In Xanadu

There are 5 posts tagged In Xanadu (this is page 1 of 1).

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.

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.

I prefer cotton it’s more durable

The Old Boy informs me that I spend too much time talking about school, and that when I talk about school I sound like I’m complaining. “Nobody will read that because nobody wants to hear teachers whinge,” his notes said. “That’s the entire basis of America’s education system.”

I wish they’d never showed him how to send text messages, but he has a point. School is insidious; it seeps into too many aspects of my daily life and I shouldn’t let it.

Anywho. Let’s talk about the Silk Road.

Pictured above, the Silk Road is one of the most famous trade routes ever and has been utilized in one form or another for several centuries. Connecting Europe with the Middle East and Asia, you can tell by looking that the Silk Road goes through all sorts of fun places where you aren’t at all likely to get kidnapped or murdered. The Silk Road is also well known for passing through areas of tremendous political stability where there are hardly any wars at all and everyone gets along pretty well. It is such a chill part of the world that most travelers choose to go down the Silk Road on recumbent bikes, their only real complaint that they wished there were more lemonade stands along the way.

In all seriousness, before sea routes became more practical, the Silk Road was one of the only ways to spread wealth and culture between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It may not be safe, but it is an exciting road that connected a whole slew of ancient empires. If you were a trader or a merchant, this is where the action was.

In the year 1271, a guy named Marco Polo traveled down the Silk Road causing a ruckus and making all sorts of new pals, and news of his exploits were one of the things that sparked a tremendous European interest in the dealings of China.

If this sounds familiar, it should. We all studied it in 6th grade (but forgot most of it by 9th).

Anywho. In the 1980s, after a couple hundred years of the Silk Road being impassable due to wars and closed borders and stuff, a Scottish historian and traveler named William Dalrymple realized that, with the right visas and a little planning, it might be possible to travel the whole lengthy of the Silk Road again. He decided to give it a try, and this book is the result:

It’s pretty good so far. I do worry that it’s going to pan out to be something spiritual, that the author is going to somehow channel Marco Polo or something and experience a profound awakening by sleeping in the same ditch where Polo once relieved himself.

I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally spiritual about traveling, and it bugs me when travel writrts pretend there is. Can it be spiritual? Sure, but I tend to think of it on an (auto)mechanical level. You can think of yourself as a Datsun pick-up truck, and your spirit as, perhaps, a carburetor. If you travel around long enough, you’re eventually going to realize that your carburetor needs replacing. Same for the tires and the windshield wipers and the oil and eventually the whole transmission’ll needs work. It doesn’t matter where you are when it happens; all that you need in order to make these realizations is to keep moving.

Traveling changes you no matter where you go. You learn empathy, you learn patience, you learn humility. (All very, very spiritual.) But you could be driving across Alaska when you learn these things, or on a boat in Indonesia, or hanging out on a beach in Brazil.

My point is that following the path of Marco Polo might seem cool, but there’s nothing inherently better about it than any other road you may travel. The author certainly will garner no better understanding of the actual Marco Polo than he would if he were swimming through the canals of Venice playing a game of Marco Polo with the citizenry.

Still, it was probably a wild trip and I’m excited to hear about it.

Silly rabbit, lucky charms are for leprechauns

My high school had our Open House on Thursday. Having gone to a much smaller school than the one where I currently teach, the idea of an Open House seems unusual to me. Apparently students and parents around here get to choose which high school they want to go to? I’ve always been under the impression that, if you lived in a certain area, then you went to a certain school. That was why rich parents would move to a certain neighborhood “for the schools.”

Yesterday, though, I spent an evening explaining (or “upselling”) aspects of the English department to prospective parents and students. Mostly, I did this by giving everyone really hard grammar and punctuation questions and giving them mini Snickers if they got a question right. Good salesmanship is about having snacks. (Prove me wrong.)

I didn’t try very hard, though. English would not be a selling point for nearly any high school — every student has to take four years of English, no matter what, so there isn’t much “selling” to be done. I can understand some students wanting to go to a certain school for the football program, or because they have a good music director, or their theater department was big, but nobody picks their high school based on the English classes.

Essentially, I was like a car salesman pointing out that the vehicle in question had four tires. “These babies sure do spin!” I said, aiming a kick at a tire, missing, and kicking the door frame instead, leaving a large dent.

So, it’s been a busy week. I have made some good progress with The Portable Dorothy Parker (I’m nearly finished), and am thinking about what I want to read next. I’d like to pick something fun, but I also want to keep working with the element of randomness. Maybe I’ll just pick a number and let the Gods of RNG hold my fate in their fat, fumbling fingers.

I mean, I can’t pick out the books that I know I’ll like first. If I do that, pretty soon the list will turn into one big chore. Like a bowl of Lucky Charms with all the marshmallows picked out; it’s milky disappointment. I feel like randomly picking is the only real way to go forward.

At the same time, who cares? This is my project and I can do it however the hell I want.

Maybe I could randomly select three books and choose the one that I like most? That’s an idea! It’s still random, but it’ll keep me from getting hit with The Bible when I don’t feel like reading something so ponderous.

Let’s try it!

Native Son by Richard Wright
In Xanadu by William Dalrymple
the lives and times of archy & mehitabel by Don Marquis

Oooooh what a range. I’ve heard of two of these, and I’m pretty sure I read Native Son in college. Still, if I’m picking between those three, then I suppose my next book is going to be In Xanadu by William Dalrymple, which I’m pretty sure is about a guy traveling down the Silk Road in the 1980s.

Let’s get ready for some lightly racist soul searching!