To begin, the seventh day just screams out “The Canterbury Tales.” Each work was about how a woman tricked her husband in some way to stay with her lover. The most shocking one I found was the story with the bath, in which the stupid husband cleans it while the lover has his way with the wife.  I honestly couldn’t picture this situation in my head. It was too odd. one huge difference I noticed between this chapter and the general vibe of Arabian Nights was that sex and love making was a natural part of a woman’s crazy gene. But for the Decameron, sex is either a very grave subject or an incredibly funny subject. It’s like listening to a nervous fifth grader telling PG-13 rated sex jokes to his friends. Everyone huddled around laughing in an uncertain manner.

The sixth day made me feel kind of dumb. With each quirky  one liner I simply sat there scratching my head. I am sure they were brilliant at the time but if I said any of those things today I would probably get my butt kicked. I had no idea that there was such a reverence for cleverness. I thought that it was much less celebrated than that of Islamic culture. I didn’t realize how wrong I was.

Finally, on the fourth day, which I had already read a bit of, was even more interesting in the second half. I really like the story about the sage and the lover who dies from rubbing it up against his teeth. I liked that they actually had a reasonable explanation. If it was in the Arabian  Nights, they would have simply stated that it was a genie.

She is god-like and yet she barely even gives him a second glance. I can understand why there is a sudden relief for him when she dies. I mean, he needed those chains broken. I also don’t understand why he lavishes these poems with gushy imagery and what not but then has these incredibly simplistic and plain explanations. Is there some sort of greater significance involved here?

I’m no real romantic. I’m too skewed by modern notions of love. So overall, I found his love for her a little over the top. I get that he is basing his poetry on Medieval Lyric poetry and creating a number of different levels with each verse is cool. But why her? Why now after so many years?

Inferno also touches base with his lady love, who now is not only a holy object but also the reason for why Dante is able to go through hell and not be too messed up afterwards. I get the religious undertones. I’m not that dense. But I feel that there was something else within this work that I couln’t quite grasp. Looking at the different levels and the specific names he presents in the work (political figures) I feel that there may be some political significance. I think tha tthis was the period where Italy was n political and economic turmoil but I’m not sure. Honestly, class is going to be a big help today.

To begin with, “TSM” made Spain sound like one of those angry kids in highschool who beat up all of the gay kids because he himself was gay. The two cultures seemed to get along for a while until Spain freaked out about its cultural instability. I love that it is the homosexual’s fault for all of Spain’s problems. But the real ringer was the idea that homosexuality was a “Virus Oriental” and therefore curable. Now where have we heard that before?

What strikes me as odd is the fact that some Arabs were just as disgusted with the idea of same-sex intimacy as the Spanish Christians. However it seems that the Sodomitic Moore became too strong of a bad guy. It was the potent signifer of cultural, sexual, and racial diference that the two cultures recognized.

There is also the idea of the Moors being too indulgent (Moor+heaven=tons of food) so they become homosexual pagans. I’m still a little muddled as to how the image of the gay Moor came to be but from the reading I have gathered that it was mainly the evils of propaganda that forever soiled their image. There was a deliberate confustion of cultural and sexual differences in Sodomy. My favorite line from this work is that the image of the Sodmitic Moors was a “by-product of the forgoing sexual, cultural, and gender difference into a servicable discourse by which the Christians might expose the “enemy within.” I thnk that pretty much means point and gasp at the homosexuals and they’re bound to give in.

Now onto “Chaste Subjects” which I think was a stretch and a half on the author’s part. It was like she was looking at a poem about flowers and analyzing its affect on the price of oil. I mean, come on. Yes, a chaste knight is odd. And yes, the devil did dress up as beautiful woment to try and seduce the pious young knights. But to insinuate a homosexual undertone and quesitoning of sexuality was a bit much.

I am totally on board with the oddness of having Chaste knights. It defeats the whole purpose. A knight goes for adventure to get sex from the greatful dame later on. To not accept the sex disrupts the cycle in which chivalrich prowess is rewarded. Sex is a reward for the exploits and battles are a way to prove chivalric prowess. to overcome the temptations of flesh demonstrates the defining relationhip of gender and desire. These ideas make sense. I can see them in my head and they connect quite well.

But then suddenly, the author pulls this ide out of her hat that the shifting, uncertain gender of the devil is an object of deire for the poor knight. At one point she states that the knights establish that fighting is with men, sex is with women. But then she does this whole analysis about the devil chanign sexes and how that maesses with gender  roles and yadda yadda yadda, something about using the figure of women to verbalize the concerns of the church and I’m scratching my head. She may not come out and say it but I felt that she was hinting to the confusions of sexuality with this devil and the relationship the knight feels toward it. I think that was just a bit much. These men deire to not deisre. That’s that.

Overall I thought that Said did a wonderful anthropological analysis of what the “Orient” is with regard to how man perceives it. The west is a geographical area, the Orient is a man-made concept. I didn’t realize before this work that as Americans we have a completely different concept of what the Orient entitles. But for both Europe and the United States the Orient is a way for people to dominate a seemingly harmless and exotic culture without feeling like jerks. It made me think of our reasoning for having slavery back in the day here in the US of A. We decided that Africans LIKED the hard labor. So therefore we were being helpful.

I also liked that Said pointed out that there is a difference between the academic and imaginative meanings of Orientalism. Academically we understand their culture through texts and history. But imaginatively they are different and less than us, despite the evidence that refutes this perception.

One thing that needs a bit of clarification for me is the idea of the 4 elements that Said points out: Expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, and classification. I understand that these concepts go with the idea of Orientalism but I had issues distinguishing them. He also brings up the idea of a new discourse versus an old discourse. Aren’t they more or less the same or is there some underlying difference that I am just not getting? I understand that the old discourse had to do with the Crusades and the racism involved with that. Isn’t there still a sense of racism but this time with relation to the greed for oil? And don’t both discourses involve the colonial mentality?

I really like the questions Said raised. They made me think, which is a dangerous thing. How does one represent other cultures? I realized that there is never really an objective way. people are influenced by their own culture and there is no real way to be completely open-minded. I think that the notion of the “other culture” is dangerous depending on the level of education and “open-mindedness” people have. It is a very touchy subject and can easily turn sour.

I didn’t see where the whole industrial revolution speech a few days back was going but hey, guess I got told.

To begin with, I got a mixed message from this text. One moment Dronke is saying how Arab philosophers are essential in the developement of Western Christian thought. Okay, got it, there was respect for the Eastern thought, even though they are still considered infidels and bad to the Westerners during their crusades.

Dronke also uses the word “apologetic” a number of times. Can anyone clarify what he means exactly? I thought that the Crusaders didn’t care about the infidels, and yet they are apologetic to the Arabs.

One of the (what I consider) major parts of the text is the recognition that there were translation issues from Arabic to Latin and so a number of consequences occured that unwittingly shaped the Latin language and skewed the understanding of the Arabic texts. For starters there was a diproportion in the languages with the words meaning being. In Arabic there are many terms that funtion as synonyms for said word and the Latin language had problems with this. Secondly translators who saught accuracy in the translations used Latin words in an unfair, technical sense. Also new, phonetic words were created when translators ran out of options. Finally, the act of tranlating Arabic into latin created new Latin words.

What confuses me is that Dronke says all of this and then sates “The translations from Arabic do not seem to have done much to enlarge the scope of philophical Latin in the Middle Ages” but the theories of Aristotle elaborated by the Arabs entered the Western Christian Philosophy.

So wait, it was Aristotle, not the Arabs, that shaped Christian Philosophy? So was Arabic simply the barrier between the West and ancient Greece?

Pretty much what I got out of this text was that the Arabs had written a lot of Aristotle’s works and then the West took it from them and translated their writings into Latin. Dronke also dabbles in the idea of the East’s influence in Western Science but with all of the back-tracking and name dropping I was pretty much lost. I understand that noetics provided Western thought a new way of thinking and the ideas of morals were incorporated through the work “Disciplina.” Overall the point is made that the Arabs had a significant impact on the West and no one really awknowledge it then so it is not really common knowledge today.

There were a number of strange and unnerving ideas placed forth by Irwin that I have never thought about before. For starters I have never contemplated the origins of stories until today. It shouldn’t be surprising that the original story, THE story, cannot be traced back to any particular, original idea. This reminds me very much of what T.S. Elliot would say about poetry and the lack of creativity a writer has to offer. It’s eye-opening to realize that the Arabs and Egyptians were the possibly some of the first to bring out stories that would later be picked up by the Europeans who would call them their own. Irwin’s attempt to connect all of these cultures got confusing since his explanations seemed to hop all over the historic timeline and cultural boundaries.

I knew that it is difficult to be able to trace many stories due to the fact that they were passed on orally across generations and cultures. But the racism and sexism of the time is incredibly frustrating, not because of the obvious inequalities its produces for those in the past but rather the skewed historical records and difficulties of understanding where a story originated from. But better yet is the fact that Arabian Nights was not considered literature due to its vulgarity yet the Europeans embraced such imagery and continued to look down at the Arabian lifestyle. And fiction in general was considered a low-status type of writing.

In my ignorance, I didn’t see the purpose of story-telling going beyond simple entertainment. But according to Irwin these stories were also ways to teach young princes morals and provide beggars with a means of earning some extra coins.

While nations were divided by war and power struggles it is amazing to think that there were still deep-rooted ties between the countries. On cannot escape the influence of other cultures, no matter how hard one tries.

It is amazing to hear about the resilience of these stories. We simply read them in our youth or watch them on the television with absolutely no idea on how they had come to be. The Middle East had a great impact on the European story and in turn
America’s concept of a story. It’s funny to think that much of their credit was taken away, not just because of the racism but also due to
Arabia’s dislike for stories. There was no fad for stories in the Middle East so
Europe embraced it and took most of the credit.

So wrote this yesterday but this stupid site decided not to publish it. here is my second attempt…