writings

Slave of Desire: Sex, Love and Death in The 1001 Nights is a literary study of the medieval Arabic story collection the 1001 Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights. The influence of the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek is seen throughout the book which is really an exercise in comparative literature. Stories such as the Frame Tale (of Shahrazad and Shahriyar), The Hunchback, and The Sleeper Awakened are examined under critical rubrics such as the master-slave dialectic, the mirror-stage, and the gaze. It was published by Fairley Dickinson University in 2002.

Some excerpts:

" ... Illicit sex and wine stain the pages. Hashish is used frequently. Despite the way the book is used as a stock reference for certain sorts of events ('It was like something out of The Arabian Nights '), many people are surprised by the real contents of the book. There is a widespread assumption that it is something like children's literature, but it is not."

(from Chapter 1 Alf Laylah wa Laylah Or The Thousand and One Nights)

"...The unity of The Thousand and One Nights is like the fragile unity of a dream whose various threads, with all their condensed and displaced meanings, threaten to unravel in a thousand and one different directions."

(from Chapter 8: 'Peut-on tuer avec des noyaux de dattes?' )

recent articles and wip

Since publication of Slave I have completed an article "Min Jumlat al-Jamadat" that compares the representation of reality belle-lettristic medieval Arabic non-fictions with that of the Nights. With the exception of that article, my more recent work concerns itself with broader compartive contexts.

Two articles in the process of publication examine the influence of the Nights on the works of Voltaire and Proust.

A third article, "The Lone Nut Theory: Paranoia and Recognition in Contemporary American Fiction," will appear in collection of essays devoted to literary concept of recognition (anagnoresis). This essay examines the relation of paranoia and recognition in the works of Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo.

articles on blues

My course on the blues and the documentary about Joe Beard have also led to publications on the blues. In September of 2003 I published three articles in Living Blues about Joe Beard, Chris Beard and Son House. These were spin-offs from the documentary--indeed, the article about Joe Beard was called "So Much Truth".

I have also contributed a number of articles to The Encyclopedia of the Blues which will be published soon by Routledge.

children's book

When my daughter Lily was much younger, I wrote and illustrated a book for her called The Book of Animals. It was inspired by a work of medieval Arabic literature with that same title. That work was written by al-Jahiz, who is generally considered one of the foremost prose stylists in medieval Arabic literature. Al-Jahiz's book was filled with information and anecdotes about animals, and I translated some of the anecdotes for my children's book. Then I supplemented these with popular tales taken from other sources. The illustrations were meant to evoke Islamic miniature paintings. you can see some of these, and judge for yourself.

Cover , page 1 , page 8 , page 19, page23