Ali the Looney Tune

Intro to Vol 2; Nights 296-319

Book 2 of 3 begins with a short introduction on the history of the text. In short, “there is no such thing as a canonical text of the Nights with a fixed number of stories in a fixed order.” (p. xi). There’s more to it than that, but that really is what it boils down to.

They picked a good place to start a new volume. The first story, of ‘Ali the Persian, (Nights 294-296) is one of the best so far. It’s short and funny in unexpected ways. It reminded me of the absurdity of a Looney Tunes cartoon. I don't want to spoil it anymore for potential readers. I hope to remember to reread it.

The next few stories have pleasant variety to them: the memory of Ja’far after he is dead (pp. 11-13, Night 299), a monkey that brings good luck to a notorious “sluggard” (p. 20, Nights 302-303), our first mention of the City of Brass (p. 24, Night 304; more on this later, I’m sure), and a brief Mirror for Princes (pp. 34-36, Nights 308-309).

Then we get to our longer story, which has a lot of familiar tropes by now. It has a beautiful woman in disguise who ends up becoming a king (p. 53, Night 318). It’s quite a turn of fate, as just a page earlier, a thief swore that he and the forty thieves in his band “shall all bang away at your womb from evening till morning.” (p. 52, Night 317). Next week we’ll see if fortune reunites her with her dopey lover.

Poetry Writing Constraints

Chapters 78-80 Tons of plot in these chapters. Most importantly, we get the deaths of a major character (Cao Cao) and minor characters (Xiahou Dun, Hua Tuo, Liu Feng). Hua Tuo’s death is one of my favorites, given my love of lost books. His “Book of the Black

The Devil Goes Down to Arabia

Nights 681-695 After the last couple weeks, I was worried that I was tiring of the Nights. But there was some good stuff here! My enthusiasm for the Nights has been restored. We can thank al-Asma’i, who the index says was a real-life expert on the

Head is a Hot Potato

Chapters 76-77 With the biggest death of the book so far, and likely one of the biggest in the book overall, we really get the sense of the end of a great one. Sun Quan beheads Lord Guan and quickly regrets it. Sun is advised that Liu Bei will

Seriousness replaced absurdity

Nights 649-680 It’s hard for me to say why I found this story so much more tiresome than what came before it. Maybe I’m getting tired of the Nights. Maybe work is particularly stressful right now. If I were to look for an objective reason, I’d

Read more

Poetry Writing Constraints

The Devil Goes Down to Arabia

Head is a Hot Potato

Seriousness replaced absurdity