Untimely Book Reviews: The Voyage of Johannes de Plano Carpini

By Roy Kesey
BEIJING, CHINA-

The Voyage of Johannes de Plano Carpini
Author: Johannes de Plano Carpini
ISBN: unknown, probably low four-digits
Publication Date: 1249 A.D.
Publisher: Pope Innocent IV

Please be forewarned: I am not speaking, here, of Erik Hildinger's relatively recent and by all accounts eminently readable translation of de Plano Carpini’s Historia Mongalorum Quos Nos Tartaros Appellamus, of which I have not yet gotten ahold. I am speaking instead of the version of that text that later appeared as the second chapter of the thirty-second book of Vicentius Beluacensis’ Speculum Historiale, and was translated and reprinted in the 1598-1600 edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries.

Just so that’s clear.

I have already thought publicly a bit about this book, but as it is an unusual book in many ways, I have decided to think about it just a little more. But first some background: In 1246, Pope Innocent IV realized that Western Europe wasn’t going to be able to stop the Mongols with swords and shields and lances and whatnot, so it was time to try with diplomacy. He sent de Plano Carpini as his ambassador to the court of the Mongols, and the friar arrived in time for the coronation of Güyük Khaan, grandson of Chinggis Khaan, in 1246. He stayed in Mongolia for fifteen months, give or take, and his mission was unsuccessful but ultimately unnecessary, as Güyük Khaan drank himself to death in 1248, and his imperial successor, Möngke Khaan, decided that it would be more fun to expand southeastward than southwestward.

Güyük Khaan

 

The narrative in question is a mixture of straightforward detail that rings mostly exotic but true, of opinions and description redolent of European prejudices at the time, and of the most outlandish fable. Perhaps the most interesting parts are (not to go all Carlo Ginzburg on your ass, but, well, here we are) the unwritten bits in the gaps: the straightforward detail generally pertains to what de Plano Carpini witnessed firsthand, and the fabular bits are generally things he has heard secondhand, but he seems to imply no difference in truth value between these two sorts of information.

Thus, he blithely segues from the “innumerable multitude of dead men’s skulls and bones” that he saw near the smoking remains of recently-pillaged Kiev to the expedition of a Mongol prince into Armenia as told to him by Russian clerics, wherein the prince allegedly ran into “monsters in the shape of men, which had each of them but one arm and one hand growing out of the midst of their breast, and but one foot. Two of them used to shoot in one bow, and they ran so swiftly, that horses could not overtake them. They ran also upon that one foot by hopping and leaping, and being weary of such walking they went upon their hand and their foot, turning themselves round, as it were in a circle. (…) Isidore calleth them cyclopedes.”

The book takes pains to show the whole wallful of hats that de Plano Carpini wore on this trip: traveler (“Of the Journey of Friar John unto the First Guard of the Tartars”), missionary (“How the Friars coming at length unto the Emperor gave, and received Letters”), cartographer (“Of the Situation and Quality of the Tartar’s Land”), anthropologist (“Of their Form, Habit and Manner of Living”), sociologist (“Of their Manners both good and bad”), historian (“Of the beginning of their Empire or Government”) and unintentional mythologist (“How being repelled by Monstrous Men shapen like Dogs, they overcame the People of Burithabeth”), diplomat (“Of the Admission of the Friars and Ambassadors unto the Emperor), and spy (“How the Tartars behave themselves in War”; “How they may be Resisted”). In the last-mentioned chapter, he is somewhat pessimistic, or perhaps realistic, given the Mongols’ success on the battlefield in recent decades: “I deem not any one kingdom or province able to resist them.”

Mongol warrior

And how to read a book like this? “(O)ne has to learn to read the evidence against the grain, against the intentions of those who had produced it,” says Ginzburg. (Again with the Ginzburg!) As if a fairy tale, eyes half-closed: that is another option. Yet another: as if metafiction written in our own day by Calvino or Barthelme. And there are surely dozens of other options, and if we are lucky, a life long enough to try them all.

Untimely Book Reviews: Almost No Memory

By Roy Kesey
BEIJING, CHINA-

Almost No Memory, by Lydia Davis
ISBN: 9780312420550
Publisher: Picador USA
Publication Date: September 2001
Dimensions: 7.92 x 5.48 x. 47 in., .55 lbs.

There is high genius here. Of the fifty or so stories, I will return over and over to perhaps ten of them. And even as regards the ones I won’t return to, it is most often a question not of fictional failure but of personal taste, the way someone else might not understand my enthusiasm for Hopkins, and I might not understand their enthusiasm for Swinburne, but we can still play buzkashi together, for example, and eat some bacon, if both of us happened to like buzkashi and bacon.

Buzkashi

Bacon

Now: there is no buzkashi in this book, and no bacon that I remember, but there are a fair number of inebriated and confused persons, and a vast number of untidy houses. This is one way Davis gives the book a sense of structure; another, more interesting way that she does so is by establishing a given number of formal options and alternating them regularly. I could make a list of those options (1st-person Relationship Pensées, Longer 1st-person Stories With Things That Almost Happen, 3rd-person Relationship Pensées, Stories About Writing, Intellectual Machines, Surreal Villages, Other [Realist], and Other [Not]) but then if I made another list ten minutes later there would be entirely different categories (Mirror Stories, He Said/She Said, Language as Paring Knife…) not because the stories had changed in that ten-minute interval but because I had, and this is perhaps an example of the book at its most structurally successful. However there were also moments when, before turning the page, I could correctly guess the Next Type of Story to Appear, and that is perhaps an example of the book at its least structurally successful, but even then there are workings of language and/or insight sufficiently extraordinary to make me forget that I had unhappily guessed right.

It is in the surreal villages that my favorite stories take place--the women of “The Thirteenth Woman” and “The Cedar Trees,” the fog and teeth and cynical trees of “Smoke.” I say that, and then I change my mind and prefer the careful thought and deep intuition of “Pastor Elaine’s Newsletter”; then the sharp metamusings of “What Was Interesting”; then the smartly fragmented history of “Lord Royston’s Tour”; then realize that not even a robot could be left unstirred by “This Condition” or (in a totally, totally, totally different way) “Odd Behavior.” And I am not sure there is any greater sort of success.

An Open Letter to the Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine

By Roy Kesey
BEIJING, CHINA-

Dear Sir or Ma'am:

I am writing to you today in response to the letter you published in your issue of February 22nd of this year (Volume 356 — Number 8) from one Oronte Churm of Inner Station, in which said person states, “It’s come to my attention that some members of my community object to the term ‘double-enders,’ which I used recently to describe a vicious bout of simultaneous explosive diarrhea and projectile vomiting. I was simply being discreet, but one would never know it from the looks I got from Ms. Nipple, the schoolmarm; Mr. Reacharound, the parson; and Major Waste, who is fresh back from the war. Learned sir or ma’am, I beseech you to endorse my term in your prestigious journal, so that nevermore will the afflicted suffer insult to injury. And please find a cure for anal polyps, if that’s your thing.”

It has now come about, most probably as a direct result of said letter, that the term in question, “double-ender,” is fast gaining currency among certain less couth elements in our American society, and has even been commented favorably upon IN PUBLIC by at least two members of your current staff.

As a chronic sufferer of Bipolar Gastroenterological Distress (BGD), I must protest. The term “double-ender” conjures up images at once sexual (cf. “double-snowball,” “double-felch,” et al.), industrial (“double-loader,” “double-drill”), and athletic (“double-dribble”) in the mind of the listener, and I can assure you that none of these three fields have any bearing whatsoever on the distended abdominal tract of your average BGD victim.

(Except possibly the basketball one, given that five minutes of BGD requires a caloric and hydrational re-input disturbingly similar to that required after a ninety-minute game of full-court one-on-one.)

I therefore request that the aforementioned NEJM staff members be fired at once, and that you and the remaining members of your staff throw your considerable medicinal and terminological prestige behind an effort to encourage all American citizens to refer to BGD in the only possible way that is both physiologically appropriate and sensitive to the feelings of its victims.

Which is “BGD.”

Yours in learning,

Yesek Yor
Beijing, China

Strings

By Roy Kesey

BEIJING, CHINA-

This diagonalness of this photograph is important without being intentional. More on that in a moment, but for the time being, this: I am not a great fan of puppets. I am, however, a fan of puppet emperors. Or, rather, not a fan of them as such, but intrigued by their lives: the gilded cage, the symbols removed from all practical context--absolute powerlessness in the guise of absolute power.

A classic case: Pu Yi. His life story is of course well known, albeit in conflicting versions, including Bertolucci's, his tutor's, his "own": made emperor at an age when most of us were playing with colored blocks; the kindergarten-age abdication in 1912 and the following years of genteel house arrest in the Forbidden City; the six-day warlord-induced restoration in 1917; the other-warlord-induced expulsion from the Forbidden City in 1924, a decade in the Japanese concession of Tianjin, and then the reinstatement by the Japanese as emperor of the pretend country of Manchukuo in 1934; the Soviet invasion in 1945 and five years of further house arrest in the U.S.S.R.; the return to China and the ensuing nine years of menial labor in a prison camp at Shenyang; his subsequent career as a gardener, his marriage in 1962, his death in 1967.

While in Changchun for a recent wedding, I took a brief respite from the hops-and-barley inclined celebrations, and went with a few friends to see the palace that the Japanese built to house Pu Yi. The requisite weirdness was on full display: the Japanese needed the palace to be grand enough that it might seem fitting for an emperor, but not so grand that Pu Yi would get any ideas of actual grandness. There were the usual displays, the usual objects:

There were creepy wax figures...

...and still creepier ones.

There were placards detailing bits of Pu Yi's life, and the life of the empress, and the life of Li Yuqin, the Happiness Imperial Concubine, and there is nothing happy about any of it, but the sadness is kept at a distance by velvet ropes and time.

Then we went out to the garden to the east, and saw the hill there under which is located the immense warren-like bomb shelter built for Pu Yi and his entourage. Which is where I started to understand things at a more visceral level. Here is what it looks like inside with the lights on:

Here's the door that was pictured above, only this time shot intentionally:

And now at last the explanation of that early diagonalness: the first picture in this post was not taken to record detail for posterity, or to preserve material I thought I might need later. I was simply standing in the middle of one of the vaults...

Did I mention that my friends had already had quite enough of dark and claustrophobic cement-and-steel enclosures for one day, and had preceded me up the ladders and out into the open air? Or that this was all taking place at five p.m., when the palace closes for the day?

Well, they had, and it was.

And at five o'clock sharp the lights in the bomb shelter went out.

Pure blackness. Solid, yes, and pure, and black: a thing around me. And I stood there alone in it and felt it pressing in and all of a sudden there it was: Pu Yi's life.

I stood there until I couldn't stand it anymore, and then used the flash of my camera--my only available light source--to find my way out.

Of the Plum Blossom Festival and Some Things That Happened There

By Roy Kesey

BEIJING-

(All photographs by Jeff Cheap, used with grateful thanks.)

Not long ago I was in Nanjing for neither the first nor last time and was invited to participate in the 2007 Nanjing International Plum Blossom Festival. The exact nature of my participatory role was somewhat unclear to me, as such things most often are, but I walked happily up to the festival nonetheless, mainly because I had never seen the plum trees of Plum Blossom Hill in bloom, and had always wanted to.

Unfortunately, most of the trees were still not in bloom, and the weather was cold and gray and windy, and my choice of clothing was spring- rather than winter-oriented. I tracked down the group of Foreign Guests to which I belonged (there is always a group of Foreign Guests at these events; this group consisted mainly of young and friendly Beijing-based writers whom the Nanjing city government had invited to town such that they [the writers] might then say and write nice things about the city of Nanjing, and I myself was in town for a book release for a book that in the end was not released…) and took a seat and was interviewed for a radio program.

Fortunately, the questions were easy: no word problems about how long it will take for two motorboats setting off from separate ports at different times and traveling at dissimilar speeds to crash into one another and explode in a huge and awesome-looking fireball, for example.

In front of us there was a large stage set up, but no one yet on it, and the seating consisted of perhaps six hundred chairs spread out around us in perfect lines. The southeast quarter was full of army officers.

The other three quarters were for designated invitees, except for the foremost few rows, which had their own tables and tea and were full of authorities from here and elsewhere: a UN representative for tourism, a bunch of municipal, provincial and national cadres, the mayor, the vice governor, minor officials from India and France and Singapore, consuls from Shanghai, local Tourism Bureau people, and press. There were also some normal people seated on little blankets and straw mats on the swell of earth behind us.

The opening speeches were relatively short and painless, though they included sentences like, “In recent years, under the correct leadership of CPC Jiangsu Provincial Committee, Jiangsu Provincial Government, CPC Nanjing Committee and Nanjing Municipal Government, we have adhered to the strategy of ‘revitalizing and strengthening Nanjing through tourism’ and have sped up our effort in urban construction.” Correct leadership: this is the sort of phrase that should have stopped bothering me years ago, but hasn’t yet. We were also told several times that the plum blossom represents peace, friendship, prosperity, happiness, and the pioneering and exploring spirit of Chinese people, which is a lot of symbolism for one flower to hold, however pretty.

After the speeches, twenty cadres took the stage, and then twenty of us Foreign Guests were herded up to receive our Bo Ai (translated in the speeches as “Messenger of Philanthropy,” but I prefer “Universal Lover”) Certificates. These certificates were housed in glittery red-and-gold cardboard book-like objects. We then turned and smiled for the cameras, our positioning and respective heights such that we blocked out those from whom we’d received the certificates perfectly.

The rest of the event consisted of the Spring is All Over the Mountain Plum Blossom Program: this was mostly differently-dressed people lip-synching to over-produced pop music of various kinds. The two talent-show-style hosts were Jin Haining and Sun Nan, and he was goofy and she was beautiful, just like on television everywhere, and they both over-enunciated with great enthusiasm.

First there was a group called Ansai Drum. They consisted of nearly a hundred people: a fair number of lion-dressed acrobats (two acrobats per lion), and six very long and colorful dragons each with about a dozen dancers inside. To be frank, I like this kind of thing very much although (and because) the music is terrible.

There were then a few songs sung by various local stars, followed by the “Competition of Plum Blossoms,” a mélange of all possible types of local opera. There were perhaps eighty performers in all, one group from each kind of opera, each taking center stage for thirty or forty seconds to do a few steps and sing a few bars. There was also a group of child acrobats. As a whole it was impossible to follow but fun to watch, and the outfits were spectacular.

Then there was more singing, many of the singers accompanied by dancers dressed in gauze doing their best not to look very, very cold. The finest of this lot--the finest of the whole program, in fact--was “O sole mio” sung in proper Neapolitan by a Chinese trio: A Bao, Chen Hanhan, and Zhou Jinxing. Zhou came on stage first, and he was a perfectly competent western opera singer. Next came Chen, a television-special-type singer with television-special-type hair, but he had a sense of humor and hit the notes. Last came A Bao, a famous falsetto folk singer, and he sang this song too in falsetto but with proper western-opera-type grimacing, and Chen and Zhou and all of us in the audience were laughing so hard we could barely sing along.

The show closed with “What a Big Tree,” a mishmash pastiche of all the opera singers and jumping lions and dragon-dancers and pop lip-synchers on and around the stage at the same time and no one had any idea what was going on and I have rarely been so happy to be anywhere.