Arabian Nights

[avram]

It’s too damn hot to work out. I stayed inside and finished off the leftover roast pork and pan-fried noodles I brought home from Queens Sunday night, the noodles sadly soggy after two days in the fridge and two minutes in the microwave.

UPS just brought me the books I ordered last week: the Color Mixing Bible and the latest Tim Powers novel, Declare, finally out in paperback! I’m currently in research mode for Declare, reading the Arabian Nights (Signet Classic edition, not the massive ten-volume Burton or anything like that), and maybe I’ll do some reading on Kim Philby after that. Tim Powers’s books are worth doing some research for; he has the most amazing faculty for weaving odd strands of real-world history and geography into weird fantasy.

In the Arabian Nights, I’m currently in the middle of the story of Aladdin and the lamp. I remember people complaining that the Disney movie wasn’t set in China as the original story was, but I’m discovering that the original isn’t actually set in China either. I mean, it says it is, “A long time ago in a city of China there lived a poor tailor with his only son, Aladdin,” but Aladdin isn’t a Chinese name, and all of the characters behave as if they were living in an Arabic land. When Aladdin is trapped underground, he prays to Allah for mercy, and the sultan’s daughter visits a Hammam bath, and there’s generally nothing mentioned in the story so far that’s distinctively Chinese. It’s like a modern American setting a story in Japan but having all the characters named “Smith” and “Johnson” and going to church and praying to Jesus and driving on interstate highways and refilling their gas tanks at a dollar and change per gallon.

Comments

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Hey, there ARE some Muslims in China, after all.

(I know someone who went to China for some sort of invenstment-related purpose & the local translator was a Chinese Muslim who spoke Qur'anic Arabic with a heavy Chinese accent.)

But I think China was a good place to displace weird happenings to. The Druze (I am probably mangling this, but...) believe that there are a set number of Druze souls in the world, and that the variations in population in the Levant are made up for by a counter-Druze population living in China. I think there was once a Druze Lebanese ambassador to China, but that's the outermost limit of my knowledge.

(btw - pleased to meet you. Read your stuff on rasff.)