Arrears blogging: May 29: No shortage of gore

One thing about the Thousand and One Nights, they sure know how to keep a story moving. And, even better, they know the virtues of a slow introduction -- here, in The Tale of the Barber's Fifth Brother (must focus-group that title), we begin with a long daydream of wealth -- and not just of wealth, but of the things wealth buys, such as repercussion-free meanness to women:

I will command her to stand before me as stands the timid and the abject; and I will not look at her, on account of the haughtiness of my spirit and the gravity of my wisdom; so that the maids will say, O our master and our lord, may we be thy sacrifice! This thy wife, or rather thy handmaid, awaiteth thy kind regard, and is standing before thee: then graciously bestow on her one glance; for the posture hath become painful to her.

In defense of these old tales, we know the guy is a fool, for he's daydreaming while selling bits of glass, and, when he gets too much into the daydream, he actually kicks over his tray of glass, breaking it -- ha ha! (One of the chief things I think I've learned on this project is not to be afraid of the basic jokes; they have worked for millienia.)

Anyway, that's how the B5B (Barber's Fifth Brother) gets involved in the serial-killing ring, which seems over-elaborate -- it involves meeting a bewitching woman with money, and then, the next day, an old lady who promises access to said bewitching woman. Then the nefarious plot moves into action:

...the slaves laid hold upon him, and stripped him, and struck him more than eighty blows with the flat of his sword, until he fell sprawling upon the floor; when he retired from him, concluding that he was dead, and uttered a great cry, so that the earth trembled, and the place resounded at his voice, saying, Where is El-Melihah? upon which a girl came to him, holding a handsome tray containing salt; and with this she forthwith stuffed the flesh-wounds with which my brother’s skin was gashed until they gaped open...whereupon the old woman came to my brother, and, dragging him by the feet to a deep and dark vault, threw him into it upon a heap of slain.

But he survives, extolling Allah's perfection, because what is a better example of perfection than a serial-killing ring? But he gets his revenge, action-movie style:

So my brother rose, and, as the slave walked before him, he put his hand to the sword which was concealed beneath his clothes, and struck the slave with it, and cut off his head; after which he dragged him by his feet to the vault, and called out, Where is El-Melihah? The slave-girl, therefore, came, having in her hand the tray containing the salt; but when she saw my brother with the sword in his hand, she turned back and fled: my brother, however, overtook her, and struck off her head. He then called out, Where is the old woman?—and she came; and he said to her, Dost thou know me, O malevolent hag? ...The old woman exclaimed, Fear God in thy treatment of me!—but my brother, turning towards her, struck her with the sword, and clove her in twain.

It will not surprise students of human nature to find out that the pretty girl gets spared. And then, just as we're wrapping things up, here's the last sentence:

Some robbers, however, came upon him, and stripped and beat him, and cut off his ears

I love that, as an ending: "Oh, and also? They cut off his ears." All the people who left this story early, to beat the traffic, are denied the pleasure of that twist at the end, and it's also a twist that could really only be in print, although I guess you could do something where the guy takes off his turban at the end and someone says, "Good heavens, you're earless!" But that's not as satisfying.

November 7: Islam giveth, and Islam taketh away

They say the classics aren't relevant anymore, but today's story starts like this:

O PRINCE OF THE FAITHFUL, my story is wonderful; for these two bitches are my sisters...

But -- sorry hiphop fans -- it turns out the two bitches are just dogs. By now I should expect such transformations from "The Thousand and One Nights." As has often happened in the other readings from this volume, we have not only the presto/chango, but rooms full of gold, and also what seems to have been a key concern in the mentalité of the Arab World of the time, commercial shipping:

...I replied, Ye are welcome, O my sisters; for I have no one dearer to me than yourselves:—and I received them, and treated them with every kindness, and we remained happily together for the space of a year.

After this I resolved to fit out a vessel for a mercantile voyage.

Our narrator (or narrator within the narrator, or, possibly the narrator within the narrator within the narrator -- it's hard to tell sometimes with the "Thousand and One") then recounts her trip, where they come upon a people rich, but, unfortunately, turned to stone. Except for one guy, who quite conveniently turns out to be the Prince of the place, who was also a secret Muslim -- in this translation, "Muslimeh," or Canadian Muslim.

So naturally, they fall in love -- our Prince being, in these stony circumstances, something like the last man on earth, but with the added advantage of being rich. So they decide to head to Baghdad, where you can get a decent meal from people who aren't literally as dumb as rocks. And here's where Allah gets all capricious:

We continued our voyage with a favourable wind, and, quitting the sea of peril, entered the sea of security, across which we proceeded for some days, until we drew near the city of El-Basrah...but as soon as we had fallen asleep, my sisters took us up in our bed, both myself and the young man, and threw us into the sea. The youth, being unable to swim, was drowned; God recorded him among the company of the martyrs; while I was registered among those whose life was yet to be preserved.

In other words, God saved him long enough so that he could be drowned in the sea of security, where, I suppose to make it even more ironic, he sank like a stone. And what's worse is that it sounds like a clerical error -- "upon further review of your case, your application to live has not been granted because you have been recorded to be among the martyrs," etc.

Fortunately our heroine frees a Jinnyeh who transports her back home with all the loot intact and turns her sisters into dogs --

...She then said to me, I swear by that which was engraved upon the seal of Suleyman, that, if thou do not inflict three hundred lashes upon each of these bitches every day, I will come and transform thee in the like manner:—so I replied, I hear and obey:—and have continued ever since to inflict upon them these stripes, though pitying them while I do so.

Hmmm...I smell a PETA-neoconservative Islamophobe alliance in the works.

July 5: The Baghdad Old-Timey Comedy Hour

So today's reading is teased thusly in the DRG:

5 A Tailor Entertains a King
Here is another of those fanciful Oriental stories that proclaims the democracy of Eastern despotism. A tailor might talk with a king and receive either a death sentence or the office of Grand Vizier as a reward.
Read from THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS Vol. 16, pp. 149-162

Those fanciful Orientals! How droll of God to give them oil!

The Harvard Classics people's decisions of what to include in their volumes seems inscrutable to me (speaking of Orientalism), and I have wondered why The Thousand and One Nights should get its own volume, as opposed to just cramming it in "Folktale and Fable" or what have you. And then I realized: They think this is sociology about the Middle East. Like Bernard Lewis, only without the access to the President. Between this and the Old Testament, you're good to go. And you can kind of see it from the perspective of 1908 -- what else do you really need to know about that godforsaken (actually, the Middle East has the opposite problem -- it could use a little forsaking by its gods) part of the world? That was before we knew about the great hide-the-oil joke that, a century later, turns out to be on us.

Speaking of old jokes, this particular tale has one -- of the "shut up shutting up" variety. A guy needs to get his head shaved to impress a girl, so he says, "Go to the market, and bring me a barber, one who is a man of sense, little inclined to impertinence, that he may not make my head ache by his chattering." Nothing can go wrong, right? Well, here he comes, and, first he measures with his astrolabe to make sure it's okay for barbering, and then we get this, which I am reformatting because I think it helps:

"By Allah," I exclaimed, "Thou hast wearied me, and dissipated my mind, and augured against me, when I required thee only to shave my head: arise, then, and shave it; and prolong not thy discourse to me."

But he replied, "By Allah, if thou knewest the truth of the case, thou wouldst demand of me a further explication; and I counsel thee to do this day as I direct thee, according to the calculations deduced from the stars: it is thy duty to praise God, and not to oppose me; for I am one who giveth thee good advice, and who regardeth thee with compassion: I would that I were in thy service for a whole year, that thou mightest do me justice; and I desire not any pay from thee for so doing. "

When I heard this, I said to him, "Verily thou art killing me this day, and there is no escape for me."

"O my master," he replied, "I am he whom the people call Es-Samit, [“the Silent,”] on account of the paucity of my speech, by which I am distinguished above my brothers: for my eldest brother is named El Bakbuk; and the second, El-Heddar; and the third, Bakbak 2; and the fourth is named El-Kuz El-Aswani; and the fifth, El-Feshshar; and the sixth is named Shakalik; and the seventh brother is named Es-Samit; and he is myself."

This is Laurel and Hardy, Bugs and Elmer, Tina Fey and Amy Pohler; it's Young Frankenstein and I-gor; it's a bit so old that, like Webster's Dictionary, it's Morocco-bound. And I find it great.

Unfortunately, there's about six pages left after this. Plus a chase scene involving the shaven-head guy jumping out of a trunk -- which is what they'd put in the trailer. But I smile to see this bit ("Verily thou are killing me," indeed) waft from the dusty markets of Baghdad centuries ago, all the way to my house in 21st-century Hollywood. If there's one thing I've learned from this Harvard Classics Project, it's not to be afraid of the obvious.

June 24: Of Love

Let us take as our text -- well, actually, our text is The Tale of the Christian Broker from The Thousand and One Nights, but let us take as our motto some Auden:

Money cannot buy
the fuel of Love,
but is excellent kindling.

And if, to continue in an Audenesque vein, about suffering the Old Masters were never wrong, this old tale is onto something about love too. The Christian Broker is not the kind of broker who makes an ass of himself in lower Manhattan on summer Friday afternoons; he seems to be a nice Cairo-area merchant who happens to fall in with a rich, mysterious client who eats with the left hand -- a faux pas in the Arabia of the day, second only to invading a country under false pretenses (/soapbox). He confesses that he has no right hand, and, you guessed it -- a woman is mixed up in it.

It seems that our hero is lounging with one of his clients when a dame walks in with a veil up to here:

She wore a headkerchief inclined on one side, and the odours of sweet perfumes were diffused from her, and she captivated my reason by her beauty and loveliness as she raised her izar and I beheld her black eyes.

But what wins her heart is the fact that she wants to buy a piece of gold cloth on credit and he pays cash on the nail:

I then took the piece of stuff from him, and wrote him the paper with my own hand, and gave the piece of stuff to the lady, saying to her, Take it and go; and if thou wilt, bring the price to me in the market; or, if thou wilt, it shall be my present to thee. She replied, God recompense thee, and bless thee with my property, and make thee my husband!

I'd like to see Axe body spray do that. Well, it's love, and here's the big night:

She wore a crown set with pearls and jewels; her hands and feet were stained with henna; and her bosom was ornamented with gold. As soon as she beheld me she smiled in my face, and embraced me, saying, Is it true that thou hast come to me, or is this a dream?—I am thy slave, I answered: and she said, Thou art welcome. ... and not long had I thus remained when a repast was placed before me, consisting of the most exquisite dishes, as fricandoes and hashes and stuffed fowls.

The alert reader will be reminded of nothing so much as Smoove B:

I will serve you cooked pheasant with succulent gravy and white wine. I will serve you hand and foot. I will serve you on a soft, silk table-cloth that has been freshly laundered and purchased from the finest table-cloth store in all of creation. It will be the most spectacular dinner you have ever consumed.

There will also be corn served.

Well, to make a long story medium, as each of these assignations involve our hero bringing fifty gold pieces to his lady, eventually he winds up broke, tries to steal, and gets his hand cut off. And it turns out she was rich too! Why this is surprising to our guy what with the crown set with pearls and jewels, I don't know; but I just went with it, because I was charmed with what I took to be the subtext: these two genuinely loved each other, but it was because they were both rich. They could smell each other rich essences -- it was cash calling out to cash. And when he was poor, he was willing to do anything to appear rich; none of the My Man Godfrey crap in old Cairo. It's the unembarassed-ness of it, the Austenesque frankness (or Sex and the City-esque, maybe), that charms.

Photo courtesy flickr user Cembas

Apr 29: The Thousand and One Nights...Of Terrorism!

The past is another country, indeed. The First Voyage of Sinbad takes place in Baghdad, but a fictional Baghdad, one peopled with Arabs and such who labor under the illusion that they are a civilization. We know better, of course. They are marauders and we, who guarantee -- to even the poorest among us! -- a cool spot on the floor of any emergency room in town, are the true bearers of civilization.

Does Daniel Pipes know about this man?

Okay, down off the soapbox. One of the interesting things about this Sinbad (properly "Es-Sindibad," but that's ever so much longer to type) yarn is that after:

• He goes on a voyage
• They land on an island that is really a huge fish, who takes offense, drowning everyone;
• But Sinbad clings to a wooden bowl, and drifts to another island;
• Where, after days and days, he finally finds a mare
• Who is being led to the shore in order to mate with sea horses;
• And then is led to the king of this remote, magical place;

The topper is...he gets a job in the civil service!

O my son, by Allah thou hast experienced an extraordinary preservation, and had it not been for the predestined length of thy life, thou hadst not escaped from these difficulties; but praise be to God for thy safety! Then he treated me with beneficence and honour, caused me to draw near to him...and he made me his superintendent of the seaport, and registrar of every vessel.

For the finest treasures of Arabia are as nothing next to a Port Authority pension.

Eventually, he does get back to Baghdad (which we know by its modern name of "strife-torn Baghdad"), by means of a crazy coincidence. But then the whole story only is told because of an another crazy coincidence, which is that an Es-Sindibad, a porter who carries stuff on his head, takes a little unscheduled break in a merchant's house, and, because the merchant is also named Es-Sindibad, he (the merchant) decides it's tale-telling time. Oh, and also because the merchant is enchanted by Sindibad the porter's bitching about God:

How many wretched persons are destitute of ease! and how many are in luxury, reposing in the shade! I find myself afflicted by trouble beyond measure; and strange is my condition, and heavy is my load! Others are in prosperity, and from wretchedness are free, and never for a single day have borne a load like mine; Incessantly and amply blest, throughout the course of life, with happiness and grandeur, as well as drink and meat.

Honestly, don't you think Sinbad should be madder at God than he is? Maybe he's just enchanged by God's ability to focus on the essentials:

How great is thy dignity! and how mighty is thy dominion! and how excellent is thy government! Thou hast bestowed favours upon him whom Thou choosest among thy servants, and the owner of this place is in the utmost affluence, delighting himself with pleasant odours and delicious meats and exquisite beverages of all descriptions.

That's how you know who God loves: they have a lot of beverages.

Mar 23: Presto chango

I don't want to get all comp. religion here, but it does seem appropriate that today was a religious festival of transformation! and our reading includings women turning into mules. Yes, it's the Thousand and One Nights yet again -- back when the fact that Muslims were exotic didn't mean they were going to kill us in our beds once the Democrats take over. How could they -- when they're so busy telling tales and transforming into animals?

We get into stories-within-a-story-within-a-story land. Shahrazad (a much better spelling; it's like saying "Scheherazade" fast) is telling a story about a merchant who learns a lesson about using the proper receptacle for your date pits:

...an ‘Efrit [a kind of Jinni, I guess] , of enormous height, who, holding a drawn sword in his hand, approached him, and said, Rise, that I may kill thee, as thou hast killed my son. the merchant asked him, How have I killed thy son? He answered, When thou atest the date, and threwest aside the stone, it struck my son upon the chest, and, as fate had decreed against him, he instantly died.

"Well, it's fate's fault, then," the merchant could have said, if he'd a been a lawyer; but instead, he declaims some verses, which I won't go into, especially because the verse ends with, "the Jinni said to him, Spare thy words, for thy death is unavoidable." (In sitcoms we'd call the whole verse thing an "up and back.")

He is allowed to arrange his affairs and then comes back to the prearranged spot. He's early, though -- let this be a lesson to you, young people! -- and three merchants with various animals come, sympathize, and hang out. They then buy back his life by each telling the Jinni a story (Shahrazad-style; that the King doesn't notice the similarities shows that he was not trained in close reading, or close listening, as the case may be). Basically they're all of the form of, "See this animal I have? That was a loved one." There are twists. I won't go into them. My favorite thing, actually, is that, by the third one, we're all so wise to the form that what used to take pages now takes a paragraph:

THE MULE that thou seest was my wife: she became enamoured of a black slave; and when I discovered her with him, she took a mug of water, and, having uttered a spell over it, sprinkled me, and transformed me into a dog. In this state, I ran to the shop of a butcher, whose daughter saw me, and being skilled in enchantment, restored me to my original form, and instructed me to enchant my wife in the manner thou beholdest.

Yeah, yeah. If she's so skilled in enchantment, what's she doing in a butcher's shop? Probably helping with the displays.

Kind of a nice diversion for a reading, anyway, and even more so because the Mrs. and I just came back from Sweeney Todd, a story where the transformations only go one way.

Feb 5: Sinbad and the Animal Spirits

Well, it took us, what, 35 days, but we are double-dipping for the first time – it’s back to the 1001 nights (Vol. 16) And that’s okay – we need a chaser after all of yesterday’s Philosophy.

Indeed I’m starting to get into the rhythm of the thing. I really do wonder, “where are you taking me today”? This is just what they intended, I’m afraid: in the words of the Copywriter’s (I’m capitalizing him/her now) awesome prose, “We want something to carry us out of ourselves, to take us a million miles from our humdrum existence, to stimulate our minds to fresh endavor, to give us a new viewpoint upon our problems, to enable us to get a fresh hold upon ourselves.”

I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s kind of fun, in a way, to have part of your day spent reading some weird old text that someone else picked out. Today it’s the Second Voyage of Sinbad -- or “Es-Sindibad” as he’s called in the text, so we can mercifully tell him apart from this guy:


Anyways, Sinbad travels. Why? Because he longs to. Because if he wants to stay at home among his treasures, we got no story.

Everything’s going great – he’s on an island being lulled to sleep by a zephyr. “O if only it had been a breeze,” I’m already thinking. Whoops, they left without him: I looked about it to the right and left, and found not in it any one save myself. I was therefore affected with violent vexation, not to be exceeded, and my gall-bladder almost burst by reason of the severity of my grief and mourning and fatigue.

Who hasn’t been there? My gall-bladder aches right now, thinking about it.

He escapes the island (by tying his turban to the foot of an enormous bird), but winds up in a desert:

I therefore blamed myself for that which I had done, and said, Would that I had remained in the island, since it is better than this desert place; for in the island are found, among various fruits, what I might have eaten, and I might have drunk of its rivers; but in this place are neither trees nor fruits nor rivers: and there is no strength nor power but in God, the High, the Great! Verily every time that I escape from a calamity, I fall into another that is greater and more severe!

If you had a sidekick, this is the point where you hit him with your hat. Also, there are big diamonds. And bigger snakes. And then I hit myself with my own hat and say – of course! Indiana Jones! Young master Delicious, who’s in an Indy phase, is going to love this (probably not).

There’s also this device they use where something happens (in this case, a slaughtered animal falls from the sky), and then Sinbad remembers something important to the plot. I’ve always kind of hated this kind of storytelling – it’s so convenient – but it is economical. Also economical – Sinbad’s device of tying himself to something and then allowing himself to be transported away….where he meets a merchant.

It’s worth noting that the only people who come into this godforsaken place are merchants. It’s really commerce that drives human enterprise – I think the Apollo program fooled us. When we finally build a moon base, it will be because Coca-Cola thinks it’s a good location for a bottling plant.

And then, after a stop at what can only be called a resort hotel, he comes home! The climax was in the middle of the story! Truly the Levantine people do not share our ways.

Jan 7: If He Yawned, She Lost Her Head!

The kids are back at school, Allah be praised. This is the first day of seeing whether I can do this under normal conditions (although, to be fair, I’m on strike, so things are not completely “normal”. But, even so, here we are.

Also, my cable is out, so I have to read this the old-fashioned way, the way they would have done it in 1995 – with books. the selection is from “The Thousand and One Nights” (“If he yawned, she lost her head!”) -- Vol. 16, p. 5-13.

It turns out it’s the introduction, and I realized I’ve never read the Thousand and One Nights and have no idea who it’s author might be. You know who would know, though, is Edward William Lane, the translator, or Stanley Lane-Pool, who revised it. (or who, it turns out from the introductory note, translated “Ala-ed-din and the Wonderful Lmap” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”

Ah… it turns out, from the introductory note, that it was translated into French in the first decade on the eighteenth century…Could be Persain, perhaps?

I don’t know how to feel about this passage, from the Introductory Note:

“In the two hundred years of their currency in the West, the stories of the “nights” have engrafted themselves upon European culture. They have made the fairy-land of the Oriental imagination and the mode of life of the medieval Arab, his manners and his morals, familiar to young and old; and allusions to their incidents and personages are wrought into the language and literature of all the modern civilized peoples…how pervasive has been the influence of this wonder-book of the mysterious East.”

Not so mysterious now, of course, now that we know it has oil.

So it’s the setup to the tales, which involve two kings who are brothers, both of whom have the same predicament, which is that their women can’t keep their hands off of the black slaves. Disheartened, the two brothers go a journey, and find a Jinni who’s wife says, “when one of our sex desires to accomplish any object, nothing can prevent her.” Yeah! Grrl power!

Naturally, the King’s reaction to this is to take virgins to bed and then behead them. This leads to Shahrazad (the vizier’s daughter, I didn’t know that) volunteering for the suicide mission. The vizier then tells a story that takes two pages, about the ass and the bull, but what it’s really about is a man who got his wife in line by beating her. But Shahrazad is undeterred, thus making the two pages of story about the Ass and the Bull meaningless.