One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The 1001 Nights

Melquiades the Gypsy and The Metal Ingots by Lozano Mary (for sale (with other Cien Anos inspired paintings) at: - http://fineartamerica.com/featured/6008-melquiades-the-gypsy-and-the-metal-ingots-lozano-mary.html)

Just finished teaching One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A remarkable book and most surprising, perhaps, for its secret resilience to the outside world which, for the most part, has chosen to either vilify it as an unsurpassable hegemony or adore it in romantically annoying ways.

In any event, of course the Nights infuse themselves (in shadows) into the carpet of Solitude. They are everywhere after all. Here we have Aureliano Segundo discovering them wilting in his grandfather's forgotten workshop, having been brought to Macondo long ago (many years before?) by Melquiades:

"On the shelves were the books bound in a cardboard-like material, pale, like tanned human skin, and the manuscripts were intact. In spite of the room's having been shut up for many years, the air seemed fresher than in the rest of the house. Everything was so recent that several weeks later, when Ursula went into the room with a pail of water and a brush to wash the floor, there was nothing for her to do. Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo" (183).

This is from the 1970 translation by Gregory Rabassa, Harperperennial's 2006 update & etc.

Tim Burton's Aladdin

Take a foreshadowing of Disney, a dash of Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad movies, shadows of The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and emanations of Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas, fairly faithful renderings of Grub Street & Galland's Aladdin and mix them with Shelley Duvall's irreverent series Faerie Tale Theatre (1982-87) and you have this entertaining variant of Aladdin (Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp) told by Tim Burton.

It is jam packed with famous 70s-80s faces including Valerie Bertinelli (One Day at a Time), Robert Carradine (Revenge of the Nerds & etc), Leonard Nimoy (Spock!) and James Earl Jones (Darth Vader), and is an interesting glimpse into Burton as a director to be.  Duvall was the lead actress in Burton's first version of Frankenweenie (1984) - which you should also go and see asap.

Here is Burton's Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp (1986) on YouTube:

Disney Walk Lego Store Aladdin

Was meandering through Disney Walk, the outdoor mall near Disneyland - as we all must at some point - and came across this giant Lego version of Aladdin, the flying carpet, the lamp, Jasmine and the Genie in the Lego Store (a Lego homage to their nearby land-lords?):

From 1001 Nights

From 1001 Nights

Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic - rev. by Daily Beast

Here is a review of Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic, a new Nights book I recently mentioned. This review is from The Daily Beast and is written by English Professor Brad Gooch, well written for the most part (though is "Palestinian-Arab" really a necessary, if correct, adjective for Edward Said? Maybe the author meant "Palestinian-American," which Said was? Arab-American?), if a bit of a cursory overview of Warner's book.

I've excerpted some passages below, the entire review is here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/25/marina-warner-s-stranger-magic-reconsiders-the-arabian-nights.html

"Long before meta-fiction, blog fiction, expropriation, or hypertext, there was Shahrazad, the slinkiest, sexiest, most ineradicable trickster in global literature, telling stories every night towards the event horizon of 1001 Nights to distract her abusive husband, the Sultan, from his resolve to behead each of his wives for infidelity—while her sister curled beside them on the divan, like a kinky teleprompter, or laugh-sigh-gasp track. The result, Tales of a Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights, as it became known after its first English translation, in 1706, kicked off a craze of Orientalism that morphed across supposedly rational Enlightenment Europe in spoofs, follies, turqueries, pantomimes, and lots of camping it up in djellaba, or lounging on “ottomans.” Some of its signature tales—Aladdin’s lamp, Sinbad’s voyage, or Ali Baba’s thieves—were likely only smuggled into the text later by French translator Antoine Galland, spun by him from mere parentheses of plot in the 14th-century Syrian manuscript he was busily mining."

"The jinni (Arabic for “genie” or “demon”) in the bottle of Warner’s book, both menacing and inspiring, is Palestinian-Arab Edward Said and his paradigm-shifting study Orientalism. When I was a student at Columbia in the late 1970s, I audited Said’s course. He was an academic rock star of the moment, wore elegant dark-blue suits to class; as a snarky student exercise I kept note of the number of times he used the word “power” in every lecture. Orientalism was the equivalent of an academic beach book during in the summer of 1979—a “cult bible,” says Warner. While Said didn’t take on the popularization of Arabian Nights directly, especially as triggered by the “lurid and archaizing” Victorian-era version of Sir Richard Burton, he did take on his ilk, exposing orientalist scholars, adventurers, and explorers as trading in stereotypes of Eastern lassitude, femininity, and deception that helped stoke a colonialist, imperialist agenda.

Enough decades have passed for these ideas to be run through the word processor again, and reconsidered. While Said did not deconstruct Arabian Nights directly, he did indict one of its translators, the English Arabist Edward W. Lane, for fostering prejudice. “Said’s furious polemic against Orientalism,” Warner writes, “has dominated perception of the Nights and related Orientalist literature until now.” She stops along her way to absolve this or that orientalist figure of heavy-handed motives, restoring the impulses of sheer infatuation and curiosity that motivated so many of these Arabophiles from Goethe to T.E. Lawrence to Sigmund Freud, with his divan of a psychoanalytic couch covered with oriental rugs and cushions for Shahrazadian talking cures. Warner trots out Edward Lane as Exhibit A of a “charmed encounter” with the Middle East. A sort of method scholar, Lane lived in Cairo, admittedly dressing in Mameluke robes, while translating the Koran, producing a monumental Arabic-English lexicon, as well as his annotated Nights (1839-41) in three illustrated volumes."

The Flying Carpet is Now Real

A student at Princeton just made a real Flying Carpet, sort of. Are magic lamps next?

From: International Business Times: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/223144/20111001/arabian-nights-flying-carpet-comes-to-reality-video.htm

"Forget The Arabian Nights: This ‘Flying Carpet’ is Real"

By IBTimes Staff Reporter | October 1, 2011 7:33 AM EDT

As soon as you hear the phrase "flying carpet," your brain, in a fraction of second, draws a picture of characters out of The Arabian Nights sitting on it. However, the time of The Arabian Nights is over, and a flying carpet has landed in the real world.

A Princeton University graduate student with origins in India has designed a miniature magic carpet made of plastic, which took flight in a laboratory there.

According to a BBC report, the 4-inch (10-centimeter) sheet of smart transparency is driven by ripple power, waves of electrical current driving thin pockets of air from front to back underneath it.

The prototype, described in Applied Physics Letters, moves at speeds of about a centimeter per second. Improvements to the design could raise that to as much as a meter per second.

Talking about his creation, Joah Jafferis said: "It has to keep close to the ground because the air is then trapped between the sheet and the ground. As the waves move along the sheet, it basically pumps the air out the back." "