Author: Andrei Codrescu

Cites

• NULL (4)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The meeting was held at the Waikiki Sheraton the lastweek of February 2012. The main participants were 1001 young women, most of whom were clones, with a minority of them born through ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection), and the scientists who created them. The conference was called for observation purposes, eighteen years after the first successful cloning of a human being.
    FROM: Associated Press, (2012), Article, NULL
• Robert Irwin (2)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The automaton, a creature who is neither living nor dead, features frequently in the Nights... The brass oarsman who bears a tablet of lead inscribed with talismanic characters on his breast and who rows the Third Dervish to the Island of Safety; the little manikin which a dervish fashions out of beeswax and which plunges into the river to retrieve the sultan's lost signet ring; the air-driven statues which seem to speak... and the Ebony Horse, which is powered by wind and, when the right lever is pulled, carries a man through the air: they all simulate life, but there is no life in them.
    FROM: The Arabian Nights: A Companion, (1994), Book, UK
• trans. Richard F. Burton (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Then King Shahryar... also sware himself by a binding oath that whatever wife he married he would abate her maidenhead at night and slay her next morning to make sure of his honour. "For", said he, "there never was nor is there one chaste woman upon the face of the earth.".... On this wise he continued for the space of three years; marrying a maiden every night and killing her the next morning, till folk raised an outcry against him and cursed him, praying Allah utterly to destroy him and his rule; and women made an uproar and mothers wept till there remained not in the city a young person fit for carnal copulation.... His Chief Wazir, the same who was charged with the executions... had two daughters, Sharazad and Dunyazad hight, of whom the elder had perused the books, annals, and legends... and the stories... perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart... Thereupon said she, "By Allah, O my father, how long shall this slaughter of women endure?... I wish thou wouldst give me in marriage to this King Shahryar; either I shall live or I shall be a ransom for the virgin daughters of Moslems and the cause of their deliverance from his hands and thine."
    FROM: The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, (1885), Book, NULL
• Andrew Lang (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: At last some storyteller thought of writing dwn the tales, and fixing them into a kind of framework, as if they had been narrated to a cruel Sultan by his wife.
    FROM: The Arabian Nights Entertainment, (1898), Book, UK
• trans. by Husain Haddawy, based on the text of the 14th century Syrian manuscript edited by Muhsin Madhi (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Shahrayar.... then swore to marry for one night only and kill the woman the next morning, in order to save himself from the wickedness and cunning of women, saying, "There is not a single chaste woman anywhere on the entire face of the earth." ... the Vizier, who put the girls to death, had an older daughter called Shahrazad and a younger one called Dinarzad... Shahrazad... knew poetry by heart, had studied historical reports, and was acquainted witht he sayings of men and the maxims of sages and kings. She was intelligent, knowledgeable, wise and refined. She had read and learned... She said to her father, ... "I would like you to marry me to King Shahrayar, so that I may either succeed in saving the people or perish and die like the rest.
    FROM: The Arabian Nights, (1990), Book, NULL
• Alva Gardener (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: When King Sharyar set himself to the grim task of deflowering Sheherazade in the presence of her younger sister Dinarzad, he cursed Narrative. HE cursed the history that had imprisoned him in his story, he cursed his weakness, the cowardice of his subjects, the flaws inherent to being human, adn the gods who may or may not have been in control of Narrative.Then he entered Sheherazade and it was like entering another story. No, Sharyar corrected himself, it was another story. Sheherazade opened to him the first of a thousand and one nights, she was the crossroads at which it was possible to take another path. It was possible to live again. The crossroads in his bed invited him to take the less traveled road, nay, the untraveled road. Sharyar took it, and Sheherazade remained a virgin (the first night).
    FROM: Stockholm Syndrome or the Persistence of Humanity: Sheherazade, the First Feminist Prisoner, (None), Book, NULL
• Ali H. Madhouf (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Sheherezade saved 1001 girls. We know the stories that saved these girls, but we know nothing of their history; they got away, winning their right to anonymity thatnks to Sheherazade's nightly performances, her exhibitionism. If one could imagine the lives of 1001 girls who weren't murdered by Sharyar, one could write a true history of the Islamic Middle Ages.
    FROM: Books I Will Never Write, (None), NULL, NULL
• Peter Heath (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The work has an ambivalent attitude toward curiosity; this stems from its ambivalence toward the main object of this curiosity: the "world" as we have termed it, of romance. This world is mysterious, alluring, and attractive, but also full of danger.
    FROM: "Romance and Genre in The Thousand and One Nights" in The Arabian Nights Reader, edited by Ulrich Marzolph, (2006), Book, NULL
• Paul Mariah (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: One mad Queen One thousand voyeurs.
    FROM: NULL, (None), Poem, NULL
• L. R. Lied (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: If you can save one life by telling a story, what story will it be? Start thinking about it now, you never know when you'll be called to tell it.
    FROM: Advice to Young Women Based on Literary Themes, (None), NULL, NULL
• Meguey Baker (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Mysterious strangers. Beautiful women. Enchanted swords. Talking camels. You play members of the Sultan's Court, whiling away the sultry nights by telling pointed stories to advance your own ambitions. Navigate the social maze and you could win your heart's desire; offend the wrong person and you suffer the Sultan's wrath. Is it a wonder those here turn to tales of mystery and magic, beauty and bold adventure, to fly away in thought, if only for a time? And, if one's tale is well told, and brings one favor of one kind or another, so much the better, is it not so? Gather three or more players; more than six become unwieldy. Give each a pencil and a character sheet or a small piece of paper. In the middle of the table, put a bowl, pleasing to look at, and filled with dice of many colors, shapes and sizes. These are the gems of the Sultan.
    FROM: A Thousand and One Nights: A Game of Enticing Stories [Night Sky Games], (None), NULL, NULL
• Ron May (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: I interviewed some of the girls. I asked all of them if they had read the stories of the 1001 Nights that had inspired the number of particpants at the meeting. Only one of them said that she had tried, but being a Christian, she found it hard to read "lies". I said that these "lies" were called "fiction," and that they were stories that most people on earth enjoyed even if they were made up. "When did lies become respectable?" she bristled. "When people wanted to escape from boredom and maybe from themselves," I said, rather pedantically, "Well, sooner will a camel go through the eye of a needle than a liar into the kingdom of heaven," she misquoted from her religion, and I felt it futile to insist that her religion was itself a myth made up by the writers of the Bible. I didn't want to be mean and, besides, she was cute.
    FROM: Rolling Stone, (2012), Article, NULL
• Waikiki Sheraton (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Dr. Nicole Betrain, developer of the Sheherazade Test, told Paris-Match: "We tested 1001 subjects over an eleven-year period between 1999 and 2010, and found a narrowing of human attention span at a rate equivalent miniturisation of semiconductors.
    FROM: "A Controversial Remark", "Daily Sheherezade", (2009), NULL, NULL
• Mary Alther (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: The borderline between the oral and the written is the subject of the 1001 Nights. The stories that Sheherezade told Sharyar and Dinarzad in the royal bed were collected and written by the calligrapher who bound them in a book and who reflected on what he was doing while he wrote, which is why all of the 1001 Nights are pierced by the anxiety of leaving traces and nostalgia for the act of pure fancy that the calligrapher was destroying as he wrote.
    FROM: "Lipstick on the Mirror: Narrative and Self-Reflection", Psychoanlytic Quarterly, (1987), Essay, NULL
• J. Hillis Miller (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: If writing is initially a form of scratching or engraving, the cutting of a line, penetration of some hard substance with a marking tool, it may also, after the invention of pencils and pens, he thought of as the pouring out on a flat surface of a long line or filament, lead or ink making a cursive line of characters stamping, cutting, contaminating, or deflowering the virgin of paper, according to a not very "submerged" sexual metaphor.
    FROM: Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines, (1992), Book, US
• Regis Cambray (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Sheherezade dismembered narrative: every story she told ended on the cliffhanger of dawn and resumed on the edge of night, but the two pieces, the starting and the continuation, didn't fit exactly, and in that gap there was something not yet explained, something that historians tried to fill with bits of history, psychologists with sex, and theorists with theory. Perhaps these gaps that advanced the story cycles and kept them going were places where Sharyar and Dinarzad's intervention took place, they were the collaborative interpellations of the other two members of the threesome.
    FROM: "The Spiralling Sherezade: Notes on the 1001 Nights", The Infinite Story: Essays, (1996), Book, NULL
• Lee Haring (edited by Ulrich Marzolph) (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: To conceive the frame story as a genre makes it an entity, a product, a kind of story (Irwin): to conceive "framing" as a device or skill makes it a strategy, one element of the story-teller's range of techniques which he or she can invoke in multiple ways (Mills...), "Frame" is one metaphor, the banyan tree and the umbrella are others' (Naithani...)
    FROM: "Framing in Narrative", The Arabian Nights in Transnational Perspective, (2007), Book, US
• Tzvetan Todorov (edited by Ulrich Marzolph) (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Narrative equals life; abscence of narrative, death... Absence of narrative is not the only counterpart of narrative-as-life; to want to hear a narrative is also to run mortal risks. If loquacity saves from death, curiosity leads to it.
    FROM: "Narrative-Men" The Arabian Nights Reader, (2006), Book, Bulgaria/France
• Myron Bernstein (1)
  • IN: Whatever Gets You Through the Night (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Sharyar is the spectator par excellence, the first TV addict, a royal Archie Bunker who controls his aggresivity through the palliative effects of Shezz the Telly (who has the advantage over present-day telly of having a Body).
    FROM: NULL, (2008), NULL, NULL