Pourous with Travel Fever: The Preamble to the World Tour

This past week was a bit like that time Obama came out to the Democratic National Convention in Denver two nights ahead of the nomination in a surprise appearance that whetted the palates of centrist and leftist alike.  Or like the time Madonna made an impromtu visit to Belgrade, where a thousand moustachioed youths, male and female , chanted her name in unison from the street below her balcony. (Later the swarm of ingrates was taken down by the government police in a bloodbath that is less frequently, though only somewhat less fondly, remembered.)

I preamble with specific reference to how I, too, made impromptu alightment upon Washington, D.C. on Friday, thereby jumpstarting my travels and sojurns that will sail me through the long remainder of March.  I awoke at 5am, getting only 3 hours of sleep, and remained awake until 1am the next morning, a marathon of travel, study, and rejuvenating exile from the horrors and ennui of Gotham.  While there, I leafed through some manuscripts and, detatched pages, and single-leaf paintings for research on my dissertation.  The Chief Curator of the Sackler (who is going to be a reader on my dissertation) greeted me warmly; the art handler, a garroulous Jew, rebuked me gently for bending a single-leaf painting ever so slightly to read the text on the verso (until I reminded him that before I was a Ph.D. candidate, I was a curator, and then he courteously stepped aside); later he regaled me with stories of how he refused to bow to the Empress of Japan when she visited in the 80s.  She knew what her husband did, he explained.  He also opened every storage container for me to fondle visually and with hands the treasures housed in that institution, which was an honest delight for this weary peripatetic Islamicist.

I preamble

This past weekend, I made all final arrangements for my upcoming journeys.  Even now,  maintaining some semblance of composure and alertness despite a night of 1 hour's rest, I write from the terminal of an aeroport, en route -- through sleet, snow, and frozen fog -- to the Carribbean, where I must tend to family affairs.  These include bearing witness to my mother's annual gambling binge; and bearing witness to my mother's annual drinking binge.  In the meantime, I will exercise and get a little sun and rest, preparing for the next leg of my travels.

I return this coming weekend, and then depart a week from today for Ireland via Paris.  While there, I shall leaf through four further manuscripts at the Chester Beatty Library, one of which is the anchor of my dissertation (a Divan of Hafiz with over 450 pictures, all erotic in content, depicting different combinations of the elderly and the youthful, male and female, twos and threes, and sometimes fours when a procuress watches in anticipation of the final pentration) with weekend breaks and St. Patrick's Day off for rest.  I have been charged with 1) riding a bus outside the city to view the green pastures of the Emerald Isle; 2) serving as a gaywill envoy to those barbaric Hibernians whose blood runs a bit more rose than red; 3) taking in a local sheep-herding contest (which I believe is actually more Welsh than Irish, but my friend who recommended this, another garroulous Jew, apparently knows what she is talking about); 4) hang around Temple Bar until the wee hours, when a chorus of barbaric Hibernians with fiddles will begin to "jam"; and 5) puking a thick noxious brown fluid known as Guiness in Temple Bar.

The Curator at the Chester Beatty is awaiting my arrival; I have only met her once: a fat spider of a woman with oily skin and dry hair; the one time I met her, she wore a fishnet chemise that made me think her a harpy washed up from the North Sea and plumped  before her eventual sacrifice to the sea gods.  She's also grumpy.  I like her deeply.

From Dublin, I shall board an aerojet to London, where I have a 12 hour layover at Stansted....I hate layovers at Stansted.  I want to die everytime.  Although, to be fair, the last time I had one, I met a kindly Norweigian woman who was knowledgable of Eco's essays on narratology.

The highlight of the layover will be, first of all, my meeting up with my secret lover, Mrs. Shannon Wearing-Tiku, of the Detroit/Mumbai Wearing-Tikus (not the Cinncinnati/Hyderabad Wearing-Tikus, who are insufferable); but more importantly, the sandwich shoppe at Standsted where they make prosciutto-mozzerrella-sour cherry relish fiselles.  I usually eat two while I am there.

Mrs. Wearing-Tiku and I will then journey in complete scandal and under cover of night to Sevilla, whereafter we shall check into an unassuming converted 17th-century palace (once home to a homosexual duke whose depravity could not be hid amidst the swarthy half-bred Andaluciano youths, and whose name has not be lost in the labyrinth of history not unlike the winding streets of Arab Iberia); later, we will locate a small tavern where a aging gypsy woman will regale us through song and dance of the loss of her lover to a jezebel, both of whom she killed before killing herself.  Then Mrs. Wearing-Tiku and I head to sleep.  Other legs of our journey include bus rides through the dusty landscape to Cordoba (more complete scandal, more cover of night, more unassuming converted palacios), where we will stay in the Jewish quarter directly across from the courtyard entrance to the  Great Mosque, upon whose double horseshoe archs and forest of columns much undue remark has been made, but whose mihrab is one of the great wonders of medieval Musulman architecture; and Madinat al-Zahra, the 8th century palace-city and seat of the  Umayyad caliphate of al-Andalus (the descendents of the sole survivor of Abu Muslim's extremist and zealous massacre of Marwan II and his kin - this survivor also escaped under cover of night and disappeared through North Africa, bringing Berbers and Bedouin with him to the foot of Europe), the mosaics of which are pretty.  Mrs. Wearing-Tiku is especially fond of the columnar capitals of the Madina, which were produced and inscribed by Christian slaves of the rulers.  She knows all about them, often gazing wistfully at the delicate foliage carved into them, I believe reveling in their unique history.

From Cordoba, Mrs. Wearing-Tiku and I shall travel to Granada, where we shall find accommodations at a 4-star, completely renovated post-modern/deco revival hotel, the patio cafe of which overlooks the hilltop palace of al-Khamra (Alhambra).  By donkey, we will cart ourselves to the palace of Shmuel Naghrallah, Jewish vizier to the Zirids of North Africa, as well as the better known monuments erected under the Ta'ifa (Party) Kinglets and Nasrid amirs of Granada.

From Granada, I take my leave of Mrs. Wearing-Tiku, of whose baloney I will by that time be sick and tired - tears the whole way about how sinful our life has become, how she misses her calmer and more successful husband, my archenemy Tiku, and ever burning incense and offering flowers to the Virgin, even in the Great Mosque!  I return to ol' Londontown, where I will be staying in Russell Square in a gigantic Victorian tower built on the wealth of the colonial enterprise.  I attend a conference on the intersection between Shi'ism and the arts, view the exhibition on the Great Sophy Shah 'Abbas, and continue in my role as gaywill envoy from America.

By the end of the month, I will be refreshed, having turned my back for an extended period on New York, the finanacial crisis, the terrible weather, and the stress of it all.  Know, friends, that though I turn my back on the New World, I shan't ever turn my heart or thoughts from you!  And I will return to greet you all warmly with a shake of the hand and a slap on the rear.  Perhaps a goosey pinch for good measure.

Wish me well for my journeys, and I look forward to sending occassional missives electronically giving you status updates and relieving your worry over whether I have grown too accustomed to the ways of the Old World.