Before the Baedeker

[Bled Welder]

Think about it you literate freakazoids.  My children.  What happened to
Ruggles a few months ago.  He decided to go digital.

Chabon you god your dad loves you you idiot.  Get up and dance.

You may now call me Audrey.  I see into galaxies.  And other universes.
 Are any of you people going to stop flicking into google and read the book
I gave you.

It's not a question.  I'm telling you.  I'll finish it for you later you
paranoid absolutites.

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 6:09 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <
lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

>
> Under the influence of Pynchon, I always thought that - among the many
> problematic things about modernity that have a German origin - modern
> travel guides, as a medium to prevent experience of the Other rather than
> to enable it, were the invention of Karl Baedeker. Imagine my surprise when
> I learned that this is not the case! In the last paragraph of the third
> chapter in the third part of Hans Christian Andersen's novel *Only a
> fiddler* (orig. Kun en Spillemand; dt. Nur ein Spielmann) from 1837, I
> yesterday read about Naomi, the female counter-protagonist of Christian the
> fiddler, that she, sitting in the carriage on her way to Italy, "has a map
> of Italy on her lap and *Mariane* [sic] *Starke*, the well known Italy
> travel guide, beside her".  Me I had never heard about Mariana Starke
> before, and there isn't much in the net, so I could imagine that she's
> largely forgotten. From wikipedia I learned that her travel literature got
> published long before Baedeker's, the volume on Italy first in the year
> 1800 (*Letters from Italy, between the years 1792 and 1798 containing a
> view of the Revolutions in that country*, 2 vols. London, 1800). The more
> general *Travels on the Continent* appeared in 1820. It is also noted
> that Starke revolutionized travel literature: "Previously travel guides had
> concentrated on architectural and scenic descriptions of the places to be
> visited by wealthy young men on the Grand Tour. Starke recognised that with
> the enormous growth in the number of Britons travelling abroad after 1815
> the majority of her readers would now be travelling in family groups and
> often on a budget. She therefore included for the first time a wealth of
> advice on luggage, obtaining passports, the precise cost of food and
> accommodation in each city and even advice on the care of invalid family
> members. She also devised a system of !!! exclamation mark ratings, a
> forerunner of today's 'stars'." This comes already pretty close to the
> world of Baedeker, no?
>
> Andersen's novel is a gem.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Starke
>
>
>
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