robust woman who used to sing tender little ballads like "The Wizard's Staff Has a Knob on the End" and "The Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At ALL". She also, according to
Pratchett, wrote a cookbook with wholly original recipes for things like "spotted dick" and "toad in the hole". Things like that should be left to the imagination of the reader. Somewhere along the line, Terry approved a cookbook that someone wrote of Nanny Ogg's recipes - and it seems they are rather ordinary and don't have the degree of pornographic/humorous raunchiness that my imagination expected.
Likewise, a book of Vogon poetry would have to be more foul than anything a human mind could come up with, as different species have different intellectual abilities. I just couldn't do it. Douglas Adams couldn't, either - that's why he didn't. And if he couldn't - and let's face it, he was the only human being who could even imagine Vogons - then certainly no one else could.
Archive this post, folks - it's not often you'll get me to admit that there's something I can't do. But writing Vogon poetry is certainly crossing the line. I've just checked my anthology, edited by Barry Humphries, of specifically bad poetry (he relished it) called "The Barry Humphries Book of
Innocent Austral Verse", and even there, where some of the worst poetry in history is stored, there is nothing as bad as even the least offensive Vogon lyrics.
Myself, I think we should simply grab our slightly grubby Towels and do 42-card Tarot readings. Fire up the Infinite Improbability Drive backburner-barbeque, someone - I fancy a cook-up of Perfectly Ordinary Beast.