Kubla Khan

Once upon a fevered dream, Kubla Khan did appear it seems.  This poem was destined for greatness,and if it wasn't for an untimely visitor it would give up more than the scene staging.  But alas that is really all that we have- a great beginning.  We start with the introduction of Mr. Khan, or Kubla for I prefer to be on a first name basis with the characters.  And in his Eden-like kingdom he creates a pleasure dome.  It has a river and caverns running through it, with lots of gardens and hills.  But below the dome lies the great chasm, a savage place, with a woman moaning for her demon lover, while the echoes scream war.  But in the dome there is also an alabaster lady who enchants Kubla with her beauty, and then...nothing.  The End.
So what makes this one of the ideal romances?  I think it must be not only the poem, but also the circumstances surrounding it's creation.  I myself have had many a fantastical dream, though I only remember fragments.  But to have such a clear picture in ones mind, to actually be able to put it into words,and then to be interrupted just at the beginning of the good stuff!  Or worse, to be forever known as the one who did the interrupting and prevented the story from being fully told.  Oh the agony.  But perhaps that is what makes this story truly great is that like any amazing romance, you come to the end wanting more.  More adventures with the characters you have come to know and love.  Or in my anti-romantical case- characters that you want to see descend into the depths of darkness and chaos.  There is light and darkness, the lady on the hilltop and the one in the chasm.  You have the chance to encounter a demon lover, who just screams of death.  Now if only there were pirates this would be my choice for Ideal Romance.  Pirates and cross-dressing.

Displaced FairyTale

In 1999, in Minneapolis, Minnesota there lived a boy named Prince.  And all Prince wanted was a girl to call his princess and wear his raspberry beret.  He traveled all around the world in search of his pop rock princess.  He searched and searched and always came up empty handed- but all his possible princess' turned out to be cross dressers stuck in the 80's with rock hair.  Finally he went so crazy he actually lost his name.  Then one night, the artist formally known as Prince was auditioning opening acts.  He got a little tired and left the auditions to the club manager.  All that night it was lightning and pouring a purple rain. Just as the auditions were coming to a close the door slammed open and in walked a young lady dripping from head to toe.  The old queen, for that's what the manager was called, knew from the second he saw the girl in soaking wet pink cashmere that this was the one.  The pop princess that Prince was looking for- the girl to give him back his sanity and his name.  But just to be sure, he devised a test for her.  On the night of the big show the old queen went into the girls dressing room and placed a small pill under the couch cushions.  Then came twenty layers of crushed velvet and black leather pillows.  The singer soon came in to take her customary nap before she went on.  As she stood there at the edge of the stage the old singer came over and asked how she had slept.  Well, she said, I tossed and turned for a good long time, until I found the reason.  Someone had put a strange pill under the cushions.  Well, what did you do then? asked the old queen.  I took it of course! Said the girl.  And with that the old queen knew that this was the real thing- a real pop princess for Prince.

Xembla, Zenda, Xanadu

Alas, google has failed me.  It did not have the answer to the question of what these three words refer to.  I did learn that if you put the first letter of each line together it spells out the name of the author's son, but as for the words themselves the mystery lingers.  I believe Xembla has something to do with Vladimir Nabokov and his novel Pale Fire, at least there's an entire site dedicated to Xembla, but it never does define it.  And poor wikipedia tells us that it's a dutch television site.  Zenda was a little easier to find.  It refers to the novel The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope- which IMdb describes as a swashbuckling romance (it was made into a film in 1937), incidentally the entire novel is available as an ebook for free at project gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/95.  This leaves me with Xanadu and all I can think of is the classic film by that same name and starring Olivia Newton John which I know that we all love to hate, but I have a feeling that it might be related to Samual Taylor Coleridges poem which begins: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree."  So there we have it, the answer is: these three words are three fictional lands from three different authors.

Haroun in Wonderland

What a fabulous story!  Throughout the entire novel I felt as though I had fallen through the rabbit hole.  Images of Alice in Wonderland kept popping in my mind and it's novels like this that make me wish I was a painter.  Alas I am just a humble reader trying to answer that ever present question: "What's the use of stories that aren't even true?"  In Haroun's case it was the loss of his father's storytelling abilities that started him on his journey and propelled him to succeed in returning inspiration to said father.  The loss of stories created not only despair but an eternal night, while the reintroduction of stories created a psychedelic world of color and light.  Which coincedentaly is the point of stories that aren't even true.  They bring color to our imagination and light our way in the darkest of times.