Steampower, or Faërie for Today?
A possible change of plan & focus...
A possible change of plan & focus...
I had thought I was going to take my time machine and spend the bulk of today back in the first half of the 1800s:
I was going to read and think about the coming of the steam engine and of machinery, overwhelmingly textile, as things that had to be built and maintained, and with the resulting growth of the engineering profession, the beginnings of the machine-tool industry, and the laying of the groundwork for the industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and full globalization enforcing the law of one price across ports (with concomitant effects on real wages: see O’Rourke):
But now I am very tempted to spend it in Faërie instead:
Ill-met by moonlight indeed, proud Titania…
Pamela Dean: Tam Lin: ‘“You mean what Merlin says [in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength] about the twentieth century?” “‘Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.’” “Right. That cake’s not very dry”... <https://archive.org/details/tamlin00pame>
And:
Carrie S. 2020. Tam Lin by Pamela Dean: ‘The oddities are subtle…. Plot stuff doesn’t kick into high gear until the last chapter of the book…. Janet does undergrad stuff….airyland is happening, but it’s so out of focus that there doesn’t seem to have been any plot at all until the end of the book when all of the plot suddenly reveals itself. It shouldn’t work and yet it’s both utterly mundane and completely haunting. It’s a slow paced book until the last fifty pages with very little conflict, EXCEPT that this epic fantasy plot (of the ballad) is happening under the surface… <https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/tam-lin-by-pamela-dean/>
And:
Jo Walton: College as Magic Garden: Why Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin Is a Book You’ll Either Love or Hate; ‘It’s a book that you haven’t had the complete experience of reading unless you’ve read it twice…. If you hate indirection and re-reading, you’re probably not going to like it. In fact the magic, the ghosts, the ballad story and the Queen of Elfland are integral to the whole thing. The central thing the book is doing is college as magic garden… a time away from other time, a time that influences people’s whole lives but is and isn’t part of the real world.… It isn’t, and can’t be, your real life. It’s finite and bounded. It falls between childhood and adulthood. And it’s full of such fascinating and erudite people who can quote Shakespeare. Where did they come from? They certainly can’t have come from high school, and “Under the hill” is Tam Lin‘s very interesting answer…. Full disclosure: Pamela Dean is a friend…. I’ve had her Tam Lin conducted tour of Carleton College. But if you think that makes any difference to what I think about the book, you should see all the friends I have whose books I keep meaning to get to sometime…<https://reactormag.com/tamlin/>
How can it be that the perfect phrase “The Queen of Air and Darkness” did not exist in the English language until 1922? (The Houseman poem itself is no great shakes. But the phrase!)
References:
Dean, Pamela. 1991. Tam Lin. New York: Tor Books. <https://archive.org/details/tamlin00pame>.
Housman, A.E. 1922, “Her Strong Enchantments Failing”. Last Poems. New York: Henry Holt & Co. <https://archive.org/details/lastpoems00housuoft/page/17/mode/1up>.
O’Rourke, Kevin H., & Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2002. "When Did Globalisation Begin?" European Review of Economic History 6 (1): 23–50. <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1361491602000023>.
S., Carrie. 2020. "Tam Lin by Pamela Dean." Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, July 2, 2020. <https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/tam-lin-by-pamela-dean/>.
Walton, Jo. 2008. “College as Magic Garden: Why Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin Is a Book You’ll Either Love or Hate”. Reactor October 8. <https://reactormag.com/tamlin/>.
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