Weekend five-card spread

The past card here is the Queen of Coins, which is interesting to me since that's my signifier card. It's also showed up in readings over the past few months either in reverse, warning me that I am being the greedy shadow version of that archetype, or in a future/advice spot, apparently instructing me to adhere to being that version of myself. In this one, it's in the past, indicating possibly that I have been this person, or that I have been in a Queen of Coins-like situation for a while--one of success in business and financial matters; of taking shrewd, conservative measures to my own affairs; of being generally practical and sensible and working to build up material comforts. I suppose I have been taking some measures to get my concrete life under control lately, and to some degree it has even paid off.

The present card is the Moon, which is very much the opposite of the Queen's sensible, material-oriented approach to things. The Moon signifies that I am in a sort of liminal, hard-to-interpret space; one where the direction is not clear and where I might be deluding myself. According to Louis, it indicates that I am in "a period of fluctuating moods and uncertainty in which you must confront unconscious forces in order to succeed," which is fancy divination talk for having crazypants electoral stress and a total inability to concentrate on stuff, and I need to figure out what's going on in my head that will let me pull myself together and let me focus. I can't even manage to actually listen to the guided meditations I'm trying to do. I just took a Twitter break from writing this short-ass paragraph. It's bad, y'all. I probably really do need to find a way to listen to myself that doesn't involve my body trying to get my attention with psychosomatic nonsense, like the eight-day tension headache earlier in the month, or the fact that my period's been coming every two weeks since September when it usually comes never because I'm on medication for this. Basically, the Moon means that these days, I'm feelin' weird.

The Hidden Influences card gets us back to the suit of Coins. The Nine of Coins has been showing up a lot in readings for me lately; I don't know why, possibly just as a reminder to myself that things aren't as bad as I'm perpetually stressed that they are. The Nine of Coins represents some sort of material project coming to fruition, being alone and surrounded by stability and the fruits of one's labor. It is the card of a woman relaxing in her own space. It is the Self-Reliance card. Here, it again probably means that I'm more self-reliant than I think I am, and that my situation is more stable than I think it is. I do keep hoping this card means that some sort of profitable thing is in the works and the money hasn't reached me yet but will soon, but I've been hoping that since June and it ain't happened yet.

The fourth card, then, the Advice card, is a fun follow-up to that, bringing us backwards in the Coins narrative from the Queen to the Nine to the Ace, Firm Financial Foundations. The Ace of Coins represents an opportunity or windfall, and suggests the start of a profitable venture. What I'm hoping this means is that the practical approach of the first card and the self-reliance of the third card have brought me to a place that, while apparently liminal and weird and I'm feeling weird about it, nevertheless means I have enough resources of some sort--time, money, maybe the ability to stop freaking the fuck out so much--to launch a new project properly, something that will pay off long-term but that I've been putting off due to short-term concerns. There are certainly a lot of things that fall under that description, from writing to building a website to focusing properly on the magazine to really looking at the possibility of saying fuck it, I'm going to Atlantic City in November. I will have to think carefully about what's the most sensible thing to do, since apparently I'm in a current state of easily self-decieved building castles in the sky (not entirely unusual for me, really).

If I do this correctly I'll apparently end up at the Three of Wands, Birth of an Enterprise. The Stiefvater deck says that this card represents the part of a project where you've made enough progress that you've got something to share with other people to get advice/workshopping/support and where you need to work to protect your motivation. The Louis book says that opportunities abound, and you should count on teamwork and cooperation to move to the next stage. Business matters are active and thriving; you may travel or correspond in connection with your work; it is a good time to publicize your creative accomplishments. We'll see what this ends up being precisely in reference to, and if it's something at work or outside of it.

In the meantime, today, I have a long list of things I could be doing before this Halloween party tonight.

Snow White and the seven other badass women

The last book that I kept on the Kindle app on my phone took me over three years to finish. Because of this, I decided the next book I kept on my phone would be shorter, so I settled on Catherynne M. Valente's novella Six-Gun Snow White.

Six-Gun Snow White did not take me nearly as long to get through, although this was less because it was shorter and more because I kept going back to read it more often. I read it in all the usual places I read on my phone--doctors' offices and on the T and at the pharmacist--but I also read it in bars and in casinos, and occasionally even at home surrounded by my fifteen hundred other books. It was that good.

Obviously from the title, it's a retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. This one takes place in the Wild West, and Snow White is the half-Crow daughter of a robber baron who runs a mining corporation and a Crow woman that he basically bought and threatened into marrying him. Snow White's mother doesn't last long in captivity, and so the girl is raised by a series of well-intentioned house staff for several years and basically allowed to run wild as long as she doesn't demand her father's attention and nobody really important sees her. She learns to shoot and her father gives her a gun with ruby pearls on it, which she names Rose Red. Everything seems fine enough as far as the girl is concerned until Mr. H remarries. It is the new wife, a scion of a respectable Boston family who had some sort of scandal back East, who nicknames the girl Snow White as a racist taunt to go with the terrifying beauty regimen she imposes.

The new Mrs. H., of course, has a mirror, and this, also of course, is where stuff gets weird. This mirror doesn't talk, but it does seem to have a whole backwards alternate reality version of Mrs. H.'s life in it.

This deviation from the basic plot of Snow White isn't the most important or original thing about the novella. Valente's strengths here lie in her lyrical prose and her dreamlike world building and characterization. After establishing Snow White's character, first in isolation and then as the victim of Mrs. H., what feels like the plot of the novel really kicks off after Snow White runs away and she has to deal with all sorts of other people—we see her navigate the world of the workers in the mines, we see her best the huntsman (or in this case, "the dude," which meant something different back then than it does now), and we see her establish herself among a homestead of outlaw women, neatly obliterating the usual dynamic of being taken in by some cute wacky others because they're so nice and replacing it with a story of grim solidarity.

There is no Prince Charming in this story. Or rather, there is, but that's just the name of Snow White's horse. There is a creature called Deer Boy, who might have had a rougher time of it than Snow White even at the hands of Mrs. H.

Though the piece is relatively short, it is, like most of Valente's work, incredibly dense, and I don't mean that in a difficult-to-read law text way, I mean it as a lot of layers of meaning and connections between things that you'll miss if you don't read carefully and explores a lot of issues of class and race and gender and America and belonging and abuse and all that stuff all at once, and also it's fun to just roll around in the lovely gritty sentences and general gunslinginess. Sometimes. This book is a lot less lighthearted than The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland or even most of Speak Easy; it is extremely violent, with fairly explicit depictions of domestic, industrial, and sexual abuse. The language, even with all its metaphors and its occasional joke, doesn't obscure or romanticize any of this; it heightens it. I've seen a couple people asking if this is a children's/YA book or if it's appropriate for second graders and ahaha nope. High tolerance for the sheer unrelenting awfulness of human history is definitely a prerequisite here. For me, this is one of things I like about this as a fairy tale retelling; fairy tales had a long tradition of being gory and violent and full of torture and stuff before they got bowdlerized and Disneyfied in the twentieth century. Other people's mileage, obviously, may vary.

As for me, I enjoy violent terrible history things, and I really, really enjoy Valente's multilayered writing, even if it's way smarter than me and makes me feel like I don't have anything sufficiently intelligent to say about it.