Thursday, May 8, 2008

Fairies

I love that Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Here’s part of an essay he wrote about electricity:

…at the beginning of the century, electricity and modernity were equated -- electric current was viewed as nothing less than the medium and energy source of modernity, and the industry it produced and nourished to life was still perceived as something that had little in common with the capitalist industrialism typical of the preceding period. In contrast, electricity was widely associated with the miraculous. Indeed, the fin de siècle imagined this new form of energy as the "electric fairy" that would free the industrial world from its gloomy accompaniments, creating an effortless, agreeable, and, above all, work- and exploitation-free society of pleasure. It promised redemption.

Why did people used to think that everything new was a type of fairy? Like how in the nineteenth century they called photographs “fairy pictures.” They probably also called cars “fairy wagons” and movies “fairy movies.”

Speaking of fairy movies, anybody want to go see a play?

S-N-A-P

“What is this marvelous fairy book before me?”


It’s just a newspaper. Calm down, olden times.

“What is this thrilling yet dangerous fairyland of foreign wonders?”
What are you a newborn infant? It’s just a newspaper. Take a pill. Jeez.



"Holy fucking shit! A newspaper!"

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