One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition, which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment; the work was collected over many centuries by various authors and scholars across West and South Asia, North Africa. Some tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Indian, Greek and Turkish folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others the frame story, are most drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān, which in turn relied on Indian elements. What is common throughout all the editions of the Nights is the initial frame story of the ruler Shahryār and his wife Scheherazade and the framing device incorporated throughout the tales themselves; the stories proceed from this original tale. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights.
The bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is used for songs and riddles and to express heightened emotion. Most of the poems are single quatrains, although some are longer; some of the stories associated with The Nights, in particular "Aladdin's Wonderful Lamp", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor", were not part of The Nights in its original Arabic versions but were added to the collection by Antoine Galland and other European translators. The main frame story concerns Shahryār, whom the narrator calls a "Sasanian king" ruling in "India and China". Shahryār is shocked to learn. In his bitterness and grief, he decides. Shahryār begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonor him; the vizier, whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade does not end it.
The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins another one, the king, eager to hear the conclusion of that tale as well, postpones her execution once again; this goes on for one one nights, hence the name. The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, comedies, poems and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict jinns, apes, sorcerers and legendary places, which are intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally. Common protagonists include the historical Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, his Grand Vizier, Jafar al-Barmaki, the famous poet Abu Nuwas, despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire, in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade's tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly layered narrative texture.
The different versions have different individually detailed endings but they all end with the king giving his wife a pardon and sparing her life. The narrator's standards for what constitutes a cliffhanger seem broader than in modern literature. While in many cases a story is cut off with the hero in danger of losing his life or another kind of deep trouble, in some parts of the full text Scheherazade stops her narration in the middle of an exposition of abstract philosophical principles or complex points of Islamic philosophy, in one case during a detailed description of human anatomy according to Galen—and in all of these cases she turns out to be justified in her belief that the king's curiosity about the sequel would buy her another day of life; the history of the Nights is complex and modern scholars have made many attempts to untangle the story of how the collection as it exists came about. Robert Irwin summarises their findings: In the 1880s and 1890s a lot of work was done on the Nights by Zotenberg and others, in the course of which a consensus view of the history of the text emerged.
Most scholars agreed that the Nights was a composite work and that the earliest tales in it came from India and Persia. At some time in the early 8th century, these tales were translated into Arabic under the title Alf Layla, or'The Thousand Nights'; this collection formed the basis of The Thousand and One Nights. The original core of stories was quite small. In Iraq in the 9th or 10th century, this original core had Arab stories added to it—among them some tales about the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. From the 10th century onwards independent sagas and story cycles were added to the compilation Then, from the 13th century onwards, a further layer of stories was added in Syria and Egypt, man
Algiers is the seventh studio album from Tucson, Arizona indie rock/Americana band Calexico, released on 11 September 2012. The album's name comes from Algiers, New Orleans, where the album was recorded. All songs written by Joey Burns & John Convertino, except "Fortune Teller" by Joey Burns & Pieta Brown, "No Te Vayas" by Jacob Valenzuela. In some releases a bonus disc was included, entitled "Spiritoso," which featured the band playing their songs accompanied by the Radio Symphonie Orchester Wien and the Deutsches Filmorchester Babelsberg, conducted by Cornelius Meister and Matt Dunkley respectively. Tracks 1,8 and 11 performed with the Radio Symphonie Orchester Wien. Algiers at Discogs
Eugene Augustus Rühlmann was an American-born dancer and singer. Born in Buffalo, New York, he adopted the stage name Eugene Stratton and spent most of his career in British music halls. Stratton was a member of the Grand Order of Water Rats. Stratton first performed at the age of 10 in an acrobatic act called the Two Welsleys, he appeared as a dancer in 1873 under the name of Master Jean. He spent some time in a circus before joining a minstrel group, he was by this time using the name of Stratton. In England, he worked his way up to the main song & dance man in the Moore & Burgess Minstrel Show, in 1883 he married Moore's daughter, Annie Matilda Moore, he left the minstrels to go on the music hall circuit in 1887, first as a double act solo. Although at one time he used an Irish voice, he appeared as a "black-faced" singer, he performed in pantomime, for the first time in 1896. His friendship & association with Leslie Stuart gave him many of the songs. During the period 1899 to 1911 he made records of most of Stuart's songs.
He died in Christchurch, Hampshire on September 15, 1918, is buried in Bandon Hill Cemetery in Wallington in Surrey beside his great friend and fellow music hall artiste Joe Elvin. In James Joyce’s novel Ulysses in the fifteenth episode “Circe”, there are references to Stratton, as well as the adoption of a faux Negro dialect. Aunt Mandy The Cake Walk A Carol of Stars The Dandy Coloured Coon Hoodoo Idler Is yer mammie always with ye? I don't know nobody I Lub a Lubly Gal I'm the father of a little black coon Lily of Laguna Little Dolly Daydream Love me little My little octoroon My second time on earth She's mine, I'm hers Waitress' love letter When de golden sun went down Whistling Coon Won't you love me Oxford Companion to Popular Music by Peter Gammond - ISBN 0-19-280004-3 Harrington, J. "A Closer Look at Eugene Stratton.", in: Dublin James Joyce Journal 2.2: 78-88. Project MUSE. Web. 30 Aug. 2016. <https://muse.jhu.edu/>