A Belated Daily Note

In search of lost blogs + "A Melanated Tarot" . . . .

Hello, everyone. So sorry I wasn’t able to get the final Daily Note out on Friday of last week. Infrastructure crisis here! But back on track for now, so I wanted to offer a couple of topics in recompense.

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In Search of Lost Blogs, Part 1

The Tarot websites and blogs I have in mind are not actually “lost,” since you can still see them if you know where to look. But you’re not likely to stumble across them, for several reasons. They won’t be returned as organic results in a typical search because they haven’t been updated in a long time, and/or because they have little traffic. They are also not likely to be recommended or shared to you.

I’ve come across them along the way while doing research for the Time Capsule, and while exploring a couple of questions:

• Whatever happened to the “New Age”?

• Whatever happened to the end of the world?

The former was a period of time (roughly mid-1970s to mid-1999s) during which a wide variety of “alternative” ideas, beliefs, and practices got a great deal of public attention. Lots of books were written, and “New Age” stores sprang up to sell them—along with classes, crystals, Tarot decks, and other paraphernalia. I’ll write a little more about this marketing phenomenon in a future Time Capsule.

The latter question is related to the hype around 2012. It’s widely thought now that nothing happened, although something did. Also more to be said in a future post.

But the point for today is that the late stage of New Age enthusiasm coincided with the early stage of blogging and online publishing. So lots of sites were created, many of them rudimentary but some worth revisiting. This went on til about 2003.

In the leadup to 2012, there was a second wave of individuals writing about Tarot and related or similar topics online. Most of the sites, blogs, and social media pages were abandoned after a year or so, but some persisted for quite a while.

Here are a few examples:

• The legendary Tarot scholar Michael J. Hurst created this site in 2007, and maintained it until his death in 2016.

• In a completely different category, Lunea Weatherstone started her charming, eclectic “blogue” in 2007, and posted off and on until 2019.

• This website, which was created for Ed Buryn’s wonderful William Blake Tarot has the distinctive look of the 1990s—but it was still around in 2011. And you can still see descriptions of two readings done with the deck.

If you’re not familiar with Ed’s deck, read the fascinating guidebook for free.

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Serendipity Offers a Present

While following the trail of a lost blog, I came across this provocative essay—published just last week in World Literature Today:

Impossible to summarize, but it centers on Courtney Alexander’s Dust || Onyx: A Melanated Tarot.

And it includes this paragraph:

Alexander’s whiplashing collage in Dust II Onyx marries Maya Angelou’s eyes with a face inspired by Michelle Obama; the eyes of Nicki Minaj are placed in conversation with the facial features of Solange Knowles; Tiq Milan sits in conversation with James Brown; and the eyes of Tupac Shakur and Nikki Giovanni look out of faces painted in homage to Missy Elliott—Duke Ellington, Prince, Jaden Smith, the eyes of young Michael Jackson, Laverne Cox, Sojourner Truth, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and George Washington Carver. Though we speak of the eyes as windows, it’s hard to recognize a person from their eyes alone, and this work invites us to explore what makes these slivers of characteristics so iconic. How much of someone do we need?

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As always, thanks so much for reading. And if the Wheel of Fortune permits, I’ll be in touch soon. C