Literary Landmarks in England

If one is a true book geek, one regards a literary tour of the British Isles with an earnestness roughly equivalent to the earnestness with which Catholics regard a pilgrimage to Rome.  How could any self-respecting bookgeek not want to visit the places they've come to know and love through the pages of such immortal works as Pride and Prejudice, The Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, Henry V, Le Morte d'Arthur, Ode to a Nightengale, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, and The Adventures of Robin Hood?  How could any true bibliophile not long for the opportunity to sit in the same pub where Oscar Wilde got his abisinthe on, where Hemingway toasted the RAF over amber inches of whiskey, or where Kit Marlowe met his infamous end, stabbed through the eye in a fight over a bar bill?

It may be years before I am able to actually make this pilgrimage, but as such a tour occupies one of the top ten spots on my bucket list, I am going to attend to this before I die.  And in the meantime, there's no reason I can't console myself by compiling and regularly revising the following list of requisite stops on my ever expanding mental itenerary.

Note that, for the most part, I'm deliberately omitting the houses where authors grew up.  Except in some special circumstances (like the Bronte ___), they're just houses: they have little to do with an author's actual output

NOVEL DESTINATIONS (by author)

1. Jane Austin. How can you read Jane Austen and not long to experience the streets of glamorous, aristocratic Bath, in the footsteps of so many of her most memorable characters?  These days "taking the water" at the Pump Room may not be quite the social ceremony it used to be, but I can dream, can't I?
2. The Bronte Sisters
3. Lord Byron
4. Geoffrey Chaucer
5. Agatha Christie
6. Charles Dickens
7. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  I understand they've turned 221B Baker Street into a museum featuring Holmes memorabilia.  Okay, so there is no Holmes memorabilia (there being no actual Holmes), but I'm not going to let that spoil the enjoyment I intend to derive from viewing such relics as an original cypher from The Case of the Dancing Men, the plaster bust Holmes used as a decoy in The Empty House, Watson's medical bag, Holmes's violin, or the picture of Irene Adler they retained as a souvenir of the unforgettable Scandal in Bohemia.
8. Daphne du Maurier
9. James Herriott. Like thousands of other readers, I find I've fallen in love with the rolling green hills of Yorkshire - as well as the good, dour folk who inhabit the farms and byways of the Yorkshire countryside - by way of James Herriot's highly entertaining accounts of his life as a veterinarian in that region.
10. Thomas Malory
11. Alexander Pope
12. Sir Walter Scott
13. William Shakespeare.  The Old Globe Theater.  David Garrick's house.
14. Jonathan Swift
15. J.R.R. Tolkein
16. Oscar Wilde. His monument, to the east of Trafalgar Square, is engraved: "We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars" (from Lady Windermere's Fan)

SHRINES & MEMORIALS

1. Westminster Cathedral (Poet's Corner).  As well as actual burials, Poets' Corner also commemorates the life of literary greats (and quite a few who have faded into obscurity) with memorials: amongst these are the poets John Milton, William Wordsworth, Thomas Gray, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Burns, William Blake, T.S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Writers such as Samuel Butler, Jane Austen, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Walter Scott, John Ruskin, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Henry James and Sir John Betjeman have also been given memorials here. Perhaps the greatest English writer, William Shakespeare, also has a memorial here: buried in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, Shakespeare had to wait until 1740 before his monument (designed by William Kent) was placed in the transept. Another late addition was Lord Byron, whose lifestyle caused a scandal although his poetry was much admired: although he died in 1824, he was finally given a memorial only in 1969.Dr Johnson's House [7], 17 Gough Square, just off Fleet Street - this fine Georgian house marks the residence in which Dr Johnson compiled his great Dictionary of the English Language. (James Boswell's house is also somewhere nearby)
2. Bow Street.  was formed about 1637. It has been the residence of many notable men, among whom were: Henry FIELDING (1707-1754), Novelist; Sir John FIELDING (d.1780), Magistrate; Charles SACKVILLE, Earl of Dorset (1638-1706), Poet; and William WYCHERLEY (1640?-1716), Dramatist
3. "xxx Lived Here."  Other famous folks who resided in London and whose homes may/may not be worth a visit (I haven't yet decided):  Ezra Pound, William Makepeace Thackeray, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir James Barrie, EF Benson, Enid Blynton, Edmund Burke, Francis Hodgson Burnett, Fanny Burney (aka Madame D'Arblay),  Thomas Carlyle, GK Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, C. Day-Lewis, Walter De La Mare, Thomas DeQuincey, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, John Dryden, George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Cross, née Evans),  TS Eliot, Henry Fielding, Ian Fleming, Ford Madox Ford, CS Forester, EM Forester, John Galsworthy, Mrs. Gaskell,  Kenneth Grahame, Robert Graves, Sir Henry Rider Haggard, Radclyffe Hall, Thomas Hardy, Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins, James Hilton, Thomas Hood, WH Hudson, Aldous Huxley, Washington Irving, Henry James, James Joyce

The British Isle 

1. Yorkshire (James Herriot).  
2. Yorkshire/The Moors (Wuthering Heights, Hound of the Baskervilles)
3. Sherwood Forest (Robin Hood)
4. Tintagel (King Arthur)
5. Stratford-on-Avon (Shakespeare)
6. Scotland Yard (innumerable crime novels)
7. Oxford, The Eagle and Child (CS Lewis, Tolkein, Auden, Hogwarts)
8. Dublin (Oscar Wilde, James Joyce)
9. Edinburgh (Burns, Walter Scott)
10. pub where Kit Marlowe died
11. Grasmere/The Lake District
12. Hampstead.  Romantic poets Keats, Shelley, Byron and Coleridge, along with writers Robert Louis Stevenson, D H Lawrence and J B Priestley all lived in Hampstead.
13. 
    

Top 10 Reasons to Visit New Orleans

New Orleans Starry Night Moon Art by Karen Tarlton,
available from Karen's Fine Art on Amazon Marketplace

Forget New York City, forget Hollywood; forget Nashville, San Francisco, or Washington D.C.  In honor of the big Saints victory in the Superbowl, here are the top 10 reasons New Orleans is the absolute coolest city in the United States.

1. The music.  New Orleans isn't just the home of jazz, it's the wellspring of jazz ... not to mention blues, brass and zydeco.  In a fashion almost parasitic, the music feeds off of the lives and experiences of the city's people.  Forget the booze: just stand anywhere on Bourbon Street and let yourself become intoxicated by the music wafting from the open doorways of half a dozen bars.
2. The cuisine.  Make no mistake - New Orleans may have a laid-back attitude about most everything else, but they take their food very seriously.  They've figured out that the chickory in the cafe au late perfectly balances the sugary sweetness of a beignet.  That seafood is meant to be enjoyed every meal of the day. That everything tastes better with a rich, buttery sauce. That, no, you don't have to eat your vegetables. And that there's simply no such thing as "too hot."
3. The architecture. Part sophisticated European city, part sleepy southern town, part gaudy Caribbean port, the  major architectural influences on New Orleans haven't so much fused as figured out how to coexist.  Gorgeous creole townhouses with lacey trimwork and ornate iron balconies exist aside ancient wooden claphouse structures with sagging shutters and doors that stay open year round - not so much because the city never sleeps (though it doesn't), but because their frames have become so warped they simply don't close any more. And yet New Orleans not only makes this cacaphony work, but makes it appear somehow genteel, rather like an aged but still upright and fiercely elegant dowager.
4. The attitude. "The Big Easy" isn't just a nickname; in New Orleans, it's a lifestyle. Maybe it's having successfully withstood centuries of hurricanes, yellow fever, pirates and multiple invasions. Maybe it's the fact that 7 different flags have flown over the city in the course of its long history. Or maybe it's just growing up knowing that you're living below sea level and, therefore, everything you have could be wiped off the earth at any time. ...Whatever the cause, there is a "live for the moment" attitude in New Orleans that you just don't find in any other city.
5. The parties. No city knows how to party like New Orleans. Sure, Mardi Gras gets all the attention, but the Mardi Gras spirit infuses this city year-round. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, the bars never close, the music never stops, dancing in the streets is not only expected but encouraged, and strings of plastic beads never go out of style. 
6. The ghosts.  New Orleans is called the most haunted city in America and even in broad daylight, it's apparent why. The whole city seems to exist in a timeless space between past and present.  And at night ... well, just try walking through a New Orleans neighborhood and tell me which scares you more: being attacked by a mugger, or being accosted by the sallow shade of an old yellow fever vicitim.  (Anne Rice lives in New Orleans ... enough said?)
7. The Mississippi.  It's vast. It's murky.  Much of the time it manages to look like a busy interstate at rush hour.  But it connects the busy, relatively modern seaport of New Orleans to the city's antebellum roots, and its placid surface does little to conceal the enormous and terrifying forces that the river's inadequate levees strain to keep contained.  
8. The bayous.  Sprawling cypress trees, their roots protruding from the water like vestigal limbs. Spanish moss eerily wafting in invisible breezes.  Fish and nutria slicing through the water beneath your boat. That telltale "V" of water indicating the passage of something much larger - something huge and green, with lots of teeth.  Much like the city itself, New Orlean's bayous are ancient, majestic and more than just a little bit unsettling.
9. The Voodoo. Think of New Orleans as the Vatican of voodoo.  The city isn't just home to voodoo - it is saturated by voodoo, from the haunting drumbeats of the local music, to the african god figures sold in most of the local gift stores, to the gris-gris bags hanging around the necks of many of the inhabitants.  Marie Laveau, arguably the most famous voodoo priestess, practiced in New Orleans, and she is buried in one of the city's fabulously creepy cemeteries (see next entry). If any city will make you believe in zombies, New Orleans will.
10. Death. When I die I want to go out the way they do it in New Orleans: with music, singing, dancing, and a parade through the streets. The people of New Orleans seem intuitively to understand that funerals need to be a celebration of life, not a celebration of death.  Maybe that's because no city embraces death quite so nonchalently as New Orleans. The city is riddled with cemeteries in which the dead inhabit beehive-type above-ground crypts, resembling nothing so much as little apartment houses of the dead.  It's as if, even in death, the inhabitants of this astonishing city can't bring themselves entirely to leave, but remain eternally in New Orleans' thrall.