Word: xanadu
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...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...
...movie are spirited away by annoying, ridiculous, and cartoonish little grim reapers, while the dear are called to the heavens by free-floating white Christmas lights. Many times blue screen outlines are visible, and Swayze, in motion, often looks like a laser-streaked rollerskater form the 1980 classic Xanadu...