Monday, May 28, 2012

"One Thousand and One Nights in a Bar-Room"

"One Thousand and One Nights in a Bar-Room:  Or The Irish Odysseus" is an article/review by Matthew Josephson on/of the book Ulysses by James Joyce.

It begins on page 146 of the journal Broom (from September 1922) which you can read for free here:  http://books.google.com/books?id=sEwHAQAAIAAJ&dq

It is interesting to me for its title only, the review speaks at great length as to how Joyce's Ulysses is nothing more than 700+ pages of drunk people in a bar talking.

It has nothing to do with the Nights apart from its title, however, just another interesting mention.

Broom was a journal of the arts in the US, published in the early 20th century - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom:_An_International_Magazine_of_the_Arts

Josephson was a writer from New York. 


Aladdin from Broadway by Frederic Stewart Isham

Aladdin from Broadway is the name of a 1913 book by Frederic Stewart Isham.  A film by the same name was made in 1917.

Here is a link to the book in its entirety in many forms on archive.org - http://archive.org/details/aladdinfrombroad00ishaiala

I don't know anything about the book or film or author, the story begins in Damascus though!  I'll look into it at more length later, for now it's here.

Monday, May 14, 2012

The First 48: Murder in the Middle East

Here is a video made by some high school students in Milwaukee, WI, as a part of the University of Wisconsin's 2010-2011 initiative The Arabian Nights in Wisconsin.

It is based on the A&E show The First 48, a real-life police detective series that follows US homicide detectives and their investigations into murders, with the pressure of getting a lead within 48 hours, the window of time statistics show is needed in order to make progress on a case.

Here are Shahriyar and Shah Zaman under interrogation by the detectives:



You can see some more projects based on the Wisconsin initiative archived on their website:  http://humanities.wisc.edu/public-projects/gwt/gallery-of-student-work/arabian-nights-gallery/

Sunday, May 13, 2012

Marvels & Tales Vol 26

The latest issue of the academic Journal Marvels & Tales has several interesting Nights-related things including the article "Nabokov's Ada and The 1001 Nights" by Seyed Gholamreza Shafiee-Sabet and Farideh Pourgiv, and reviews of Malcolm Lyon's 2008 English translation of the Nights and Paul Nurse's literary history of the Nights, Eastern Dreams: How the Arabian Nights Came to the World.

You can find the journal here at their website via Wayne State University Press: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/ 

If you have access via a university, or at a nearby university library, you can read the journal for free.