Italian Days Arabian Nights

Memoir set in Italy and Libya during World War II.

Spanning five decades and as many continents, Hippy Days, Arabian Nights is a funny, moving, and compelling story of a woman whose extraordinary life will never be summarised by the words ‘could have’, ‘might have’, or ‘should have’. Whether it’s following her dreams pursuing what she believes in, or chasing matters of the heart, from the outset Australian artist Katherine Boland has grabbed life by the throat and jumped in feet first. Part One: Hippy Days. One woman’s experience of life in a hippy community that sprang up in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales as part of the counterculture movement––an overlooked and relatively untapped period in Australian modern history. In 1976, Katherine and her boyfriend John, like many idealistic young students of the time, abandon their university studies and leave Melbourne to pursue a sustainable and independent life in the bush. Their earnest quest for a Utopian life in harmony with nature is both hilarious and serious: John finds himself reviving their dying goat with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in the back of a ute while on the way to the vet; and, under the stars, alone in the bush, a pregnant and groaning Katherine goes into labour to the accompaniment of New Year’s Eve fireworks and the sympathetic mooing of a neighbour’s cow. However, as Katherine reveals, even the strongest woman is vulnerable and the noblest of dreams can perish, observing as she does that in many families ‘peace, harmony and mung beans’ can founder on the back of drug addiction with its many consequences including family violence and child neglect. Part Two: Arabian Nights. Prior to the Egyptian revolution in 2010, Katherine receives an invitation from the Egyptian Ministry of Culture to participate in an International Artists’ Symposium. And so begins her next fateful and totally unplanned foray into the unknown: falling head over heels in love (or is it lust!) for an Egyptian journalist 27 years her junior – at first sight. Her ideas and preconceptions about Islam and the Middle East are challenged as her relationship evolves and deepens over the next 6 years.

This volume offers new approaches to considering Italy’s traumatic experiences through a wide array of media, including film, documentaries, docufiction, websites, YouTube videos, advertisements, newspapers, and literature, that have not yet been fully analyzed. It looks at the trauma inflicted on Italians not, simply, as national or cultural traumas but, rather, as the creation/identification of subnational and transnational communities shaped by these trauma cases. The term “subnational”, or “transnational”, community is used mostly in reference to human beings, as they form those communities; however, they are also connected to a specific place, namely Italy. In addition, whereas “things” cannot become traumatized, this book also considers “living things,” such as the environment and the nature, which may create further trauma(s) for people.

Arabian Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern, West Asian and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night. The stories proceed from an original tale of ruler Shahryār and his wife Scheherazade where some stories are framed within other stories, while others begin and end of their own accord. This edition contains the most beloved and most well known tales such as Sindbad the Sailor and his Seven Voyages, Alibaba and the Forty Thieves, The Fisherman and the Jinni and many more which will transport you into the land of magic and nostalgia. Collection: The Story Of King Shahryar And His Brother The Tale Of The Bull And The Ass The Fisherman And The Jinni The Tale Of The Ensorceled Prince The Porter And The Three Ladies Of Baghdad The First Kalandar's Tale The Second Kalandar's Tale The Third Kalandar's Tale The Eldest Lady's Tale The Tale Of The Three Apples Tale Of Nur Al-Din Ali And His Son Badr Al-Din Hasan The City Of Many-Columned Iram And Abdullah Son Of Abi Kilabah The Sweep And The Noble Lady The Man Who Stole The Dish Of Gold Wherein The Dog Ate The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Again Through A Dream The Ebony Horse The Angel Of Death With The Proud And The Devout Man Sindbad The Seaman And Sindbad The Landsman First Voyage Of Sindbad Hight The Seaman The Second Voyage Of Sindbad The Seaman The Third Voyage Of Sindbad The Seaman The Fourth Voyage Of Sindbad The Seaman The Fifth Voyage Of Sindbad The Seaman The Sixth Voyage Of Sindbad The Seaman The Seventh Voyage Of Sindbad The Seaman The Lady And Her Five Suitors Khalifah The Fisherman Of Baghdad Abu Kir The Dyer And Abu Sir The Barber The Sleeper And The Waker Story Of The Larrikin And The Cook Aladdin; Or, The Wonderful Lamp Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves

A Queer Film Classic on 1974’s Arabian Nights by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the controversial Italian director who was murdered under mysterious circumstances in 1975. Already internationally distinguished as a poet, novelist, and outspoken social critic of the postwar period, Pasolini turned to filmmaking around 1960. In little more than a decade, he produced one of the most remarkable bodies of work in cinema history, beginning with his early film-portraits of the struggles of underclass youths and extending through his adaptations of such sacred or mythic narratives as the stories of Oedipus and Medea and the Gospel of St. Matthew. In what turned out to be the last years of his career, Pasolini turned to several classic works of chain-narrative—The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom—as models for his own radical expansion of cinema’s capacities for telling, showing, and enacting embodiment, nudity, and sexual desires and behaviors. This book explores the legacy and context of Arabian Nights, in many ways the most optimistic and appealing of Pasolini’s late films, not only in the final explosive phase of Pasolini’s career but also more broadly in the global history of film spectacle from Douglas Fairbanks to Maria Montez. Michael Moon teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.