This week’s Nation is carrying an interesting review of the new book by Samantha Power (who is perhaps now best known for her Hilary-Clinton-is-a-monster-gaffe). Chasing the Flame is a portrait of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the UN diplomat who was killed by the 2003 car bomb at Baghdad’s UN headquarters. Michael Massing’s book review tries to understand Power’s fascination with this man, whose life can best be described as sketchy. Incidentally, I learned, Vieira de Mello’s UN field career began in Bangladesh!
Unable to find a teaching job, Vieira de Mello landed a position with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In 1971, at age 23, he was sent into the field for the first time, to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to help Bengalis displaced from Pakistan. Feeding and sheltering refugees, Vieira de Mello realized that he was meant to be a man of action, and his career path was set.
Even as my familiarity with Power is limited to talks at conferences in DC and Cambridge, I think Massing’s effort to locate the book in the context of her intellectual development makes sense–or, at least, make for interesting food for thought, especially for those of us angry youth who sneer at cooptation by power (Which makes me wonder, what will happen of Obama the Prophet? *shudder*):
Just as Vieira de Mello made the journey from student revolutionary to senior diplomat, so has Samantha Power gone from being an independent critic working outside the system to being a high-profile figure operating within it. Her book’s odd shifts in tone and frustrating gaps in analysis reflect, I think, the ambivalence she feels about making that transition. In grappling with the many compromises Vieira de Mello made in the course of his career, Power may be unconsciously wrestling with the accommodations she’s been forced to make as she’s traveled the perilous path from obscurity to celebrity, from being an outside analyst assessing those in power to being one of the powerful herself.
Read the full article here.
I’ll be spending a considerable amount of time this season studying the Thousand and One Nights, not least because I have enrolled in an evening class on it at our famed institution in the neighborhood. We already had the first meeting last week, and it was wonderful to be back in the classroom after so many months! But I’m also hoping to devote some time to the history of medieval Arabic literature in general, as well as to other related topics, such as Bocaccio’s Decameron. What inspired me now to blog about this, however, was the following amusing quote:
whether the tales be really Arabick, or invented by Mons. Galland, I have never been able to learn with certainty. If they be Oriental, they are translated with unwarrantable lattitude; for the whole tenor of the style is in the French mode: and the Caliph of Bagdat, and the Emperor of China, are addressed in the same terms of ceremony which are usual at the court of France. [James Beattie in "On Fables and Romance" (1783), quoted by Robert Irwin in The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London, 2005), p. 17]
We may laugh (as I do!) at this allusion to the possibility that the 1001 Nights was entirely a creation of Antoine Galland, but truth is there are grounds for such skepticism. Galland, by the way, was the Frenchman who produced the first European translation of the Nights in 1704; his was also the first printed edition of the Nights in any language (the first Arabic print did not appear until over a century later, in Calcutta!). The textual history of the 1001 Nights, as well as the history of its European translations, is sometimes as remarkable as the stories themselves. Indeed, as one writer notes: “Essentially, everything you think you know about the Arabian Nights is probably wrong. Even the number of nights and stories. The history of the tales is itself an enormous puzzle.”
It is to Galland’s credit that the manuscript he used for his translation happens to be the earliest extant text of the Nights: a 14th century Syrian manuscript that now resides in Paris, and which eventually became the basis for Muhsin Mahdi‘s more recent “authoritative” edition of the Nights. There are two points to be made: first, Galland didn’t quite produce an “accurate” translation, and second, that manuscript was not his only source for the stories. With respect to the first point, let me quote Husain Haddawy, who argues that “instead of following the text faithfully, Galland deleted, added, and altered drastically to produce not a translation, but a French adaptation, or rather a work of his own creation.” The second point, however, is probably the more interesting, and below is why.
It may surprise many to learn that neither of the two most popular or well-known stories of the Nights, that of Aladdin and Ali Baba, existed in written Arabic before Galland. That is, they were never a part of the “authentic” corpus of the Nights! (And I say that despite realizing that authentic is a very problematic term that we should refrain from using in the context of the 1001 Nights). Galland himself mentions in his diaries that he heard the story of Aladdin from a man named Hanna Diab, a Maromite Christian Arab of Aleppo, who was brought to Paris by a friend of Galland, and who personally narrated 14 stories to Galland (Apparently, seven of these fourteen later appeared in Galland’s edition of the Nights, says Irwin). Now, the first written Arabic account of the story of Aladdin appears in 1787, “in a manuscript written by a Syrian Christian priest living in Paris, named Dionysius Shawish, alias Dom Denis Chavis” (Haddawi). A second account appears between 1805 and 1808 in a manuscript written in Paris by another Syrian, Mikhail Sabbagh, who “claimed to have copied it in turn from a Baghdad manuscript written in 1703.” But guess what? It turns out that both Chavis and Sabbagh had “fabricated the text by translating Galland back into Arabic”!
Imagine the twist: from oral Arabic into written French and then back into Arabic! But wait, there’s more. These Arabic manuscripts then became the source of later translations into English, such as by John Payne and (the in/famous) Richard Burton! According to Irwin, “Burton adopted such a catholic attitude that he strayed quite a distance into the Nights Apocrypha. Finding no Arabic originals for some of Galland’s ‘orphan tales’, he adopted the bizarre procedure of translating them from Hindustani translations of Galland” (p. 30).
But of course, none of this should imply that the stories of Aladdin or Ali Baba did not exist before the 18th century. Rather, it would seem that they were a part of the oral tradition. This reminds us then, that to overly insist on “text” and “authenticity” is in some ways tantamount to betraying the spirit of the 1001 Nights, which have been transmitted over centuries through popular narrative. Indeed, scholars agree that many of the stories in the Nights actually predate the “frame” tale, i.e. the story of Scheherazade and Shahrayar. And much of what we call the “Arabian” Nights is hardly Arabian: the origins of many of the stories lie in India, Persia, and even China.
My first albeit cursory introduction to the textual history of the Nights was Fatima Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West, which I read just over a year ago in college for a class on Orientalism. Mernissi’s book is a confluence of many themes, but primarily she follows the journey of Scheherazade to Europe, through the translations of Galland, Lane, Burton and others. In trying to uncover the roots of Western fantasies about the harem, she offers an intriguing feminist reading of the European reception of the 1001 Nights.
But to meet your more immediate curiosities, if any, about the textual history of the Arabian Nights, I can refer to two articles that I have found online: one here by Gregory Frost, and another longer one here by Daniel Beaumont.
Last night, I got back home to discover a package waiting for me. I sort of knew what I was expecting, since I had recently ordered some books from the Yale Press website (they have a selection of titles 50% off, on “holiday sale”). As I opened the box and removed the protective bubblewrap, my eyes fell on the fresh, glossy cover of a paperback, and I had such a near-orgasmic experience that I actually took myself by surprise! That made me recall a short piece I once wrote for a sophomore writing class in college: the professor had asked us to describe a personal obsession, as a way of introducing ourselves to him. Naturally, I wrote about books, describing with care how even the tangible, physical object of the book mattered so much. That prompted the professor to refer me to Walter Benjamin‘s famous essay on book collecting, “Unpacking my Library” — for which I had to keep looking at our college library for days, since the essay is not available anywhere online (There is, however, this great essay on the essay).
There was a time when I used to blog about the newest additions to my bookcase, but it seems that nowadays I buy books much more frequently than I blog. For that I can only blame Boston and its oversaturation of bookstores. Unfortunately for me, the pleasure of buying a book is always accompanied by a necessary bit of guilt: of course, literacy and consumerism (even if it’s just of books) are both privileges. In any case, if you are curious what came in the package mentioned above, here are the titles I ordered: The Poetics of Translation by Willis Barnstone, The Grounding of Modern Feminism by Nancy F. Cott, The Lenses of Gender by Sandra L. Bem, and Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition by Marcia Colish. I must admit, I’m a tad bit promiscuous when it comes to my books: I put these up on my shelf, and then went to bed with a different one!
Speaking of books, today I discovered what I had long been looking for: LibraryThing! It’s an online thing that helps catalog your personal collection, particularly suited to acadedmic books, since it lets you search the Library of Congress and other library catalogs. Over the years I tried a number of different strategies, none of which worked out. Back in high school, I used to literally record the author/title for each of my few books in a notebook. During the summer after my freshman year at college, I created an excel spreadsheet, to keep track of what item was landing on which arm of my collection: Dhaka or New Haven. Needless to say, this was all too time-consuming, so this past summer I tried allconsuming.net (no pun intended) — which allowed you to pull records from Amazon but left much to be desired (it’s more for simple lists than a proper catalog). LibraryThing is just perfect: a simple but great work of genius, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better. I will now have to start entering data into my account: even with my modest collection, it’ll probably take a few weeks, since I can’t imagine handling more than a few books at a time. Unless I spend an entire weekend on this…which may not be such a bad idea :-) Oh, in case you had to stutter on that word in the title: LibraryThing users are apparently called “thingamabrarians”!
I discovered bell hooks in a cute little used books store in Harvard Square named Raven Books. I discovered the store just over two weeks ago when I was hanging out in the area with some friends, and when I went back several days later I found bell hooks on a small 3-tiered bookcase idling outside the door and marked with a sign that said “$2.95.” Raven Books is actually one of the best bookstores I’ve been to in recent memory, but I’ll talk more about it in a separate, longer entry on Boston’s bookstores (they’re a whole phenomenon!).
I was immediately sure that I wanted to buy the book — mainly because I’d never read bell hooks, though I’ve heard quite a bit about her (although actually I think my first conscious introduction to her was through Introducing Cultural Studies). So this was a copy of Ain’t I A Woman: black women and feminism, and on brief examination, I guessed that it must’ve been pretty early on in hooks’s carrier. But when I bought the book, I had no idea that this was actually her first major published work, what would eventually become a significant contribution to contemporary feminist thought. Nor did I know, as I just learned, that hooks was still an undergraduate at Stanford when she was writing it!
I’ve been consistently carrying it on me, and making tiny steps of progress whenever I get a chance. I’m actually pretty impressed at the amount of reading that one can get done while commuting on the subway train to and back from work. With just about a 6 to 7 minutes ride each way (and usually some more time waiting for the train), it doesn’t feel like much, but it’s been just a few days and I’m already half-way through the book. It’s been a great read so far, although admittedly, having decided on history as my primary disciplinary identification, it’s sometimes somewhat disconcerting to read materials with a more sociological bent.
In keeping with my blog habits regarding current readings, I should probably copy a quote here. Below are two excerpts from the Introduction that offer a glimpse of hooks’s main contentions:
No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women. We are rarely recognized as a group separate and distinct from black men, or as a present part of the larger group “women” in this culture. When black people are talked about, sexism militates against the acknowledgment of the itnerests of black women; when women are talked about racism militates against a recognition of black female interests. When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women. No where is this more evident than in the vast body of feminist literature… (p. 7)
Although the women’s movement motivated hundreds of women to write on the woman question, it failed to generate in depth critical analyses of the black female experience. Most feminists assumed that problems of black women faced were caused by racism — not sexism. The assumption that we can divorce the issue of race from sex, or sex from race, has so clouded the vision of American thinkers and writers on the “woman” question that most discussions of sexism, sexist oppression, or woman’s place in society are distorted, biased, and inaccurate. We cannot form an accurate picture of woman’s status by simply calling attention to the role assigned females under patriarchy. More specifically, we cannot form an accurate picture of the status of black women by simply focusing on racial hierarchies. (p. 12)
I was explaining to a friend last night how my encounter with “cultural studies” was sort of the culmination of a number of critical interests: primarily, these include Postcolonialism and Critical Theory, both of which I discovered senior year at college. But other major (and perhaps deeper) interests include multiculturalism (and its critiques), questions of race and identity, and feminism — which has always been a concern, but mainly so in the last 3 years. This past summer, I came across a copy of Introducing Cultural Studies at my favorite used bookstore in New Haven (Book Trader Cafe). I used to be a huge fan of the “Introducing” series back in high school, ever since I discovered it at the British Council library in Dhaka: the books treat relatively serious topics in clear and easily understandable prose, presented in the graphic art medium! In any case, I thought it was interesting that Introducing Cultural Studies was actually written by Ziauddin Sardar, who I’ve come across previously on numerous occasions through readings on Islam. Sardar is a remarkable intellectual figure in contemporary Islamic thought, and I think we in the U.S. unfortunately don’t get enough of him (He’s more British than American!).
I ended up buying the book. It’s a rather cursory introduction to cultural studies, but quite well-written. I’m actually not even sure if I would’ve understood much of the stuff in it while still in high school, so the book is probably more of a casual reading for college students and others. I feel inclined to quote below from the last section of the book (“Where is Cultural Studies Going?”), in which Sardar ponders the future of the (non-)discipline. I thought that within just a few paragraphs, this was quite concise and insightful.
Cultural studies started as a dissenting intellectual tradition outside academia, dedicated to exposing power in all its cultural forms. But it has now become a discipline and a part of the academic establishment and its power structure. Only in the Indian Subcontinent, cultural studies still functions as an independent, but highly diverse, intellectual movement.
By being successfully domesticated in the knowledge industry, cultural studies has become too abstract and too technical, divorced from the lives and realities of the people it is supposed to be empowering, and on whose behalf it was to develop strategies for resistance and survival.
Its amorphous character means that almost anything can be, and often is, justified as “cultural studies”. There seems to be little or no quality control. Moreover, certain segments of cultural studies appears to strive towards banality. It is one thing to study popular culture. It is quite another to romanticize junk and give it academic respectability. Meaningless “textual criticism” of music videos, pop culture and youth style is undermining the importance of cultural studies and the groundbreaking work already achieved in the field.
The legitimacy that cultural studies provides for infantile Western culture has a detrimental effect on Third World societies. Respectable social scientists in places as distant as Delhi and Taiwan spend their time studying, teaching and defending Western junk at the expense of their own rich cultural heritage. Exported Anglocentric cultural studies thus retraces the routes of British colonialism and reconstructs the Empire.
Champions of cultural studies should not make claims on its behalf that cannot be substantiated. Cultural studies is not an ideology. It is not a religion. It does not give meaning and direction to those who follow or use it. It does not, and cannot, teach us how to live a good, moral life. What is can do is help us understand the mechanisms of cultural power and find ways and means to resist them. That’s all.
As a discipline, cultural studies is in danger of losing its edge. It could simply dissovle into another discipline like sociology, anthropology or psychology. That would be a great shame. However, as a collective term for a number of diverse and often contentious intellectual endeavours that expose power in all its ubiquitous forms, cultural studies has a great future.
As a dissenting movement, cultural studies can remain open to unexpected, unimagined, uninvited possibilities — especially those that come from outside the West. And, only as an intellectual movement of genuine dissent, in all its forms, can cultural studies fulfil its original promise. (pp. 168-71, Introducing Cultural Studies, 1997)
Last weekend I finally finished reading Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. I’ve had the book for just about two years now. When Lahiri came here for a reading last year, I had only read one of the stories in the collection: “A Real Durwan”, the one that most reminded me of home.
When Lahiri was here, I got her to sign the book. The room was packed beyond capacity, and after the reading a lot of people queued up to get autographs. I was glad I remembered to bring my copy of the Interpreter with me. While I was waiting in the line, Lahiri’s little baby started crying. She took the baby over from another woman who I think was a relative, and held it with one hand while continuing to sign books with the other. I felt a bit sorry, and wondered for a minute about the balancing of the public and private lives.
When it was my turn, she held her pen on the book and asked for my name so she could address me personally. But I told her it was alright, it wasn’t necessary. I felt guilty taking up her time: the baby was still wailing. People should be considerate and let her go, I thought. I believe she had asked if I was sure. Yes, I was. So she scrawled just her signature, further down the page, but there was a big blue dot where she’d first put down the pen. I murmured a faint thank you, and left. I had actually wanted to say thank you in Bengali, because I knew she would understand. But in that split moment, I forgot all the Bengali I know. But then again, ‘thank you’ in Bengali is a rather formal expression, hardly used in the everyday. Oh culture, so baffling! In many of her stories, Lahiri wonders, for example, why Bengali couples never kiss, never hug each other.
Immediately after that reading, I had to go to a meeting where I showed the book to a friend, who exclaimed, “Oh, she didn’t write you a little personal comment?”. I always regretted not getting that personal thing. If anything, that big dot kept being a bad reminder: after all, it would’ve only taken a few more seconds. But now that I’ve actually read the book, I realize that what really matters is what the stories tell. The issues explored by Lahiri are ones very pertinent to our times, issues that I am thinking about all the time and even facing every day in real life. There is, of course, the bit of universality in Lahiri’s writing that everyone can relate to. But then there are the particulars that struck at the very core of my being. The abundant Bengali imageries are all too familiar, all too laden with nostalgia. Lahiri copes with existence in a grey area, somewhere between Bengal and America: the same grey area that I must inhabit.
Lahiri’s writing is beautiful, and I’ve felt amazingly content after each story. Content, but sad. Well, sadness is existence. There are too many maladies, too many things to think about. How stories create contentment amidst all this, truly baffles me. Well, it may be baffling, but I am still grateful.
Filed under: Bookish
In my life, things happen in clusters. I have long since stopped calling them coincidences, both because they have by now lost the element of surprise and also because I don’t know if they are meaningful enough to be labelled that. But it has been the case with numerous events, many of which I have wanted to blog about, but procrastination, of course, gets in the way.
The first time I learned of the novel The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini was more than a year ago when I was travelling back to New Haven from DC and made a stop in NYC to visit my favorite bookstore, The Strand. They had a whole stack of copies and the book looked interesting (mainly because of the author’s Arabic name), so I picked it up and took a look at the blurbs on the backcover. I didn’t buy it, though, because I had enough at hand. On my way out, however, I noticed that it was high up on the Strand’s list of top 20 bestselling books of the Week (the store always puts this up). Seems like a good book but funny I hadn’t heard of it until now, I thought.
On the train from NYC to New Haven, I was sitting next to a gentleman who appeared to be commuting back home from work. He took out a book to read, and I was trying to take a peek at the title when I suddenly discovered that it was, guess what, The Kite Runner! Interesting, I thought. After I was back in New Haven, I remember again coming across something about the book as I was going through updates on my regular blog reads (probably on MoorishGirl.com).
Anyways, fellow blogger Tea Beascuit was deeply moved by the book. Looks like I should add it to my already heavy reading list. Any feedback, others?
Filed under: Bookish
Between last night and now, I have spent over 8 hours procrastinating by shopping books online: reading excerpts, checking out reviews, comparing editions/prices, and of course buying. And to wonder why I screw up my schoolwork…
Update: Well, guess what? I woke up today morning and the first email I got is from my credit card company, saying that they noticed “unusual charge activity” on my card, and wanted to make sure that it wasn’t fraud. Heh. It totally cracked me up, but I also realized this really is one of my occasional fits of bookbuying — happens two or three times a year.
Anyways, since some of you asked for it, I will list here what I got or am checking out. I bought:
- The Beginning and the End, by Naguib Mahfouz. I bought it because I have the Arabic text, and I thought I’d sit down with both and try to do some reading practice.
- Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih. I need this next week for my “Orientalism” class. It’s supposed to be one of the best in modern Arab literature: I’m glad I’ll finally get to read it.
- Treatise on Tolerance, by Voltaire. A primary source for my final paper for the “Enlightenment & Romanticism” seminar. I don’t really need to buy it, but for texts that I think are of substantial importance, I don’t feel very comfortable using them unless I actually own them. Mainly because I love to have highlights/notes for future reference.
- The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela: Travels in the Middle Ages. A primary source for my senior thesis next semester. Will try to do some work on it over winter break. I’m sure you’ll hear more of Benjamin of Tudela on the blog, since a whole semester of him is coming up.
- The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, by Maria Rosa Menocal. She’s the one who wrote the better known Ornament of the World, and is one of my favorite professors/authors, hopefully also an advisor for my senior thesis.
- Communities of Violence, by David Nirenberg. I read excerpts from this before for my seminar with Menocal last semester, and Nirenberg actually made a guest appearence in class one day. In this book, he puts forth some new and very interesting (but also controversial) ideas about co-existence and persecution in medieval Spanish society.
- The Medieval Spains, by Bernard Reilly. Supposed to be a good survey history text for medieval Spain. I’m buying it for background reading over winter break.
- Moorish Spain, by Richard Fletcher. Similar to above, but focusing specifically on the period of Muslim rule. From the few pages I’ve read, Fletcher’s seems to be a really good and engaging author.
- The Niche of Lights (“Mishkat al-Anwar”), by al-Ghazali (trans. David Buchman). This book is part of the great new Islamic Translation Series from Brigham Young University. It has a parallel English-Arabic text, and I thought it’d be great practice for Arabic reading, in addition to all the good stuff by al-Ghazali. This edition was reviewed by my professor Frank Griffel in the October ’02 issue of the Journal of American Oriental Society.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings. Lings’s biography, based primarily on Ibn Hisham’s Seerat Ibn Ishaq, is now a classic in the English language.
- Rethinking Islam: Common Questions, Uncommon Answers, by Mohammed Arkoun. I’ve read bits of Arkoun before, but have been wanting to read this for a while. Arkoun is a hidden treasure of the Muslim world, and is still not so well-known, partly because he writes mainly in French.
And I would also like to buy the following, but I think I just might be able to resist until my next shopping spree:
- The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawi. I think any respectable bookshelf is worthless without a copy of this literary masterpiece, specially in Husain Haddawi’s “authoritative” translation of Muhsin Mahdi’s “authoritative” Arabic text.
- The Arabian Nights: A Companion, by Robert Irwin. Came across this while browsing, but looks like it’d be something nice to have. It discusses the history of the text, which is something I got interested in when reading Fatima Mernissi’s Scheherazade Goes West.
- Saracens, by John V. Tolan. Tolan is a pretty well-known scholar of medieval European perceptions of Islam.
- Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, by Dimitri Gutas. Gutas is currently one of the leading scholars of the Greco-Arabic tradition. Unfortunatley though I never got to take his class.
The list of course goes on, but I think that’s enough for today.
I have recently taken an interest to the genre of travel narratives (having read several 19th century British examples for my Orientalism class): they are so funny and full of quirky details! As I already mentioned recently, I’m doing some research to find a topic for my senior essay, and was leafing through my old copy of Stillman’s great Jews of Arab Lands, when I came across an excerpt from the records of Meshullam of Volterra, who was apparently a 15th century Italian Jew who visited Alexandria, Cairo, Gaza, Jerusalem, Beirut and Damascus and then wrote down about it (Many people, of course, travel – but not everyone can/does write about it). I was studying in the library today and got hold of a bunch of random books for research, and lo and behold, who else but Meshullam of Volterra crops up in one of them!
The following is one of many funny passages I found on skimming the text (note particularly the line in bold!). Meshullam arrived in Jerusalem on 29th July 1481, and stayed there until 29th August.
The buildings of Jerusalem are very fine and the stones are larger than in the buildings of the other places that I have seen. The land flows with milk and honey although it is hilly and ruined and desolate, and everything is cheap; its fruits are choice and very good. There is a Karob honey which is called dipirasciativo, also date honey, and the honey of bees, and wheat and barley and pomegrenates and all kinds of fruits good and fine; and they have good olive oil, but they only eat sesame oil, which is very fine. The Moslems and also the Jews of this place are pigs at their eating. They all eat out of one vessel with their fingers, without a napkin, just as the Cairenes do, but their cloths are clean. They also have asses whose saddle is worth a lot of money, for they place upon it precious stones and gold threads. The customs of the Moslems are diverse from all people, for everyone marries twenty or thirty wives as he pleases, but they do not see them until they go home; and the men give dowries to the women, and from the day of marriage the man is only bound to give her food, but her clothes and all other things she requires she has to make herself; and when she is with child Moslems do not touch her till two months after the child is born,, for that would be a great sin, and the wife is bound to pay for the food and clothes of all her sons and daughters; therefore they are all openly harlots, and when they do not wish to stay with their husbands they go to the Niepo, the Lord of the City, and say that their husband does not give them food and they are believed, and the husband must divorce his wife; for the Moslems give divorce like the Jews. All men and women and children, Jews as well as Moslems, have these customs. They sleep in their clothes, and these customs are usual in the whole Kingdom of the Sultan, and not in Jerusalem only. I wrote this when I was in Alexandria of Egypt, but I forgot to write of some of their customs. They are all alike.
p. 194-5, “Rabbi Meshullam Ben R. Menahem of Volterra,” in Jewish Travellers, ed. Elkan N. Adler (London: G. Routledge & Sons Ltd., 1930).
I was just quickly skimming through a book in the library, called How to Read a Film (by James Monaco: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) and came across the most amazing statement ever:
Popular novels have been a vast reservoir of material for commercial films over the years. In fact, the economics of the popular novel are such now that recycling the material as a film is a prime consideration for most publishers. It almost seems, at times, as if the popular novel (as opposed to elite prose art) exists only as a first draft trial for the film. (p. 45)
