larping all the way (page 88)
You already know I love Viking things (Discursive Aside page 19). Did you also know that I have a theme song? Ally McBeal has a theme song. Well, I also have a theme song. It´s a song sung by Chinese girls from the perspective of themselves as Vikings:
They sing of how their loves and lives got transmitted down over the ages as Scandinavian mythology. Facts.
I´ve always found the North interesting. Canada is the True North, strong and free, and I love it for that. In Northern Lights, by Philip Pullman, Lyra goes up to Trollesund, then Svalbard, or Spitsbergen, and I go with her, by bearback, by Tatar-sled, by imagination.
One of the things I like about Chinese religion, is that it just takes it all in. There´s folk religion, there´s Buddhism, there´s Daoism, there´s Confucianism, then later on Jesus Christ´s younger Chinese brother joined in by leading the Taiping Rebellion. It´s just very syncretic.
My approach to stories is pretty syncretic, too. I love S.H.E´s Mandarin pop turn as Viking girls in the music video above. And I love that Atlantis, can be in any sea.
Atlantis was found a couple of times (and luckily caught on camera by Walt Disney himself). In the 1800s Professor Lindenbrook´s expedition (which included an eiderduck) got to Atlantis in the center of the earth. In the early 1900s Milo Thatch, linguist and cartographer, got his expedition to that lost empire as well.
Emil Hering tells me that Atlantis was really Vineta, and he showed me pictures of it.
And here´s the village smith making flying daggers, after Wilhelmina Wang had transmitted to him the knowledge.
Vineta wasn´t terribly big. It was a trade city, the way the Hanseatic Cities were. Plagued by pirates like Störtebeker and Wickie and the Strong Men, it would hide out in different lagoons and bays, inlets and shoals, above and under the water, under Germanic and under Slavic flags, sometimes as inland as the flat lakes of Mecklenburg, sometimes as far out as the straits of Kattegat. It was a flexible city, the way trade cities are, and it was fine to hide snug as a waterbug on a tug-boat in the reef off Zinnowitz, or in the Bodden behind Zingst, by the castle of Ralswiek, or surrounded by the River Peene. There are floating castles, and walking ones, too. There are castles in the sky, and castles under the sea. Why not moving cities that drift along the streams, from the Prussian inlands to the Nordic waters, from the fresh fish in the sweet lakes bordering Brandenburg, to the oily fish in the salt waves of the Suebic Sea?
Emil Hering assures me, Vineta was such a drifting, dreamy, coquettish city, its harbours and quays welcoming travellers and traders, hiding from marauders and pirates, the way the waves reveal then cover the beaches, erode then rebuild the cliffs. So it was that this Vineta welcomed Wilhelmina Wang from Chang´an, Janosch A. Prufrock from Anglia, Ludwig van Beethoven from Borussia, and the talking tiger Laohu whose Ur-laohus once roamed the bank and swam the length of Amur River between Serica and Tatar Siberia.