A Passage from a Steampunk Novel

A character in the novel Clementine is said to have dreamed "of his own ship -- and of the clouds, drafts, and passages over the Rockies. He dreamed briefly of Seattle, the walled city filled with gas and peril, and of the giant Andan Cly who had tried to help retrieve the Free Crow when first it was stolen. He also dreamed of a skittering of black birds, shifting their weight back and forth on a tree branch, their tiny claws gripping and scrapping the wood."

In the next paragraph we learn that the sound those birds were making was an intrusion into the dream of a real world event, one to which the dreamer awakens.

There's a lot going on in this passage, and it's deftly done.

Clementine is part of the Clockwork Century collection of novels by Cherie Priest. Its an alternate history based in part of the notion that dirigibles became a key means of transit across the North American continent in the second half of the 19th century, while the Civil War waged on and on.

The character in question is a free black, and the captain of an outlaw dirigible -- a sky pirate. So the name he gives his craft, "Free Crow," is itself of symbolic weight.

Read that passage again, and see how the vessel the Free Crow is transformed in his mind into those black birds, which in turn make the scratching sound, which in turn ... etc.

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A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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