Literary Kinds

Here is the link to House episodes available online.

http://www.casttv.com/shows/house

We're looking at Season 4 - House's Head.

For our second reading of the Arabian Nights, I decided to pick up from the first tale and read in chronological order the next three (since it seemed that a large number of the class read the first few begining stories, and this would lend some common ground). I attempted to read the first tale on the ELF site in Burton's translation, but could not find in myself a willingness to continue after the paragraph of all-caps. Instead, I read the Lang translations of: "The Story of the Merchant and the Genius" and "The Story of the First Old Man and of the Hind" and "The Story of the Second Old Man, and of the Two Black Dogs"

"In 1984 Muhsin Mahdi, a professor of Arabic literature at Harvard University, published a scholarly edition of the Nights which “will shape the course of subsequent scholarship on the Arabic text.” He based his edition on Galland, introduced corrections from eight other mss."

My copy of Arabian Nights was translated by Hussain Haddawy, who used Muhsin Mahdi's text.

 I read the Thousand and One Nights tales from the ELF site, and the tales that I chose were The Story of the Merchant and the Genius, The Story of the Greek King and the Physician Douban, and The Enchanted Horse. I decided to skip around because I wanted to get a sense of some of the early, middle, and later stories, but when I have time I would like to read all of them, and in order. Some stories lead into other stories, and these stories are part of the secondary story which is a part of the Thousand and One Nights main story. So I feel like, to get the full effect and being able to understand the main underlying story, you need to read all of the stories in order.

When I watched "Metropolis," I didn't see an overwhelming amount of connection between the film and "Persepolis," but there were a few noteworthy similarities that I picked up on.  The most significant similarity, I thought, was that both tell the story of revolutions against corrupt leaders put together by the people.  The revolutions were not at all the same, but they had a lot of the same elements (people coming together, copious amounts of violence, etc.).  I also noticed the similarity in the stylization of the images, as Anne mentioned in class on Tuesday.

 So far I've read the first 9 stories of the Arabian Nights collection off of ELF. It's interesting coming back to read these again after years of not doing so. I read many of the Arabian Nights stories when I was younger. I owned the book, which was a gift, and I read several stories before bed every night. Now, I don't remember a lot of them. What's interesting is that the first time I read these stories they were in Turkish. I only wish I had a better memory for the times, or at least to book so that I could comment as to whether I had different experiences while reading the stories in different languages. 

the concept of holy moments in movies fascinated me, mainly because i had never thought about it like that before, and its true, movies do do that for me, as do tv serials - i remember me in high school and whenevr i was having a particularly bad day i would just sit in front of the tv and watch anything that was even midly interesting, simply because it distracted me. and thinking about it, obviously its a successful distraction - it takes over your sense of vision, sound and a good part of your mental cognitive ability, leaving little room for thought.

a book on the other hand needs more work, you need to read it, and sometimes, if your thoughts are too loud, you skim the book, because you can. and its easier.

we began class by taking a look at peoples responses to the movie Persepolis - the class seemed to have similar reactions in terms of concepts and things like the fact that the movie was in french, the soundtrack it had, the addition of movement, lack of borders and its play with colour.

what the class did not seem to agree on however was whether the role of an adaptation (the movie was one of the book)  was to preserve the original - a discusion which presented itself in bits and pieces throughout the class.

aybala50 enjoyed the music in the movie - she said it added a layer to the experience which the book couldnt do. she also thought that it gave the movie more direction because the film maker could control how we felt through this soundtrack.