In residence

[owlmoose]

jerkface asked: "If you could choose one fictional setting in which to live, where would it be and why? What would you do once you got there?"

There are several tempting answers to this question. Narnia comes to mind. So does the Wizarding World, post-Voldemort, and the city of Amber, and the United Federation of Planets. But the one that occurred to me right away was Blackstock College, the school that provided the setting for Pamela Dean's Tam Lin.

Tam Lin is one of my favorite books, and while there are many reasons for this, one of the most important is how much the feel of Blackstock, as described, reminds me of Bryn Mawr. And there is a small part of me that wishes I could just live at Bryn Mawr forever. So I think I would feel right at home as a member of the Blackstock community, either as a student or as a member of staff.

As for what I would do when I arrived, I think the answer to that is quite clear: be a librarian. Right? I mean, how awesome would that be?

30 Days of... Project! Complete list of questions / Ask a question on LJ or on DW.

Comments

[jeanniemac]

Totally with you on this one. Love Tam Lin, love Blackstock, which definitely feels like a co-ed Bryn Mawr.

I first read Tam Lin in my sophomore year at BMC and its stuck with me ever since. My copy, a first edition hard back, was a gift from Kimi Kinja (class of 90, I think) who was an editor at Tor Books at the time. A bunch of us Backsmoker types got care packages from her right before Christmas Break with copies of the book in it. It made exams and end of semester papers a lot harder to finish that year.

[owlmoose]

I think you're probably the person who recc'd "Tam Lin" to me in the first place, and you may even have used the words "co-ed Bryn Mawr", which might have helped it strike me that way. I still re-read it once a year on average.

[cypher]

...That is possibly the best argument anyone could have made to get me interested in reading that book. It's been ten years since I graduated, and I still miss the Mawr.

[owlmoose]

Consider it strongly recc'd, especially if you're interested in fairy tale retellings.

Have you been back at all? I've been to three reunions now, and visited for various other things (I was really active in the Alumnae Association for awhile), and even with everything that's changed (15 years, for me) it's like I never left.

[cypher]

I haven't been back in a few years, at this point -- right after I graduated I lived in Philly, so I would go back for May Day every year. But then my partner and I moved to Seattle about five years ago, and I haven't been back since. I keep thinking I'd like to, but finding time id never easy. ^^;

I will definitely add Tam Lin to my to-read pile!

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

Really? You fascinate and astonish me, because while I feel as you do about Bryn Mawr, my reaction to the book was, "Wow, it's not like that at all. When I was there, people talked about their specialties, not their relationships.*" I actually thought The Secret History came a lot closer to the right feel, despite the crazy people and the murders.

*With a continuing side of, Given that it's a translation from an Italian original, why is our heroine correcting somebody's English version of Dante's inscription at the gates of Hell? How precisely is 'All hope abandon, ye who enter here' more correct than 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here?' -- Sadly, yes. I probably haven't looked at the book in a decade and a half, and that question is still eating at me.

[owlmoose]

Hey, I didn't know that you're a Mawrter. Small world!

I agree that "The Secret History" has some of the BMC atmosphere as well: the small, tight-knit world, sometimes impenetrable to outsiders, a focus on shared intellectual pursuits. I got a similar feel from "The Magicians", which I read earlier this year. But at least in my circle, we talked about our interpersonal relationships, too, not just our work, and Blackstock has that "closed world" feeling as well. I also think part of what I found familiar was Janet's own attachment to Blackstock.

I probably haven't looked at the book in a decade and a half, and that question is still eating at me.

You know, I hadn't thought of that, but it's a very good point.

[phoebe_zeitgeist]

It's downright eerie how many Mawrters I find on the web, when you consider how tiny a school it is. In a way it makes me think of the very early days of online community, with its quirks of Myers-Briggs typology: INTP types were and are something like 1% of the general American population, but 60% of the American on-line population. The few; the proud; the uber-geeky!

As I think back, it does occur to me that my specific cohort was probably geeky even by our institution's rather excessive standards. We really didn't talk about stuff like relationships, and furthermore we had a fairly explicit social rule that said it was bad form to talk about exams, papers in terms of their due dates, grades, studying, or professional ambitions of any kind. You talked about the intricacies of finance under Louis XVI, and fangirled his finance minister. You talked about war and technology, and illustrated points of Assyrian fortifications by sculpting defenses out of mashed potatoes or melting ice cream. You argued about whether the outcome of the Battle of Hastings was a fluke. It was glorious, in ways that for me at least Tam Lin never quite evoked.

I'll have to try The Magicians, though. Anything that does remind me of Bryn Mawr wins an instant place in my cold and shriveled heart, and I look forward to finding out whether this will be one of them.

As for the Dante thing, you're too kind to me. It's a tiny and silly thing for me to be fretful about, and I can't entirely believe the way it's continued to niggle at me. And yet, as you see: someone innocently says, Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, and predictably as Pavlov's dogs my backbrain replies, Dante! Is one translation really more correct than the other, and why??

[owlmoose]

Isn't it funny how we congregate and find each other? Not just on the web, but other places too -- wider friendship circles, the workplace....

When I was there (class of '95), not discussing grades was pretty universal, but most of the folks I knew definitely talked about studying and how much homework we had to do. The latter was a sport of sorts: comparing workloads and fighting for the title of farthest behind (we sometimes called it misery poker). We did sometimes get into the intellectual and philosophical conversations, too, although maybe less often because my circle crossed a lot of majors.

One of the things that I find glorious about Bryn Mawr is that we were all geeky at heart, all in our own different ways.