A month from now, my captivity will all be over.
That's because I'll have, God willing, finished my paper, driven out to Kalamazoo with Ysabel, delivered my paper, become part of the new troika in charge of the Pseudo Society, talked about revising last year's paper for publication with my editors, driven back from Kalamazoo with Ysabel if she hasn't strangled me in my sleep for grinding my teeth, taken several days off from writing, and fallen face first into my wee bed once I've shoved the Double Felinoid onto the floor so there's room. Dobby will be free! with plenty of time to romp, play, repaint my bathroom, and head over to the Heck Piazza Dodecaplex for my second and third and possibly fourth viewings of Avengers: Age of Ultron.
It'll be glorious, especially the parts about sleeping in my wee bed and ogling the gluteal regions of certain lead actors in Age of Ultron please ignore me I'm WWWWHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEE urgh argh help ack thump
The road trip itself promises to be exhausting but fun. I've traveled with Ysabel before and we're reasonably drift-compatible, at least when it comes to bathroom use and meals. We'll be staying with friends in Buffalo to break our journey, our hotel and car reservations are set, and as long as we can agree on music/audio books to listen to, it should all go well. Traveling should be fun, after all, at least when it's voluntary and for pleasure.
Tonight's Research Rewind concerns such travel. I've been to several countries, both physically and in the mass of tissue known as "Ellid's brain" in the Common Speech of the West, which has done as much to equip me for our regular trips into Badbookistan as anything else. The diary includes several books that proved useful before trips to Europe and Great Britain, but the real meat is a trio of Travel Books So Bad They're Good:
- A popular, influential, and 100% bogus compendium of medieval wonders that inspired generations of travelers who longed to see wool trees and men with their faces in their chests.
- A lively, entertaining, and utterly misguided look at the America Civil War, written by a military observer who should have known better.
- A brisk little romp through 1930's Germany that somehow managed to miss the GIANT RAVING MEGALOMANIAC O'DOOM and his earth-toned followers marching through the streets.
All are worth a second look, which is why I now invite you all to venture below the 0.5 Orange Kaiju for a diary from late in 2011 that I called
AROUND THE WORLD WITH CLUELESS TOURISTS
As those of you who read these diaries have probably guessed, I’ve done a fair bit of traveling.
Oh, not nearly as much as some; I’ve never been to the West Coast, or Asia, or the Deep South, and I’ve only been to the Prairie West once. I’ve spent all but two years of my life either in the Midwest (Cleveland and Pittsburgh) or New England (Massachusetts). My accent is a blend of the precise diction of a schoolteacher, the harsh Pittsburgh r’s of my youth, a slightly nasal Boston slur on some phrases, and a tendency to say “y’all” that is the sole remnant of the two years I spent in Virginia as a child. A dialectician could probably spot all of the above in a heartbeat, but most people think I just sound American, and they’re probably right.
For all that, I’ve been to Europe more than most, plus short visits to Las Vegas, Nebraska, Ontario, and the Washington area. I also make my annual pilgrimage to the Kalamazoo Medieval Studies Congress, the largest gathering of professional medievalists and serious amateurs in North America, where I’ve presented two papers that have become the basis for much of my published work.
In short, I enjoy traveling even if I can’t afford to do nearly as much as I’d prefer. So when I do slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the face of God manage to go somewhere other than a quick trip to Vermont or the Berkshires, it has to count.
This means I do my homework before I leave, in the form of reading as much about the culture, food, history, art, and language of the place I’m to visit. This especially applies to overseas, although I did read a guidebook to Las Vegas before I went there for a Harry Potter convention five years ago, since Vegas is in many ways just as foreign to me and my workaday life as the oldest parts of Europe. Part of this is because I want to get the most bang for my hard-earned buck, but I freely admit that I’d rather avoid being a typical Ugly American my late aunt, who didn’t exactly cover herself with glory by describing the last Fascist dictator as “the little man with the mustache” or reacting to a dish of paella as if it were the infamous chilled monkey brains dessert from the second Indiana Jones movie.
I haven’t always succeeded; I’ll never forget the bewildered look I got in Tuscany when I ordered a latte under the impression that I’d get coffee with cream, but it was a chilly enough day that a glass of hot steamed milk tasted just dandy. I’ve still tried, though, which means I’ve read quite a few travel guides, or at least books set in whatever city I’m planning to visit. Fortunately, most of the ones I’ve chosen over the years have been excellent:
- Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers’ fascinating defense of women’s education and moral equality with men, is cleverly disguised as a Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriett Vane mystery novel. I’m scarcely the only romantic young feminist who’s read it before visiting Oxford, but it certainly helped me absorb the atmosphere before I visited the City of the Dreaming Spires in the summer of 1981. I never went punting, alas, but I did get to study with Douglas Gray, who’d studied with JMW Bennett, who’d studied with JRR Tolkien, which was just fine with me.
- The Matter of Wales, Jan Morris’s loving tribute to her homeland, was invaluable background reading for my hiking trip to Snowdonia eleven years ago. I stayed in a converted manor house, Plas Tan-y-Bwlch, and spent a lovely afternoon exploring Dolgellau. This delightful old market town is where I met a sweet, friendly tabby cat with gentle paws that flopped onto its back for a tummy rub right in the middle of the sidewalk, saw signs for “wet fish” in the grocer’s window, and had cherry scones and clotted cream in a little teashop while the rest of my group went shopping.
- The Last Medici was a grim look at the decline and fall of the leading family of Florence, but Rick Steves’ lively little guidebook more than made up for the gloomy end of the dynasty, especially the claim that Savonarola had promised to ban Vespas in the tourist areas. And not only did I get to see more art and historic sites than one would think could possibly exist in a small Tuscan city during my precious week in Florence, I made friends with yet another cat. This time it was a plump, demanding gray and white beast at the Palazzo Pitti, clearly beloved of tourists and the staff at the museum café, who tried to crawl into my bag in search of a white chocolate hazelnut Ritter Sport bar. I also got to see the Impruneta Cushion, the oldest known piece of Italian patchwork – and for those who like such things, I’ll be posting a link to my article on this very cushion when the book is available for sale.
The above are only a few books that have enriched my travel experience, and I’m sure I could fill an entire diary or two with all the background reading I’ve done on famous cities and tourist attractions. Alas, not every travel book is useful, or even good, as the following selections will amply prove.
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Tonight I bring three Bad Travel Books. One is a medieval romp that makes the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy look like sober fact, one is a Civil War diary written by a trained observer who allowed class prejudices to lead him to an embarrassingly wrong conclusion, and the third is a delightful look at Germany in the early 1930s that completely misses what was going on beneath the gemütlichkeit surface:
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, by Sir John Mandeville. John Mandeville, aka Jehan de Mandeville, was an English knight, born at St. Albans. He traveled widely, and between 1357 and 1371 written accounts of his journeys began to circulate throughout the educated elite of Europe. They became wildly popular, as much for the fantastic nature of the peoples Sir John saw and lived among as for the information about new lands they contained. Soon Sir John’s name was a byword for a mighty traveler, and no less a mariner than Don Christobal Colon of Genoa, later Admiral of the Ocean Sea at the court of Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella and discoverer of the new lands of America, relied on Sir John as a guide to the peoples and places he would encounter once he had reached the fabulous Indies.
And what amazing and places they would be! Sir John wrote of the fabulous East, of Constantinople and Egypt and the unknown steppes of Central Asia. He spoke of a fabulous plant in India that instead of flowers produced tiny white lambs with fleece so soft it could be spun and woven into cloth nearly as good as fine linen, of living men with only one eye, of the immortal phoenix, men whose heads were below their shoulders, trained otters that brought fish to their Chinese masters, weeping crocodiles and balsam trees, a woman who turned into a dragon, monsters and marvels uncounted. Is it any wonder that generations were enthralled?
Alas, Don Christobal (better known to history as Christopher Columbus) little knew that his great source was not all that it appeared to be. Not only were there no phoenixes, no Cyclops, and no weeping crocodiles, he and his fellow explorers in the early 16th century quickly learned that many of the other marvels mentioned by Sir John simply did not exist: Prester John, men with heads below their shoulders, women who became dragons, bushes that bore lambs, trained otters – none were real. There really were bushes that produced soft, fluffy, white fiber that could be spun and woven into fine cloth, but they were nothing more than the cotton bushes that had been known in Egypt and India for generations. And the famous trained otters were nothing more than the tamed cormorants of China.
The collective disappointment was only compounded when someone analyzed Sir John’s work and found that much of it bore a suspicious resemblance to the works of other travelers, only embellished with fantastic beasts and impossible humans. Brother Odoric of Pordenone in particular was the source of much of Sir John’s account of travels through the old Byzantine Empire, Trebizond, and the Tartar lands, and it’s a mercy he was long dead by the time someone accused him of cribbing his account from Sir John, even though he’d come earlier and been far more accurate. Other victims sources ranged from the Armenian Prince Hetoum to the most famous Asian traveler of all, Marco Polo. It was all very confusing, and Sir John’s name soon became a byword for “liar” instead of “traveler.”
Popular as they had been for over a century, by the late Renaissance The Travels were widely dismissed as nothing more than fairy tales, and their author scorned as an unscrupulous fabulist. Worse, it became increasingly evident in succeeding centuries that there never had been a Sir John Mandeville of St. Albans at all.
That's right. "John Mandeville" was a pseudonym for another writer, probably a Frenchman. Although many candidates have been advanced and dismissed, the most recent theory is that the book published under the name "John Mandeville" had most likely been written by one Abbot Jan de Langhe, a Flemish Benedictine from Ypres who’d traveled only as far as Paris. Abbot Jan was an avid collector of traveler’s tales, and it may well be that he began writing simply because he wished that he, like Odoric of Pordenone and Marco Polo, had traveled to the farflung lands beyond the horizon.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville were immensely influential in their time. They are now known, if at all, as medieval nonsense, and it’s little wonder that modern writers such as Cathrynne Valente have turned to them as a source for fantasy novels rather than actual history, anthropology, etc. Despite this, though, they are certainly a classic of some sort. Abbot Jan would likely be quite pleased.
The Fremantle Diary: Being the Journal of Lieutenant Colonel James Arthur Lyon Fremantle, Coldstream Guards, on his Three Months in the Southern States, by James Arthur Lyon Fremantle. Arthur Fremantle was the very model of a modern British colonel in 1863. Born in 1835 to a distinguished military family, he had graduated from Sandhurst, the Britsh military academy, and gone straight into the Army. A year later he joined the famous Coldstream Guards, where he quickly rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and Captain of the regiment. In 1860 he was appointed as Assistant Military Secretary to the Governor of Gibraltar, and it was there that he met a man who would change the course of his life.
The man was Raphael Semmes, the legendary Confederate commerce raider. In 1862 he arrived at Gibraltar in CSS Sumter, hotly pursued by the Union navy, and asked for leave to have the Sumter refitted before another mission against the Yankees. Fremantle met Semmes sometime during Semmes’ time in Gibraltar, and before the flamboyant Confederate had left the Sumter to take command of his new ship, CSS Alabama, he had enthralled the young British officer with his tales of derring-do. Fremantle soon decided that he had to see what was going on in the New World for himself, and in 1863 he applied for a leave of absence and set out for the Confederacy.
Fremantle, like most Britons, found slavery repugnant, so his initial sympathies were with the North. This quickly changed when he actually reached the Americas. He had to enter Texas through Mexico to avoid the blockade, then slowly worked his way eastward toward Lee's army and return passage through New York.
Although he told his hosts that Briton would never recognize their new country as long as they maintained their “peculiar institution,” Fremantle was deeply impressed by the chivalry, courtesy, and gallantry of the Confederates he met. Even witnessing the Army of Northern Virginia kidnapping free blacks and herding them over the Confederate border to be sold like cattle did not change Fremantle’s admiration for General Lee and his staff, especially General Longstreet and his aides Moxley Sorrel and Thomas Goree. The courage of the men, the kindness of the officers, and the doomed brilliance of the Army of Northern Virginia at Gettysburg eventually seemed to blind him to the moral rot at the core of Confederate society, and if this trained military observer was ever aware of the fatal Southern disadvantage in men, funds, and materiel, it never seems to have sunk in.
Soon after Gettysburg and the debacle of Pickett's Charge, Fremantle left the Army of Northern Virginia and proceeded to New York, where he took ship for home in the middle of the New York draft riots. This did not improve his opinion of the North and its people, and by the time Fremantle arrived in Britain he was thoroughly convinced that the Confederates would win their independence from the North.
Of course Fremantle’s friends and fellow officers wanted to know all about his adventures, since only Union papers were available in Briton. Fortunately he had kept a diary of his three months in the South, and in 1864 he published a lively, entertaining account of his travels that quickly became popular in Briton, the South, and even the North. And despite the passage of a year, and a string of Union victories that had begun at Vicksburg and continued even to the day his book appeared in print, Fremantle still confidently predicted a Southern victory.
Fremantle married soon after his return to Briton in 1863. He went on to a distinguished career that brought him a knighthood, the governorship of Malta, and membership in the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes. Whether Fremantle ever admitted he was wrong about the South, or whether his fellow officers occasionally snickered about this behind his back, is unknown. However, a character based on Fremantle has a memorable cameo in Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, so his gaffe did that much to ensure that his memory would remain ever green in the hearts of Civil War buffs. A group of Civil War re-enactors even helped restore his grave in 1901.
Fremantle’s descendant Tom Fremantle recreated his ancestor’s Civil War journey by walking from Texas to New York in 2001 and 2002, accompanied only by a pack mule. He later wrote a book about his travels called The Moonshine Mule, ensuring that the Fremantle tradition of travel accounts, if not military observation, continued into the 21st century.
Beer and Skittles, by Mary Margaret McBride and Helen Josephy. Mary Margaret McBride was the Oprah Winfrey of her day, or at least the the B. Smith. Originally trained as a journalist, McBride was one of American's most popular radio hosts during the Depression, World War II, and the early 1950s. Her folksy broadcasts, first as "Martha Deane," then as herself, combined news, opinion, recipes, commercials (but only for products she herself used and liked), and entertainment in a package that female radio listeners found most appealing. Parodied by Bob and Ray as inept cooking teacher "Mary Margaret McGoon" and I Love Lucyas "Mary Margaret McMertz," McBride was a true American institution.
She was also a writer, penning a weekly newspaper column between 1953 and 1956, as well as a recipe book, a book on jazz with band leader Paul Whiteman, and several travel books, co-written with her friend Helen Josephy. These good ladies, who resembled nothing so much as a pair of Helen Hokinson matrons, enjoyed visiting Europe during those halcyon days when well off Americans could tour the cultural capitols of the West for less money than the price of a iPad, and their enthusiasm for their subject is obvious.
Beer and Skittles was their fourth travel book, after London is a Man's Town, Paris is a Woman's Town, and New York is Everyone's Town, and very entertaining it is. The prospective tourist learns the customs and annual festivals of even the most obscure cities and towns in Germany, the best local restaurants and hotels, the price of a glass of beer or wine – everything that a discerning traveler would wish for in a book about Germany is here. So why is this charming little book So Bad It’s Good?
It’s a fair question, since based purely on literary quality Beer and Skittles isn’t nearly bad enough to count as a BSBIG. But when one reads the book, and then looks at the publication date, and then reads the book again, the faint sense that something isn’t quite right becomes stronger, and stronger. And then it becomes obvious, and the reader curses herself for being just as blind as Mary Margaret McBride and Helen Josephy.
Because despite being published in 1932, there is not even the slightest hint that Germany was about to descend into twelve years of Nazi-dominated hell.
Now, in the authors’ defense, they were writing a travelogue, not a political treatise. They were describing what it was like to travel in what was then a free and democratic republic, so expecting them to include a chapter or the occasional paragraph warning Americans to keep a weather eye out for rioting Brownshirts is perhaps asking a bit much. Herr Hitler of the Chaplinesque mustache was regarded as something of an international joke in 1932, so it’s possible that McBride and Josephy, like so many others, never dreamed he’d take power less than a year after Beer and Skittles was published. It’s also true that foreigners, particularly Americans and Britons, were by and large treated well by even the most fanatical Nazis, who hoped to curry favor with their fellow “Nordics.”
At the same time, other books from the same time period, like William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, make it clear that life was far from normal in Germany in the early 1930s. The Nazis and Communists were openly brawling in the streets, wealthy Jews were quietly moving money and possessions to other European countries, and political rhetoric was, to say the least, heated; one anti-Hitler faction known as the Poison Kitchen published repeated exposes of Hitler's bad behavior and ridiculous ideas, even to the point of staging a mock trial of his very non-Aryan nose. American citizens who were married to Germans, or had German relatives, or spoke German, or looked German (or Jewish) risked censure or worse if they didn’t salute the Stormtroopers as they paraded about the cities, and there was a noticeable and rising tension throughout the first years of the 1930s that one would have had to have been willfully blind not to notice.
Far be it from me to accuse McBride and co-author of willful blindness; they were only writing a travelogue, after all. But one would have thought that they would have at least wanted to warn Americans (especially Jews) that they might, just might, want to watch their step until they were safely back on the ship for home.
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And so, my fellow far-travelers – have you ever encountered a travel guide that steered you wrong? A Rough Guide that sent you to far rougher accommodations than you actually wanted? A Fodor’s that recommended Ma Maison d’Bedbug or Der Hassenpfeffer Verklempt as the perfect honeymoon spot? A local tourist guide written by the owner of the place where the local whores kick holes in the walls while engaging in the oldest profession? Don’t be shy – it’s Saturday night and you know what that means….
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