Word: xanadu
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Coleridge moved "caves of ice" to Xanadu from the Kashmir region of northern India, where they had been described in 1795 by the Rev. Thomas Maurice in The History of Hindostan. Alexander and a friend, forbidden to travel there because of political turmoil, attached themselves to a mob of religious pilgrims and pressed on regardless. The journey was not entirely spiritual; an overcrowded campsite was fouled with human dung. This does not prevent Alexander from creating a beautiful scene. "I saw, on drawing back the tent flaps," she writes, "snowdrifts gleaming on the towering black peaks and, a long...
...cargo manifest for Caroline Alexander's learned and delightful work of literary voyaging (The Way to Xanadu; Knopf; $23) might read something like this: toothbrush, 1; wide-brimmed straw hat, 1; large, leatherbound geographical and poetical tomes, six or seven dozen. But Alexander's account of her travels, undertaken to set foot and mind on the actual places around the globe that inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge's misty and fantastical poem Kubla Khan, carries its erudition lightly...
...journeying begins as it should, in libraries, and in particular with a 1927 work, The Way to Xanadu, by the British scholar John Livingston Lowes. He not only traced literary and mythological influences on the poet's imagery, but demonstrated that Coleridge (1772-1834) was a tireless armchair traveller. There was, in fact, a real Xanadu (more commonly called Shangdu) with the remains of real walls and towers. Marco Polo had been there. And there were in the world -- though not in the same place except on Coleridge's bookshelf -- marvellous caves of ice, mighty fountains, rivers that might well...
...vast, cold Alpine wall seen through the broken window of a bourgeois living room, with shards of glass on the floor that still carry bits of the sublime view on them, is the title of Poe's 1846 tale about a superrich American landscape connoisseur who creates a Xanadu for himself. "Let us imagine," says Poe's hero, "a landscape whose combined vastness and definitiveness -- whose united beauty, magnificence and strangeness shall convey the idea of care, or culture . . . on the part of beings superior, yet akin to humanity . . ." Yes, one can well imagine Magritte liking that. His work...
Before Disney World, Orlando's attractions were the Tupperware Museum and Gatorland, where visitors could watch alligators lunging for chicken carcasses. Gatorland is still there, but now there are Sea World and Reptile World, Wet 'n Wild and the Mystery Fun House, Xanadu and Cypress Gardens. In Orlando, restaurants, hotels, shops and golf courses all want to be theme parks, or at least themes. A store selling Christmas trinkets is called Christmas World. There are Bargain World, Flea World, Bedroom Land and Waterbedroom Land. At the Medieval Times restaurant, patrons can eat roas meat with their hands and watch knights...