Since I'm clearly not getting anything else done today

[melannen]

Who wants a cartomancy reading? Pick a deck, I'll do a basic four card draw, we can all interpret it together. Offer good until Monday night. Offer closed, but will be finishing up the requested readings soon!

Choice of decks:
1. Audubon's Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America
2. Modern Art
3. Iraqi War Criminals c. 2003
4. Computer House of Cards
5. 1982 Chippendales
6. Iraqi and Afghan Heritage Resource Preservation
7. The Game of Authors
8. Forgotten English Insults
9. Sesame Street: You're a Grouch
10. Radacad Radioactive Materials Security Training
11. Geology Knowledge Cards
12. Women Who Dare
13. Random

Comments

Re: These are wonderful and I'm spoiled for choice

[melannen]

I ended up re-doing this draw several times because I'd realized I'd previously sorted the deck into "women of color", "white Victorian feminists" and "others", and it didn't want to shuffle back together enough to give a reading that mixed them. I finally had to toss them up in the air, but I think I finally got it back to random!

Also you get summaries because these also have really long text.



Where you've been: Chien-Shiung Wu (American, b. China 1912). A nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan project, and is best known for disproving parity conservation in the weak interaction, an experiment that won two of her male colleagues a Nobel prize in 1957.

Where you are now: Josephine Baker (American, 1906-1975). Dancer, entertainer, activist and French resistance spy.

The thing that I always think about with Josephine Baker is that, the minute she realized she could live someplace that didn't hate her and hurt her the way the US did, she noped right out of here and made her life in Paris instead - but that never stopped her for continuing to fight for freedom and safety for everyone, and died in her old age after a massively successful career and life of activism.

So there are much worse cards to get for "Where you are now"!

Where you are going: Isak Dinesen, (The Baroness Blixen, Danish, 1885-1962). A wildly successful aristocratic writer best known for the book Out of Africa, about her life in Kenya.

I am honestly not sure how to read this one - Blixen is a person with a mixed life story (wealthy family, wildly successful writing career, lifetime health problems, messed-up personal life) and legacy (wrote a lot of very good books, many of them are notably racist and colonialist.) So perhaps you're looking at a mixed future, too - good things and bad things coming together.

What you should do: Mary Wollstonecraft (English, 1759-1797). Writer, radical feminist and republican revolutionary.

Mary Wollstonecraft calls out to you to be loud and eloquent about what you believe and what you deserve. Also, if your daughter takes up with a Romantic poet, don't worry, it'll work out better than you have any right to expect.

Re: These are wonderful and I'm spoiled for choice

[jesse_the_k]

EPIC!

I'm struck by the many overlaps between these cards and my personal history.

My father worked at the Institute for Advanced Study and MIT with other Manhattan Project alums. I was a goose among the doves there, so I moved a 1000 miles awy into a completely different culture.

I've recently read a beautiful graphic novel re: Josephine Baker--it's whetted my appetite for a deeper look. She was a heroine for my mother, a socialist musician.

mixture of good and bad is definitely what my present has held, so why not my near-future?

I'm emboldened to be loud and eloquent! Thank you so much for this reading.