Oompa Loompa doopity don’t

It’s been about a month since my last post and, quite honestly, it feels like longer. Ages seemed to have passed. A whole era. That’s probably because I came down with the worst cold I’ve had in years and have been both very busy and falling behind at work.

The worst part of this cold hasn’t been the coughing or the runny nose. It’s been the brain fog. I don’t know what the hell has been going on with viruses these days, but I feel like I’ve dropped about 20 IQ points. I don’t think I’m alone in this, either. I hear so many anecdotes about people needing weeks and weeks to feel mentally “normal” after they catch the bugs that have been going around.

Anywho. It hasn’t been fun. Such is the life of a teacher.

It’s Wednesday of spring break, and the weather is going haywire. Yesterday was 70 degrees and sunny. Today there’s a blizzard. I expect we’ll lose power at any moment, as is happening all over this part of Nebraska. Soon I will have to shovel.

I finished Mumbo Jumbo, which I didn’t like. It’s nothing to do with the book. I’m afraid I just read too much of it while my brain was melting due to fever. It doesn’t help that the book is awfully non-traditional in its structure, and the prose is by no means easy to parse. Even if I was at 100% brain function, I doubt I would have fully digested it.

They always say that authors have a specific person in mind whenever they write something — a person to whom the story is targeted, whether it be conscious or unconscious. (Freud, it is likely, really wanted to show his mom how smart he was.) This book, Mumbo Jumbo, is a book whose target (if they exist) utterly baffles me. Who is Ishmael Reed trying to speak to? Were there readers out there looking for him? Because I simply cannot picture anyone out there thinking, “This. This is what I’ve been waiting for.”

Which is fine. You don’t have to “get” every book that you read. Mumbo Jumbo, from what I can gather, was an experiment with form and the incorporation of African mysticism into some kind of noir mystery and written before I was born. I can snap my fingers to it the way I might snap along with a complicated Jazz record, but, ultimately, I’m a rock and roll guy. I could spend months with Mumbo Jumbo and it’d likely never click.

As Primus (who sucks) always says, “They Can’t All be Zingers.”

Today, in order to give my brain a much needed break, I’m going to read Frankenstein by Mary “Torso Face” Shelley.

I don’t know who did that painting, but it comes across as Gollum doing a Downton Abbey cosplay.

I’ve read Frankenstein about a dozen times, the most notable of which was when I moved to Seoul in 2014 and had to spend several hours at the Immigration Office waiting to get my visa stamped. It was one of the only times in my life when I sat down in a chair and read an entire book without moving, save to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. (Shout out to the immigration office for making me wait several hours! Couldn’t have done it without you, fellas.) Frankenstein turned what might have been a trip to bureaucratic purgatory into a relatively pleasant afternoon.

It’s a skill I’d like to cultivate: Not just sitting and reading, but sitting and not consuming digital media for extended periods of time. Is it ironic that I’m writing this on a blog most people will read on their phones? Maybe. But my half-dozen regular readers appreciate irony.

These days, however, the goal of trying to avoid digital media seems more and more like starting a diet when you’re on a tour Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

…and we just lost power. Not for a long time, but long enough to cause my computer to shut down. So, I’m going to wrap this up before we lose it completely.

Stay safe out there.

Uncontrollably exuberant

Not only have I never heard of Mumbo Jumbo, but I have no idea who this Ishmael Reed is, either. As an English major, it’s tough admitting that. There’s very little point in being well-read if you’re not going to seem well-read when you’re talking to people on the street or at parties and such, so whereas I might normally just say nothing or perhaps nod my head and knowingly mumble, “Hmm, yes,” when Ishmael Reed is mentioned, I’ve got to admit my ignorance here.

I can guess why I haven’t heard of this author or book. It was published well before my time (1972) and takes place even weller before my time (the 1920s). Besides that, the cover of the edition I have features two bare-breasted flappers (or, more accurately, the same bare-breasted flapper twice), which puts it firmly in the category of Books That I’d Be Unlikely to See on a Shelf at a Bookstore.

Let’s see what James Mustich, who put together this list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die (and pictured below combing his moustache with a corn tortilla), has to say about this one.

Mumbo Jumbo may be the most rambunctious novel you’ll ever read, a noir mystery steeped in the lore of African American HooDoo, the social tumult and political corruption of the 1920s, Egyptian mythology, and the deep wells of Ishmael Reed’s idiosyncratic imagination.

“Rambunctious” means uncontrollably exuberant, and it is a heck of a word to use to describe a book. Personally, when I read a book, what I’m looking for is controlled exuberance, but that’s just personal preference. We’ll see how rambunctious Mumbo Jumbo actually is.

Here’s the opening paragraph:

A True Sport, the Mayor of New Orleans, spiffy in his patent-leather brown and white shoes, his plaid suit, the Rudolph Valentino parted-down-the-middle hair style, sits in his office. Sprawled upon his knees is Zuzu, local doo-wack-a-doo and voo-do-dee-odo fizgig. A slatternly floozy, her green, sequined dress quivers.

Well. I don’t know what to make of that, quite literally. What is a fizgig? The internet says it’s a flirtatious woman, but it could also be an Australian police informant.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how uncontrollably exuberant are we getting if the mayor of ‘Nerlins has an Aussie fink on his lap?

Thanks be to God! Amen! Amen!

Well, that’s the end of The Travels of Marco Polo. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I were well versed in the history of Asian cultures, or if I knew more about architecture or language. It’s been years since I’ve been to China, but the (relatively brief) depictions of places Marco Polo and I have both been to don’t remind me of anything. No surprise, really. Places change over the course of 700 years.

The book did make me a little more envious of William Dalrymple’s travels in In Xanadu, which saw the author retracing Marco Polo’s journey in the 1980s. While a lot has changed over the centuries, the paths are still there, and (very frequently) so are the cities. The Travels of Marco Polo would definitely be a book I’d refer back to if and when I went back to Asia. It might even be an impetus.

There’s just something … exciting about feeling that kind of connection with the distant past.

I read The Journals of Lewis and Clark a few years ago when this blog was still in its infancy, and that, I think, is how I can imagine (at least somewhat) how it would feel to travel in Marco Polo’s footsteps.

We here in Nebraska don’t have a lot what I would characterize as “cool history,” but Lewis and Clark did pass through here (twice!), and Sarah and I frequently make trips along the same path they took (owing to our having family in Montana). Sure, we’re in a car and not hauling boats upstream while fighting off hordes of mosquitos, but there is a kind of visceral connection.

Of course, Sarah and I camp a lot when we travel, and it hasn’t been several centuries since Lewis and Clark bumbled their way through, so you can always get the sense that you’re seeing the same island or river bend that Lewis and Clark might have seen. Is that a real connection, or is it just some ghostly mirage that pops into my head when it’s quiet near the Missouri and the stars are out?

Beats me, but I bet you could find something similar on the path of Polo.

Doing a little research into what traveling the Silk Road might be like today and, besides the visa issues and relative danger of traveling through Afghanistan and Pakistan, going along the Silk Road would be way easier. There are more highways now, as well as high-speed rail. Plus the internet! You could probably do the whole trip while staying Airbnbs.

If you were going to do the trip, though, you’d probably want to break it into a series of destinations and find a … slow way of doing it. Taking cars or buses rather than anything faster.

No point in retracing someone’s footsteps if they were riding a horse and you’re on an airplane.

School is canceled today because of snow and frankly horrifying temperatures — it is 1 degree Fahrenheit right now, and I’m afraid that’s as high as it’s going to get. I’m sitting in my office next to a space heater with Jolene curled up at my feet. Now that the driveway is scooped, I don’t have to go back out for anything.

(Unless the action figure I ordered off eBay shows up today.)

I’m using the time to read and get over this damned cold. I also might watch Conclave this evening; I’ve heard good things and I’d like to be more purposeful with the movies and TV I watch. I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of good stuff because I get stuck re-watching old comfort shows.

Marco Po-Snow

It’s President’s Day and it’s snowing like the Dickens.

I’m still sick, which is just glorious, and my symptoms have morphed into some kind of cold with all the sneezing and snot and coughing up all sorts of nastiness. I’ve also become like like an unlucky spouse in Law & Order, banging my head and face into door frames as I pass by.

I can see Sarah fielding questions at the grocery store from some overzealous security officer. “Excuse me, ma’am. How did your husband get that black eye?”

“He, uh, walked into a door.”

I don’t have a black eye, though. Just a bruised ego and a few drips of spilled coffee on my pants.

My reading presses on, though.

Marco Polo has gone to Japan and India and has stopped at all sorts of cities and villages in-between, but the real news today is how the pool game Marco Polo came into being. More specifically, why do players call out “Marco Polo” rather than, say, any other phrase in English?

There are a few possible answers, but my favorite is that Marco Polo had a reputation amongst sailors as someone who didn’t really know where he was going. So, sailors would play the game on their ships to pass the time — one player blindfolded and calling out, “Marco!” while the others hide and call back, “Polo!” How or why the game got moved into a swimming pool is anybody’s guess, but I do like the image of Marco Polo as some blind, bumbling Billy waist-deep in water calling out his own goddamned name in hopes of discovering where he ought to go.

This is somewhat backed up by Polo’s financial status, which wasn’t all that great, or, at least, wasn’t helped by his travels. He didn’t make all that much money as a merchant and he sure didn’t make much from publishing the tale of his travels. What wealth he had later in life was mostly owed to his being a respected name in Venetian society.

So, maybe he wasn’t that great of a merchant, but he sure was a great traveler. Or, maybe he was just at it for a really, really long time.

That’s probably all you need to get good at anything, really. Just keep at it.

Length times width times height

I’ve finished up the first volume of The Travels of Marco Polo and have moved on to Volume 2, a fact that doesn’t amount to much when you’re reading ebooks. There’s no satisfactory closing of the book once I reach the last page — just a new file that I tap on and suddenly I’m back at 0%.

I’m not diving too deeply into the footnotes anymore; one could dedicate a lifetime to learning about Marco Polo’s travels, so I consider myself more akin to a tourist who’s just passing through. I’ll check out what interests me, but leave the minutia to the academics.

It’s interesting, though, to question how reliable Marco Polo is as an author. We know that some of his descriptions are embellished, and others (like those of Prester John) are straight-up folklore, but there are a lot of small details that may be … odd falsehoods. For example, Polo says that there’s a way across a certain stretch of desert that only takes a matter of days, but historians (and cartographers, I suppose) cannot find any such path. Was Polo lying, or have the desert sands shifted?

Who needs answers when you have so many questions?

Watch out for Tartar buildup

I woke up this morning feeling so well rested and, I suppose, not horrible that I had to wonder if we don’t always take for granted what life is like when you’re not sick. Maybe we do and maybe we don’t, but getting over the flu makes me feel like a whole new person. I’m a person who can breathe easily through his nose, a person who doesn’t always feel like vomiting, and a person whose butt is no longer squirrely.

I just got an email that my department head has also joined the ranks of the flu-ridden. This virus is wafting through our school like a plume of teenage vape.

No one is safe from supernova bubblegum. (Or whatever vape flavor the kids are into. It may very well be “hurricane bubble wrap” or “apathy.”)

I thought I’d share a video I found of one of the characters in The Travels of Marco Polo: Prester John.

I got to a chapter in Travels that sees Polo discuss a great war between Genghis Khan and “the ruler of a great Christian empire” named Prester John. I’d never heard of the guy, and I was a little shocked to hear that there was a Christian empire somewhere in Asia during the 13th century. So, I did a little searching to see what was the what. Who is Prester John and why did he cause Genghis so much trouble?

Turns out, the guy is a total myth. Not only Prester John, but his whole Christian empire. The “great battle” Polo describes is a complete fantasy and grounded in just about as much truth as the stories of Paul Bunyan.

(Well. Maybe.)

Here’s a video that talks about how the legend of Prester John came about and how it had some broad cultural impact:

Makes you feel a little … inadequate, doesn’t it?

I mean, this guy fought the Mongol empire and he doesn’t even exist. So what’s your excuse?

Splish sploosh I was having a boosh

I did most of my reading yesterday in the bathtub. I’m an avid bath reader to begin with, but I’ve got a case of the flu that keeps giving me the chills, so I’ve been making a bunch of bubble baths to help raise my body temperature.

The last couple of weeks have been tough on my physical health. I had some kind of stomach bug last Wednesday (“stomach bugs” are almost always food-borne illness) and this week a flu has literally decimated my school. I’m staying hydrated, eating saltines, and bathing more than that chick from Splash.

(I know her name is Daryl Hannah. Every guy my age knows her name is Daryl Hannah, but I thought it’d be cooler if I seemed nonchalant about it.)

Marco Polo has just crossed the Gobi desert and relayed the tale of a village where husbands let their wives sleep with visitors who pass through. (It’s called “being a good host.”) The government told the people of the village to stop it because that was weird, but the villagers wrote a letter saying, “Please, please, please let our spouses sleep with strangers; it’s tradition!” and the government responded by saying, “Oh, alright. Fine. You guys can keep boning vagrants. Who are we to stand in the way of tradition?”

The Travels of Marco Polo makes me think about travel, naturally, but particularly the way most Americans tend to blast through their trips like they’re trying to speed-run Paris. For us, travel is full of maps and time tables and lists of all the things we have to do and see and eat. A lot of us come back from vacation more exhausted than we were when we left.

This wasn’t the case for Marco Polo, though. Marco Polo traveled around the Silk Road and China for about 24 years. That’s about a third of his life, and he wasn’t living it all go, go, GO! He would stay in one place for quite some time, and it’s not easy to understand what that is like.

In one scene, Marco Polo talks about these hills that are so pleasant and beautiful and bountiful that people go up there when they’re sick and are (as if by magic) healed. Marco attests to the healing properties of the area by saying that he’d been sick for about a year but got better once he saw how cool those hills were.

Sick. For a year.

More so than the magic of that particular hillside, the interesting thing to take from this is that Marco Polo didn’t see what he was doing as some kind of trip or vacation. It was just life. He wasn’t rushing around trying to knock the Taj Mahal off his checklist; he was more akin to a nomad. His home was the road.

And what a lifestyle! I don’t know if I’m jealous of him — he was ill for a whole year of this journey, after all — but it’s fun to imagine what life would be like if you just … didn’t have a permanent residence.

Are there still people in the world who live like that? Other than, like, you know, homeless people?

Rabbit holes with no rabbits

Most of the time, the experience of reading The Travels of Marco Polo goes like this: You read a sentence that says, “After those twelve days’ journey you come to a fortified place called Taican, where there is a great corn market.” Hearing the name “Taican,” you decide to check the footnotes because you don’t know where that place is and you assume its name has changed sometime in the last seven centuries.

Sure enough, the footnotes tell you that “Taican” is now “Talikan,” located in the province of Kataghan (or Kunduz) in northern Iran. Armed with this information, you realize that you still don’t know anything about the place. So, you go to Google Maps to look it up.

“There it is!” you say. “I still know nothing about it!” A red pin on a map can only tell you so much. So, you try to find pictures on street view, but there aren’t any actual pictures of Talikan, just pictures of nearby dirt roads that wind through some mountains.

While that does give you some idea of what it must have been like to travel through that part of the world, you still don’t feel like you’ve got a clearer picture of what life in Talikan is actually like. What about their culture, their traditions? What about the corn market?! You dive back into the footnotes for answers.

” … Wood speaks of Talikan in 1838 as a poor place of some 300 or 400 houses, mere hovels; a recent account gives it 500 families.”

Wait, what? 500 families? Hovels? You decide to check Wikipedia, because something here isn’t adding up.

That’s when you realize that you’ve been researching a tiny, inconsequential village in Iran for the last ten minutes. It might have been popular in the 13th century, but it sure isn’t now.

I’m starting to believe that Marco Polo intended this book to be used by merchants who were going to travel the Silk Road — they’re the only ones to whom most of this information would be practical.

The writing style is fun, though, if you can get into the tone of medieval literature. And you absolutely don’t have to read all the footnotes. This isn’t a history class.

Although I am curious about what happened to the corn market. (I’m a Nebraskan — corn is our thing.)

Both lost and diarrhea

The Old Boy, whom I have retained as an unlikely editor and site manager, tells me that my readers are getting antsy. “They cannot handle waiting for something for which they long, but perhaps it is good for them to do so. Character-building, you know.”

Editors talk like that. The good ones, anyway.

I’ve been hit by some kind of bug that has sapped most of my energy for the last week or so. There’s a nasty flu going around the school, and I’m not sure if I’ve got it or if I’m just getting hit by the February Mehs. Or maybe I’m allergic my aura.

Whatever the case, when I’m not at work or doing assignments for my university class, I’m sleeping.

I have had time to finish In Xanadu, however, and have moved on to The Travels of Marco Polo, which is probably one of the oldest books on this list. (It was first published in 1299 A.D.) The version I am reading came from Project Gutenberg, the site where you can download just about any public domain book in epub or pdf format.

The real challenge of this version isn’t that it’s over 700 years old, or that it was originally written in Old French — it’s that the text is 80% footnotes.

I probably should have read Travels before reading In Xanadu, but I honestly didn’t realize Travels was on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I should have guessed. It is a popular text, and one of the earliest “travel books.” It was the entire inspiration for William Dalrymple’s journey and has inspired countless others to wander around Asia, getting both lost and diarrhea.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

The Travels of Marco Polo is an example of European Medieval Literature, which can be a little difficult to get into. We modern readers understand modern books in ways that we take for granted; we all recognize that modern books are written to sell, follow certain kinds of structures, adhere to sets of rules that are specific to genre. We assume every author wants to write a bestseller and reach as wide an audience as possible. 

For Medieval Literature, though, publishers didn’t exist, and who knows what authors were thinking? There was no printing press, so it is unlikely that people wrote books in hopes of becoming rich and famous. It was just too difficult and too costly to make copies of the texts — only the incredibly wealthy or members of the aristocracy could afford them. Were these authors just writing for posterity? For fame, or to add to academic knowledge? Nobody knows, but very few copies were probably made initially. Some sources say there were only a few dozen, all copied by hand.

More copies would have came slowly after that, until the printing press came about (1440 A.D.), at which point everyone started shouting in their pool and wielding big hammers on horseback.

The truth probably is that Marco Polo told his story for posterity and would have been pleasantly surprised to realize it’d last as long as it has. Either that or he was just really bored in prison and dictated this book to kill time.

Alfred Orders Kale

What a lousy week for reading! I’ve been behind nearly every day, and some of those days I haven’t even hit 50 pages. Progress is progress, though.

In Xanadu has given me the travel bug, although you might say that I always have the travel bug and reading about backpacking just reignites my fervor. I don’t know much about the places along the Silk Road; it’s a part of the world I’ve never been to, save for a few bits in China, but I love all the travel-related stuff. Fun facts about finding places to sleep, getting on buses and trains, meeting exciting people while being exhausted and stinking. There’s something magical about it.

There are a lot of people — my dad included — who think of travel as something relaxing, something comfortable and easy and filled with tour packages and guides and car rentals and complimentary blankets. (“Martinis on the poop deck!”) It’s one way of looking at travel, certainly, and not an invalid one, but it’s never been the way I approach it. I think travel should be decidedly uncomfortable. It needn’t be a life-or-death struggle, cutting deals with smugglers to sneak you through Laos, but if you’re traveling first class all the time, then you’re not seeing the good parts of where you’re going.

The few times that I’ve been backpacking (mostly in southeast Asia), I’ve tried to do it on a shoestring budget, staying in hostels, getting rides on sketchy buses with little Asian guys who crawl into the luggage compartment to look through backpacks for iPhones, going to places that not-so-many people go to where the food will probably give you diarrhea and the water is brown. All of this hinged upon the belief that “the road less traveled” is somehow better; that it’s possible for someone to grow as a person by experiencing new cultures, and that you can only experience a new culture when you (in some form or another) leave your own culture behind.

In other words, go where the locals go, eat where they eat, do the things they’re doing.

In Xanadu is definitely in that wheelhouse. In 1986, William Dalrymple made an attempt to follow in the footsteps of Marco Polo, even though it technically wasn’t possible and possibly wasn’t technical. (That makes sense, right? No? Ah, hell with it.) He was going through parts of the world that you can only really get to when you’re riding on the back of a coal truck, and he was doing it while it was illegal to do so.

I feel like, similar to taking the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Silk Road is one of those backpacker holy grails. Everybody dreams of it, even if it’s one of the most difficult trips you could take on planet Earth. (Even if I had the money or the time, I’m not sure I’d be able to hack it at my age.)

But it’s fun to read about, and Dalrymple’s writing style is tremendous.

I’ll be a little sad when I finish this one.