My friend Jane handed me her copy of Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin (1991) fourteen years ago, on top of a stack of Sandman comics. She was headed to a semester abroad in Scotland, worlds away from our Midwestern university town. As she handed the book to me, Jane said, “Thomas Lane is the perfect man. But you’re going to wonder why Janet spends so much time talking about her bookshelves.” Jane was three years older than me and she had long red hair. I wanted to know what she knew.
Tam Lin is a campus novel, a coming-of-age story, and a Victorian ghost story. The book is weirdly, woefully structured: the story takes place over four years, but the first year takes up almost half the book. Why does Janet spend so much time talking about her uneven bookshelves? Characters come off as either incredible literary savants, able to quote Milton and Keats at the drop of a hat, or obnoxious pedants. I still can’t decide. No one can (the “Most Helpful Favorable Review” on Amazon begins, “I loved it, but you might not”.) You either read this book and want to be an English major in an idyllic little town forever, or you want to run far away from these creeps and watch TV for four days straight. There is no third option. The way you feel about Tam Lin might also say something about your relationship to literature / the literary canon / higher education / fairy tales. And after you finish this book, you have to go read some more books.
The story is a retelling of the medieval Scottish “Ballad of Tam Lin,” and a love story between undergraduates Janet Carter and Thomas Lane. “Tam Lin”—Dean refers her readers to Volume I of Francis James Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and a copy is printed in my battered edition as well—is about a woman’s fight against the Fairy Queen’s attempt to abduct her lover into the underworld. Dean’s version is set in the 1970s on the campus of a Midwestern liberal arts college called Blackstock (modeled on Carleton College.) The Fairy Queen is a classics professor and Blackstock—a beautiful, verdant land where nothing changes—is her underworld.
Although Thomas Lane might actually be the perfect man, Blackstock is the real love interest of this story. The school is the picturesque ideal of what a liberal arts education should look like: rolling hills, fields of flowers, quaint brick buildings, a vibrant cultural scene, and lots of lore and tradition. It’s a sort of Midwestern Hogwarts.
While there are references to other places and to contemporary events—Janet is grateful for the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on Roe v. Wade, the text seems dimly aware that something is happening in Vietnam, Janet’s roommates hail from Chicago and Pennsylvania—Janet herself doesn’t leave the state of Minnesota for the entire narrative because Blackstock is her boyfriend.
At Blackstock, the weather is always doing something poetic and everyone is crying at productions of Hamlet, fighting over a bust of Schiller, or reading cosily in their rooms. Wouldn’t you love to love her?
Some of the students at this campus just happen to be a group of actors from Shakespeare’s Globe (it takes awhile to figure this out because everyone in college in the 70s wore flow-y shirts). They’ve been at school for a long time (it’s their blending-in technique, sort of like the Cullens perpetually attending high school) and they also have the fantastic memories required of Shakespearean actors, so they perpetually quote Shakespeare and Milton at each other. When I was sixteen, I thought college would be like this and tried to prepare myself to keep up with such banter as well as Janet does (after a week, I realized I needn’t have worried).
This partly exciting, partly exhausting intertextuality is Tam Lin‘s defining quality. Characters interact through oblique literary references from a variety of genres, including science fiction, Augustan satire, and Greek tragedy. They mainly talk in Shakespeare, though:
“‘Will you talk sense for once!” said Janet, losing all patience.
‘Sir, said Robin…’I cannot. Cannot what, my lord?’ he apostrophized himself sharply, as Rosencrantz had spoken to Hamlet. ‘Make you a wholesome answer,’ he said mournfully, as Hamlet. My wit’s diseased.’ He reverted to his own expression, and looked hopefully at Janet.
‘Oh, go away!’ said Janet. ‘You’re enough to try the patience of a saint. Leave me alone. I’ll see you at supper. Don’t say it!‘ she added furiously, as Robin seemed about to add some of Hamlet’s observations about Polonius and the worms, which would, to a grasshopper mind like his, have been amply suggested by the word ‘supper.’”
There’s a hint of awareness of how ridiculous it all is when one character, watching a pair conduct a conversation entirely through quotations from The Merchant of Venice asks, “After we take Shakespeare next term, will I be able to do that?” There’s another wonderful moment when Janet is in the throes of existential crisis and seeks out a copy of The Waste Land. It’s a pretentious form of therapy, but Janet finds so much enjoyment in the literary allusions and, 90% of the way through this novel about literary allusions, I am totally with her when she gets to the line “These fragments have I shored against my ruins” and blurts out loud to the silent library, “You said it.”
The text offers both syllabus and metacommentary (and includes some fantastically judgemental literary snark: “‘I love Agatha Christie.’ You would, thought Janet.”)
For better or worse, this book is bait for lit majors, and may be partially responsible for the influx of qualified humanities PhDs in a lousy job market. This is largely Janet’s fault. Her father is an English professor at Blackstock (of Romantic poetry, what else?) and she plans on taking over his job after he retires and even has her nice little Victorian house in town all picked out (this girl really doesn’t want to leave Minnesota.) As a professor’s kid, I empathize with Janet’s faculty brat precocity and Dean’s sensitivity to her position (when a professor says her name “without either consulting the list or looking as if he had ever seen her before,” I breathe a sigh of relief for her.)
Janet is also, often, eye-rollingly awful. Some girls in the dorm offer her weed and she condescendingly tells them that the Stoppard play she’s been to that night was quite enough excitement. (They get her back by calling her a Puritan, which she deserves.) She obsesses over minor flaws in other people’s characters and is incredibly nosy about everyone else’s personal life; she’s the drama queen of her insular world. (She would have been crushed like a bug at a big state school). But I find myself ready to forgive her because of how very apparent these flaws are to her, and to other people (and it doesn’t help when her boyfriend tells her he’s considered sleeping with her frenemy).
Her obtuseness is often a mystery to her; something else to which I can readily relate. And she does eventually learn to give other people a break: she and her roommate Christina never really get along, but they come to rely on and appreciate each other.
Upon re-reading, all this intertextuality I’ve been vaunting comes across as mightily heavy-handed. There’s no real reason for Hamlet to pop up on every other page. Thomas Lane is the perfect man, but he—along with most of the male characters, actually! Discuss?—is also really irritating for most of the book. I’ve always been extremely ambivalent about the ending, because I feel that Janet herself is extremely ambivalent about the ending, in which—spoiler alert—she decides to keep an initially unwanted pregnancy after an anticlimactic showdown with the Fairy Queen. There’s also a pretty big hint that the Fairy Queen is going to come for Janet’s child in seven years, but it’s cool because at least Janet doesn’t have writer’s block anymore. This book has, however, stayed with me through the years. I still have Jane’s copy (I sheepishly Amazon-ed her a new one years ago). The front and back covers have fallen off and are wedged in between the crumbling pages. I also have a library acquired from book fairs the summer I first read Tam Lin: Eve of St. Agnes (all the Keats, really), Marat/Sade, Dorothy Sayers, John Donne, and The Lady’s Not For Burning.
To me, Tam Lin‘s most interesting move is to foreground the rewards of a life spent reading. Eighteenth-century satire and Elizabethan verse and Greek lyric poetry are immediately relevant to and influential upon the characters’ lives and thoughts. It’s taken for granted that Chaucer is just as entertaining and enlivening as Heinlein, that murder mysteries and pot boilers deserve serious critical consideration too, and, above all, that difficult texts reward the effort it takes to engage with them. Tam Lin takes fiction so seriously that when the Fairy Queen turns out to be real, no one seems all that surprised. After all, why wouldn’t the stories be true?
***
Topics for Discussion
Watching Hamlet with Janet and friends
Secrets of being a lit professor: you can get away with complete ignorance about two fields (for Janet’s father, it’s Jacobean drama and modern poetry). What are yours?
College in the 1970s: required courses in physical education (archery, anyone?), bunk beds, hockey sticks
Birth control in the 1970s: will you make throw up
Pink curtains
How many 18-year olds do you know who regularly write sonnets and appreciate bagpipe music?
Tags: academia, books, classics, pamela dean, slaney chadwick ross, tam lin, the author of this post has the best name ever
OH MAN, this book! A few points-
-You are so right about the atrocious pacing. I did not notice this on first reading, but oh boy was it glaring subsequently.
-Pretty sure Blackstock is Macalester.
-Have you also read Fire & Hemlock? If you have, do you like Tam Lin better?
I apologize for being all the hell over these comments. But yeah, trying to reread the book now I always get mad that the subsequent years are just glanced over at best.
I didn’t read Fire and Hemlock till a couple years ago and I distinctly remember reading and going “I’m sure I would love this if I hadn’t imprinted so hard on Tam Lin.” It’s good, but there’s not enough room in my heart for the string quartet AND the Blackstockians.
Fire and Hemlock is my favourite book ever, I hadn’t realised it inspired this one until fairly recently, and I only got round to reading it about a month ago. I really liked it, but it was about 2/3 of the way in before I had any idea at all what was going on. I know the story of Tam Lin because I’ve been obsessively rereading F&H since I was about 11, but it was a long old time before I could make the story I knew related to this book.
I obviously need to go read Fire & Hemlock now.
Everyone always needs to read F&H right now. I would, but I’ve got a 10K-word F&H fanfic in the next tab that I’ve just started.
I wonder which of my friends is most likely to have a copy I can borrow…
“because I’ve been obsessively rereading F&H since I was about 11”
Hello, I would like to be friends. Fire and Hemlock, Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, and The Golden Bowl are my holy trinity.
We can definitely be friends! I’ve not read Fludd but just looked it up and will be remedying that omission shortly!
Excellent on both counts, and I hope you love Fludd!
I also have reread F&H so many times, and I’m not sure I understand everything that happened yet.
Me either! I always feel dumb, but I think the problem is that I read it when I was so young there was no way I could get it. But it left me with a confused understanding that I’ve never been able to shake and which clouds my understanding whenever I reread. Such a great book, though. I love anything with Tam Lin in it.
I guess I would say I like F&H a little better (it’s just a little less pedantic) but I’ve also been loving it for far longer.
A few years ago I found these posts on a livejournal that explains the ending (it’s a two-parter):
http://rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com/254549.html – Part 1 http://rushthatspeaks.dreamwidth.org/401546.html – Part 2
Honestly, it takes some effort to understand the ending as explained by these essays as well, but it’s quite fascinating.
Diana Wynne Jones herself wrote an essay about Fire and Hemlock called “The Heroic Ideal– A Personal Odyssey”, from The Lion and the Unicorn (1989). You can find it in Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (a series of essays by DWJ).
I seriously recommend Reflections! It’s very good.
Wellll I wouldn’t say F&H inspired Tam Lin? At least, not to my knowledge. They just both draw on the same ballad.
I only read Tam Lin because I’d read in a few places that it was inspired by F&H – so while it’s entirely possible it’s not the case, it’s certainly ‘a thing that is being said’.
Blackstock is definitely Carleton. Pamela Dean is an alumna.
I recommended Tam Lin to a professor of mine, mentioning in passing that the school setting was based on Carleton. Her eyes lit up. “I went to Carleton!” Turned out that not only had she gone there, but she was the same year as Pamela Dean.
FIRE AND HEMLOCK! Having read it first kind of ruined Tam Lin for me, I think. What a beautiful, perfect novel.
Yeah, it definitely ruined Tam Lin for me. My teen jerk self could only think, “What, this is like Fire & Hemlock with extra college and without all of my love.” It took me a while to realize that the point of Tam Lin WAS college.
I like them both very much! I imprinted way harder on Tam Lin, and I find it much more fun, but I think Fire and Hemlock manages to be much more about something real–which is why it’s less fun. On my last reread I actually had to stop for a couple of days because I was so uncomfortable with Polly’s behavior, which if you ask me is a very good sign in a book; Tam Lin, on the other hand, I always sort of fall all the way through very quickly because it’s so fun to skip from lit joke to lit joke. (However, the eventual end of Tom and Polly’s relationship will always make me much more uncomfortable than the one in Tam Lin, and not so much in a “it’s good that it’s uncomfortable because it’s getting at something real” way.)
I interpreted the pacing as reflecting the experience of uni -the first year does mentally loom so much bigger, has more emotional resonance, because it’s when you do a lot of figuring out and getting to know people/places and establishing patterns that you will continue or test or break in the next two years. Isn’t it natural, when coming to the end of an experience, to look back and wonder how the last part went by so quickly?
Fire and Hemlock is also beautiful. I must reread it, new levels (mostly intensely disturbing levels) seem to come to light every time.
Yes, me too. My first year was horrible and strange and great and full of SO SO much growing up and then those after were still full of stuff but faster.
“You either read this book and want to be an English major in an idyllic little town forever, or you want to run far away from these creeps and watch TV for four days straight. There is no third option.”
EXACTLY.
I love and hate this book because it brings out the monster pedant in me. I always end up sniffing haughtily and saying that Janet’s reading of both Hamlet and the modernists is far too simplistic.
Also: Team Tina. There, I said it.
Reading it as an adult I have a TREMENDOUS sympathy for Tina. Good god, I’d want to go find some nice normal people too.
Thank god for folk dancing.
Tam Lin didn’t really ruin college for me, but only because the friend who gave me her copy is two years older and took that bullet for me a little bit. We are still best friends.
oh yeah, Janet is a dick all right but man you got to keep your smoke to yourself sometimes, she wasn’t wrong.
couple of things though
1. I don’t think this is an observation original to me, but who knows, maybe it is: Christina, like Alma in Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary, is a lengthy and a thoughtful answer to the so-called Problem of Susan, one that takes the received text and works with it — rather than denying that the Problem of Susan can possibly be what the books say it is — and as such it puts Janet in the adversarial role and forces her to be fair and generous against all her natural inclinations. I think it is really brilliant and is my favorite part of all the metatextual business in the book.
2. There’s no real reason for Hamlet to pop up on every other page.
I don’t understand a single word of this sentence including “and” and “the.” and there isn’t even an “and” or a “the” IN the sentence.
How many 18-year olds do you know who regularly write sonnets and appreciate bagpipe music?
The unspoken implication of this question is that an appreciation for poetry-writing and bagpiping are things that are invisible in youth and develop with age (like that Familial Fatal Insomnia of which we are all terrified), an idea which makes me as blanch as pale as a Victorian ghost and feel nauseated as a pregnant 1970s college student. In fact these are defects that are bred in the bone and show themselves early. 18 is just the right age, if not too old, since some precocious 18-year-olds have already learned about shame.
but so, I have found that there are two kinds of people in the world, people who love The Secret History and don’t get Tam Lin, and people who love Tam Lin and hate The Secret History. I cannot understand or function around either type, they are both wrong and both books are the best.
Ooh, good call about Tina. I had noticed that she had that influence on Janet and on the story, but hadn’t connected it to the larger pattern.
And actually, while I am not Team Tina as such, without Tina you actually might start to think that Janet and pals were totally right about everything — you might start to accept their proportions unquestioningly — because, especially if you read this book during the Shameless Years, they sound sooooo appealing. It takes a grown person to recognize how annoying someone would be if they were in their early twenties FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS.
oh yeah and I like how it’s subtle in the middle of a lot of very explicit intertextual business. I completely love Pamela Dean and all her works because she does all this serious and well-thought engagement with things that, because of an accident of childhood reading, mean a lot to me but not so much to the world at large. [ — there is so much thinking about Heinlein and Lewis in all her books. and others, but those two stand out to me. and it is hard to explain to people who don’t care, why you would even bother to refute anything in those two jerks. like, why are you beating an ant to death with a hammer, they would ask, it is not necessary and makes you look a little unbalanced. like it is easy to find people (horrible people) who love Lewis and Heinlein and understand what is great in them, and it is even easier to find people who understand in what ways they are deeply wrong about things and why, but it is super rare to find people who do both. So I love her. ]
Anyway! Yes, Janet knows fuck-all about music, as I remember, but consoles herself for this deficiency by imagining that Christina understands it without appreciating it, or whatever, because she doesn’t do the accepted in-group performative displays of pleasure that Janet is accustomed to. Thomas says that too, as if he would know that her pleasure was “dutiful” only. that is the only area where I am indignant on Christina’s behalf, but it’s a big one.
I’m Team Molly, but I agree Tina is important. And for that matter I had a college roommate who I did not appreciate properly, but luckily I appreciate her now and all is well in the world! We email all the time! But the result is that on my most recent reread I was much more aware of how suboptimal Janet’s behavior was toward Tina. I think I did a better job. But then, I would think that.
Molly really is the best.
But most of Janet’s suboptimal behaviour to Tina happens entirely inside Janet’s head, where we are privy to it. Out loud, she one time doesn’t laugh at a joke Tina makes (and knows she would have if Molly had said it), and snarks about Tina and her tastes behind her back a couple times, which really is nasty, but also I think a thing to which many are prone.
She THINKS a lot of awful things. But her outward behaviour is actually pretty mildly mean.
Well, it’s hard to know, since it’s all from her perspective. Nick makes comments a few times about how very obviously Janet is making an effort to be nice to Tina, basically implying that she’s making heavy weather of her virtuous martyrdom in tolerating her. The suggestion I’ve always taken from that is that Janet is probably a lot worse than she realizes.
I LOVE BOTH BOOKS, LET’S GO DRINKING AND TALKING ABOUT OUR FAVORITE ANCIENT POETS
OK
OK
OK
it is like, TSH is for people who understand self-loathing and class anxiety and alcoholism and drug-taking, and Tam Lin is for people who understand ghosts and intellectual snobbery and loving your books better than your boyfriends, and WHY doesn’t everybody just understand both??
And I think, in some ways, Tam Lin is about finding your people and Secret History is about the feeling of being an outsider. Which might also skew the results some.
HOWEVER NEITHER BOOK APPRECIATES LATIN ENOUGH FOR ME. THERE I SAID IT.
Clusters of outsiders, and the disorienting experience that provides!
THIS ENTIRE THREAD, FOREVER. <3
(I haven’t read Tam Lin, but TSH is my everything, and now I think I have to read Tam Lin and I am anxious about how I will respond!)
I will +1 ANY comment that references The Problem of Susan. Because SERIOUSLY.
have you read E Jade Lomax’s Susan story? It’s shortish, here: http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/69470941562/th…
Loved that, thank you for linking it!
Confession: I love Tam Lin, but bounced very hard off The Secret History.
Count me in as someone who loved (well-played) bagpipes as a teenager and loves them now. I never wrote sonnets, but I certainly read them.
I, too, loved bagpipes as a teenager. Partly because I grew up to a soundtrack of bagpipes and marches (thanks, Dad), partly because of a group of very attractive, shirtless pipers and drummers I happened to see around the age of 13-14 and who thrilled me in ways I did not yet understand.
As for the sonnets, no. But sometimes (and this really is Shakespeare’s fault) I rephrase my thoughts in iambic pentameter.
And with all this, somehow, I grew up completely unaware of Tam Lin! If I hadn’t, I might’ve been irredeemable.
Another bagpipe fan and (horrible) sonneter here. By the time I was 18 I’d already spent YEARS bouncing around to various Irish and Scottish festivals and my brother was playing bagpipes. We used to listen to crackly, popping bagpipe cassette tapes in the car on the way to school.
I spent my college career studying Classics and doing Shakespeare, and never once did I meet the Fairy Queen or any displaced Elizabethans.
This book had probably a disproportionate level of influence on me, but I haven’t read it in years – I’m kind of afraid to revisit it.
Me too! This book might be responsible for my whole career as an underemployed classics professor. What if I go back and read it and it’s terrible?? And will I ever get to be colleagues with the Fairy Queen? Because I am still waiting for that to happen.
THIS IS MY FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME FOREVER. It definitely affected my expectations of college, even though I grew up as a townie; it is probably more responsible for my decision to study classics than I like to admit (I met no fairy queens or suspiciously erudite and attractive fellow students); it gave me so many things that I desperately wanted and needed as a thirteen-year-old and I seriously considered stealing my library’s copy. I now have the reprinted trade paperback, but the first cover is WAY superior.
I stand with Nick on the matter of Keats. And I applied Janet’s father’s method to my studies and am still wholly ignorant of Greek philosophy. They still gave me an MA!
I gotta ask…did you read The Perilous Gard, too? Preferably as a precocious pre-teen who wanted to believe in fairies just a little bit too much?
I DID NOT, UNFORTUNATELY.
That’s too bad. If you haven’t read it yet at all, go ahead and give it a try. It won’t have the same impact, but it’s still a good read if you still like fairy stories.
I read it at 13 too and nearly died, it was so everything I wanted. I eagerly suggested it to my then-grad-student-in-literature cousin, who said she’d read it and looked amused. In retrospect, I share her amusement.
Every time I learn of someone else who read this book in their formative years I feel like the world is the teensiest bit less of a horrible place. I feel fortunate to have read it the year it came out, before I noticed things like the weird pacing and ridiculous characterizations. Because I loved it so much then, I can still love it now, despite its faults.
“Chaucer is just as entertaining and enlivening as Heinlein”
Well, he kind of is, but that’s not exactly high praise for either.
Also, how glad am I that I have the original printing because LORD is that new cover just awful.
I was just thinking that I’d like to reread this book. As a theater director with Janet-like snob tendencies (which I try to keep in check – I do!), I definitely belong to the camp that wants to enroll at Blackstock and spend a few years talking books, going on long walks, and staging revenge tragedies in ham-fisted protest of the classics department.
I’ll play Tina and ask: can anyone explain the Peg/ bunk bed thing?
I can’t play Tina, but can I play everyone else and ask why nobody ever just flung the bust of Schiller at Peggy’s head? Lordy she bugged.
I assumed Peg was just sort of generally haunted, and also specifically not a robust enough soul for the shenanigans of the Classics department. Susceptible but without strength, if that makes sense?
Oh yes, this book. THIS BOOK. Read during my formative years, re-read many times without a trace of irony or attempt at understanding WHY I love(d) it so. Yes yes yes. Now I kind of want to re-read it. I loved Asian Hamlet the best, though, HE was the perfect man. (Am I remembering that right?)
Yes! He was Korean.
Reading Tam Lin was incredibly surreal for me, because I was a freshman at Carleton College when I read it, living in the same dorm as Janet, with the same view out my window. Some of my upperclassmen friends lived in Nourse Apartment, the room that Janet’s advisor Melinda Wolfe lives in.
Nobody that I met at Carleton talked like Nick, Robin, and Thomas. And I liked Carleton a lot better than I think I would have liked Blackstock. But a lot of aspects of Tam Lin were true to my experience at Carleton:
(1) There really IS a bust of Schiller that everyone is trying to capture.
(2) There really ARE pagan ceremonies in the Arboretum.
(3) All of the plot really DOES happen when you aren’t there.
WOW.
I picked up Tam Lin as a freshman at Carleton, too, because the library had it and it was fantasy. The similarities between the terrain I was walking on and the terrain I was reading about grew steadily more un-nerving right up until the point where I got to the description of Olin Hall and though, “Oh, hold on. She actually IS WRITING ABOUT CARLETON.” At which point I checked the about-the-author in the back and saw that I was right.
I like to tell fans of the book that I had Advanced Rhetoric with Professor Evans (aka Owen Jenkins).
I hated Tam Lin the first time through, but it got stuck in my brain like a jellybean behind a molar and I kept revisiting it to the point where I got vaguely addicted to it and still miss it from time to time.
For all the book’s (many) flaws — Medora has the full St. Agnes eve spread set out for afternoon tea, and Janet spots that first thing? ah, the ominous creaking sound as my suspension of disbelief fails — I am grateful that it introduced me to Christopher Fry’s strange and beautiful The Lady’s Not for Burning, which is likewise narratively wonky but full of shimmering language.
The book also led me to about Alex Cox’s adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, which features Derek Jacobi, Christopher Eccleston, Eddie Izzard, and a soundtrack by Chumbawamba. The movie doesn’t quite satisfy, but then for my money neither do the Jacobeans, so it works out okay.
“Alex Cox’s adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy, which features Derek Jacobi, Christopher Eccleston, Eddie Izzard, and a soundtrack by Chumbawamba.”
Three of my favourite things right there! (I’m not that fussed with Derek J.)
Jacobi looks like he’s having fun in the role of debauched puffy tyrant, and apparently he worked for damn near no money at all. There are plenty of spots where the movie’s tiny budget is evident, but it’s still fun in a chaotic way.
What a marvellous world we live in.
LOVE THIS. The Toast is very toasty today.
I went to Carleton mostly because I first read Tam Lin when I was thirteen and thought “oh, maybe I do want to go to college”. And read it repeatedly after that. I met people who DID talk like Thomas and Robin and Nick (though not to that extent, of course). I ate in their dining halls and shopped in their Jacobsen’s and took their co-op bus and went for long romantic walks in their arboretum and went to plays in their little theater and even, I confess, hooked up in one of the practice rooms. Occasionally I will forget whether an incident happened to me in real life or just in Tam Lin (especially stuff that happened in the library, dining halls, or dorm rooms). Oh, and I took a class from “Professor Evans”, who still addressed everyone as Mr. or Miss.
But I haven’t ever been able to read it all the way through since leaving Carleton; it brings up too many crazy emotions from that time.
As for Peg and the bunk beds, I even resorted to asking the author about that back when I was in high school, and didn’t get an answer that satisfied me, except that Peg was at the time she asked for the hockey stick possessed by Victoria’s ghost–so presumably she was talking about Victoria’s bunk beds when she said she had them, and those are the ones Janet finds in the basement. But it doesn’t quite work for me.
Oh, and we also had to take PE at Carleton, not that many years ago. Just like Janet. I didn’t take fencing, but I did take swimming. Because, as for Janet, it was required for graduation. (Unless you could swim already, which isn’t mentioned as an option for her.)
Salutations, fellow Carl!!
I actually thought that all colleges required P.E. until today. It seems strange not to. However, the swimming requirement is no more. I never had to prove that I could swim to graduate. Though I can.
I suppose I did meet people who could have talked like the Classics Boyfriends if they’d wanted to. But they are all a little too down-to-earth to communicate entirely in quotations. (Maybe they do amongst themselves.)
But now we must get down to the real business at hand, which is of course trying to match up Blackstock locations with Carleton locations. Here is what I think:
Ericson = Nourse
Sherlock = Watson
Eliot = Evans
Taylor = Burton
Forbes = Myers
Masters = Laird
Olin = Olin
I think they mentioned Goodhue’s Dining Hall (now Goodhue Superlounge), but I don’t remember if Goodhue had a name.
Also, I wonder if Mark Heiman would know about the Piper. (Did you meet him while you were there?) I think there may have actually been a Piper at one point.
norse ericson. sherlock is watson. taylor is burton OH MY GOD
I’m just picturing Pamela Dean sitting there cackling to herself as she renamed things. Because I would do the same sort of thing, and amuse myself hugely with it.
And the link between Evans and Eliot is that Mary Ann Evans was the real name of George Eliot! Oh, Pamela Dean!
Also germane to this conversation is Mark and Laura’s quite thorough edition of the Child Ballads. Recreational singing parties since college have always confused me with the paucity of people who are familiar with very old songs, and Mark is probably why.
We are fellow Folk Singing people! You and I have spent countless hours sitting in the same cozy chapel basement room singing the same songs! And, apparently, as I have gathered from creeping on your profile, we are fellow math majors? And you went to Budapest too?! ARE YOU SOMEBODY I KNOW? I was Class of 2012, and Steve Kennedy was my advisor.
Even if we weren’t contemporaries, I totally feel an insane sense of kinship with you. Whatever deep water you sail over now, I have no doubt that you will return with bright treasures.
(Clean cups!)
We have also both dropped out of grad school, I see by creeping on your profile. (Mine was pure math.) But I was class of 2007; we are not contemporaries, though we may have shared acquaintances and ARE in the same reunion year.
Hello shadow me! Perhaps we will meet in reality some day!
Huzzah! I’m the same year as dcbrierton (’07), and it makes me very happy that there is such a good Carleton Folk Singing representation on the Toast. We belong here. And now I am going to have the Mary Ellen Carter stuck in my head all day, unless it gets displaced by Willie of Winsbury.
Clean Cups!
::flails in amused hysteria at the folk singer fannish alumni who are so very, very much younger than me::
Back in MY day, the folk singing happened at Farm House and Mark Heiman was just a student / a recent grad still hanging around town. And I lived in SF House the first year it was in Berg House, and Tam Lin was a brand new book my freshman year.
I bet you know my cousin, Max. (Math major, just graduated.)
–Naomi Kritzer ’95
Watson is Holmes in the book. Boliou is briefly mentioned a couple of times as Appleton. Goodhue is Dunbar (they ate in the dining hall there pretty regularly, but mostly the one in Evans basement). Musser = Murchison. Chester Hall = Old Music Hall. It’s funny, when I arrived in 1997 it seemed like the campus was almost perfectly preserved from 1971 (except for the tunnels not being open), but a LOT of changes had happened by the time I left.
Oh drat, I said Sherlock when I meant Holmes. I can’t edit my post any more, but I would if I could.
I remember they also eat at the Burton dining hall: it talks about how dungeon-like it is, and when Janet first sees the Classics guys walk in to the dining hall, the table they’re at is between two pillars, so I interpreted that to be one of the round tables between the pillars near the south entrance of the Burton dining hall, in the alcove to the left of the door (walking in).
Neither Goodhue Dining Hall nor Evans Dining Hall is a dining hall any more. Now it’s just Burton and the LDC. When I was there, the whole Evans Dining Hall dish-washing area was totally abandoned, but you could sneak back there via the tray conveyor belt. Now apparently Evans is remodeled and doesn’t have columns any more.
Cheryl Klein, class of 2000 (and occasional Folk Singer) here, just nodding in to say how thrilled I am to see so many Carls. I read TAM LIN the summer before my senior year of high school, & was terrified I’d get to Carleton and everyone would speak in vast swaths of Shakespeare all the time. It was both a pleasure & a disappointment that we did not.
Haha I also assumed everyone had to take PE in college! I graduated from St Olaf in 2007 and we definitely had to — I took dance.
Oh man, Tam Lin, Fire and Hemlock, and The Perilous Gard are all so good in such different ways, I could never decide which is the best. Tam Lin is great for the sense of atmosphere and lit/classics major bait, Fire and Hemlock I think is probably the most interesting of the bunch in terms of what it does with the story, and The Perilous Gard is maybe the most perfect and complete in itself, and definitely has the most satisfying ending.
I read Tam Lin when I was fifteen or sixteen (after I read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, so I was actually expecting it to be even trippier than it was) and I read The Lady’s Not For Burning four years or so later, and had forgotten that it played a role in the book. It wasn’t until I reread Tam Lin recently that I realized a)that’s where I had heard of the play and b)The Lady’s Not For Burning is also kinda based on the story of Tam Lin. In retrospect, the names should have clued me in. But man, that play is beautiful.
I should reread Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary, because I did not understand it at ALL at the time. Not sure it would make any more sense, though.
I think it is the only one of her books that you could call a failure but it’s really really interesting and incredibly ambitious. And I called Janet a dick but it was in jest, I like her really, but Gentian is a dick in earnest.
But I mean, I always always wanted to write like Dean does, where the plot is completely underneath everything you can see, like if you shaved your head, tattooed a novel on your scalp and then grew your hair back over it. I know it is there but HOW do I know? genius!
and The Dubious Hills is almost perfect.
That description of how the plot works is PERFECT and yeah, I wish I could do that too. MAN.
I didn’t get it at all on a ‘what is even happening’ level, but it made a weird amount of sense to me on an instinctive level. The creepy time machine feels like it should work. And what’shisname, the guy who is sort of the devil, is also incredibly creepy.
I wonder if I reread it now, would I get more of the references? I’m afraid I probably wouldn’t.
Also, I still sing her version of Tell Me Why. “Nuclear fisson makes the stars to shineeee.”
Hurray for someone else mentioning the Perilous Gard!
TAM LIN TAM LIN TAM LIN
I’m pretentious and don’t care, it’s wonderful.
THIS BOOK. This book was very formative until I turned into a different person. But when I was still the me that thought she wanted to study literature, and eagerly read actual academic treatises on fairy tales’s various sociological and thematic features–that is, between the ages of 13 and 17–this book was my entire model for life. It also had the advantageous property of letting me memorize all sorts of quotations that I could then throw around, without having actually read their sources. As was said somewhere above, this book is perfect for the Pre-Shame Years, and I took full advantage of it.
It has many flaws, though I’m not as sensitive to them as I might be because I imprinted on it like a baby duck, but one thing I do like is this: In various stories featuring The Supernatural, we often ask what on earth the “normal” people who aren’t in the know think is going on. This is essentially a story from the point of view of such a person, and incredibly, I never get frustrated with her for not figuring it out, because honestly, how could she? It’s all very subtle for a long time, and what’s unsubtle doesn’t really hang together in a way that gives you clues for a long time. At least, I think so–when you reread something so many times that you’ve practically got it memorized, it’s hard to know how it actually works anymore.
(I should state that I still eagerly read–and in fact, write–treatises on fairy tales, but that’s more of a hobby thing now.)
ETA: One thing that truly did bug me on my latest reread is how little development Molly gets. I think I like her best, in theory, but she has no real problems or activities outside of being more acceptable to Janet than Tina, and dating Robin. I enjoy spending time with her a lot, but I wish she had more to do, or be. Also, I would like to know oodles more about Sharon.
“I should state that I still eagerly read–and in fact, write–treatises on fairy tales, but that’s more of a hobby thing now”
Do you blog about this anywhere because if so I would very much like to read them.
Well, the treatises I’ve written are all also treatises about NBC Hannibal, so if you don’t like that show you probably don’t want to read them (although I guess the first one might have something in it for you if you feel like cherrypicking). But if that sounds enjoyable to you, you can start here!
I haven’t started watching it yet (too many other things in my watch queue right now and not enough time), but I definitely plan to watch it eventually, maybe after it ends. Especially since a friend of mine who watches it emailed me last week and said “I think this might be an interpretation of what it would be like for a modern member of the Unseelie Court.” I mean, how could I say no to that?
I’m bookmarking your link, so thank you!
Edit: OH! You’re 22drunkB! I see stuff reblogged from you all the time. +FOLLOWing now.
Ha, your friend and I clearly have a lot of the same ideas. I did, among other things, a reading of the whole first season as a Tam Lin story and I’ve talked a lot about Hannibal himself as the Fairy Queen (inside and outside of Tam Lin). I hope you do watch it someday!
Dorothy Sayers and John Donne? An interesting jump.
Oh, this book. It’s my best friend’s favorite book and she finally got me to read it a few years ago and…I couldn’t get past how they talked. I just couldn’t. I enjoyed the story but WHO TALKS LIKE THAT SERIOUSLY.
On the plus side, this book is the reason I met my bff in the first place. She and I met at a writing camp at Carleton College, which Blackstock is based on, which she chose specifically for that reason.
Oh God, I read Tam Lin and Caroline Stevemer’s A College of Magics around the same time in high school and they ruined me for college, and probably life. I’m still working my way through the book references.
I went to the college that “A College of Magics” is patterned on, and now I realize I have to read “Tam Lin” as that book’s long-lost twin.
I hate this book so much. I read it in college as an English major, and I came this fking close to dropping out on the spot in silent protest of this book’s existence. It is an excruciatingly boring story about excruciatingly terrible people who are excruciatingly impressed with the intensity of their own (terrible) feelings. I reread it a few years ago when I was on a kick with Modern Faerie Stories and discovered to my complete surprise that it really *was* possible to hate it more than I had before.
I still love you, The Toast. Even though now my night is slightly spoiled just thinking about this gross mess of a novel.
I shall grow old and die waiting for the Kindle version to come out. :/
(See also: The Blue Sword)
I liked Tam Lin, but not nerely as much as I love Fire and Hemlock and The Perilous Gard, which are two of my most favorite books and in my opinion vey different but nearly flawless retelligs of Tam Lin. Fire and Hemlock especially merits many rereads.
I was not a Carleton student but rather a St Olaf Student (the other liberal arts college in town) and I must say that my experience in the humanities was similar in many ways to college as portrayed in Tam Lin — the old buildings, the lawns and woods, the English and classics majors (I was both), the very smart and interesting students. We had so much fun on campus — we made our own discussion club (4 guys, 3 of us girls) that met to talk philosophy; we loved the free concerts and theater productions; I was in a creative writing group; my friends and I would go to Boe Chapel at night to son a capella. And there definitely WAS a piper my year at St Olaf — I heard and saw him multiple times. Anyhow, I read Tam Lin after college and in many ways it seemed so familiar.
It’s possible I became a librarian solely to get back at my childhood library for throwing away their copy of this book which I read religiously every year.
It’s also possible that I mentioned to another library when interviewing for a serious job that my only interaction with their library was borrowing this book from across the state.
Thanks to this thread I now have a new set of “magic/mystery on campus” books to enjoy. If this rekindles the thread a bit, I’d love to find more if you have any suggestions!