aquatic sports

There are 2 posts tagged aquatic sports (this is page 1 of 1).

Marco Po-Snow

It’s President’s Day and it’s snowing like the Dickens.

I’m still sick, which is just glorious, and my symptoms have morphed into some kind of cold with all the sneezing and snot and coughing up all sorts of nastiness. I’ve also become like like an unlucky spouse in Law & Order, banging my head and face into door frames as I pass by.

I can see Sarah fielding questions at the grocery store from some overzealous security officer. “Excuse me, ma’am. How did your husband get that black eye?”

“He, uh, walked into a door.”

I don’t have a black eye, though. Just a bruised ego and a few drips of spilled coffee on my pants.

My reading presses on, though.

Marco Polo has gone to Japan and India and has stopped at all sorts of cities and villages in-between, but the real news today is how the pool game Marco Polo came into being. More specifically, why do players call out “Marco Polo” rather than, say, any other phrase in English?

There are a few possible answers, but my favorite is that Marco Polo had a reputation amongst sailors as someone who didn’t really know where he was going. So, sailors would play the game on their ships to pass the time — one player blindfolded and calling out, “Marco!” while the others hide and call back, “Polo!” How or why the game got moved into a swimming pool is anybody’s guess, but I do like the image of Marco Polo as some blind, bumbling Billy waist-deep in water calling out his own goddamned name in hopes of discovering where he ought to go.

This is somewhat backed up by Polo’s financial status, which wasn’t all that great, or, at least, wasn’t helped by his travels. He didn’t make all that much money as a merchant and he sure didn’t make much from publishing the tale of his travels. What wealth he had later in life was mostly owed to his being a respected name in Venetian society.

So, maybe he wasn’t that great of a merchant, but he sure was a great traveler. Or, maybe he was just at it for a really, really long time.

That’s probably all you need to get good at anything, really. Just keep at it.

Both lost and diarrhea

The Old Boy, whom I have retained as an unlikely editor and site manager, tells me that my readers are getting antsy. “They cannot handle waiting for something for which they long, but perhaps it is good for them to do so. Character-building, you know.”

Editors talk like that. The good ones, anyway.

I’ve been hit by some kind of bug that has sapped most of my energy for the last week or so. There’s a nasty flu going around the school, and I’m not sure if I’ve got it or if I’m just getting hit by the February Mehs. Or maybe I’m allergic my aura.

Whatever the case, when I’m not at work or doing assignments for my university class, I’m sleeping.

I have had time to finish In Xanadu, however, and have moved on to The Travels of Marco Polo, which is probably one of the oldest books on this list. (It was first published in 1299 A.D.) The version I am reading came from Project Gutenberg, the site where you can download just about any public domain book in epub or pdf format.

The real challenge of this version isn’t that it’s over 700 years old, or that it was originally written in Old French — it’s that the text is 80% footnotes.

I probably should have read Travels before reading In Xanadu, but I honestly didn’t realize Travels was on the list of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die. I should have guessed. It is a popular text, and one of the earliest “travel books.” It was the entire inspiration for William Dalrymple’s journey and has inspired countless others to wander around Asia, getting both lost and diarrhea.

Ah, the good ol’ days.

The Travels of Marco Polo is an example of European Medieval Literature, which can be a little difficult to get into. We modern readers understand modern books in ways that we take for granted; we all recognize that modern books are written to sell, follow certain kinds of structures, adhere to sets of rules that are specific to genre. We assume every author wants to write a bestseller and reach as wide an audience as possible. 

For Medieval Literature, though, publishers didn’t exist, and who knows what authors were thinking? There was no printing press, so it is unlikely that people wrote books in hopes of becoming rich and famous. It was just too difficult and too costly to make copies of the texts — only the incredibly wealthy or members of the aristocracy could afford them. Were these authors just writing for posterity? For fame, or to add to academic knowledge? Nobody knows, but very few copies were probably made initially. Some sources say there were only a few dozen, all copied by hand.

More copies would have came slowly after that, until the printing press came about (1440 A.D.), at which point everyone started shouting in their pool and wielding big hammers on horseback.

The truth probably is that Marco Polo told his story for posterity and would have been pleasantly surprised to realize it’d last as long as it has. Either that or he was just really bored in prison and dictated this book to kill time.