Follow-up on Camels

[fauxklore]

So Bill sent me an email with a list of camel stories, thanks to his extensive database. (He indexes folktale books.) There are lots I don't know, but two on his list were in books I have. One of those is a book he borrowed from me to index, in fact. (It's a collection of Mongolian folktales that I bought in the state department store in Ulan Baator.)

It really should have occurred to me that Idries Shah would have some camel stories, too. While I'm at it, I should also see if there are any camel-related stories among the Tales of Joha, since those are closely related to the Nasruddin stories.

I should probably also time the other stuff I plan to use so I don't have camels dominate the whole program. I just wanted to show off my lovely camel puppet.

Comments

[kaasirpent]

I'm fairly sure Kipling wrote a Just So Story about how the camel got his hump. :)

[fauxklore]

He did, as I mentioned in the entry this was the follow-up to.

But I don't want to use it because the Just So stories demand to be told word for word and I am already doing another piece that requires prodigious feats of memory.

[kaasirpent]

Yeah, I read them in reverse order. I get more "spoilers" that way.

[lepusdomesticus.livejournal.com]

This may not be entirely helpful for what you're working on, but did you ever see that movie The Story of the Weeping Camel? You might be able to adapt that.

[fauxklore]

That was a movie I intended to see and never got around to.

I doubt I'd have enough time to adapt it for this event (which is in a week and a half), but I will think about it for the future. Right now, I think I will use the story that doesn't have an actual camel in it, along with a combination of a Tuvan story and a comment Nasruddin made to his wife about how good it is that camels don't have wings. (Because you wouldn't want one roosting on the roof of your house, making a nuisance of itself with all that chomping they do.)

Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish

[guyklose.livejournal.com]

A long time ago, a coworker shared with me the delight that is the book "The Joys of Yiddish" by Leo Rosten. I didn't spend much time with the book, but it seemed to me to be a sort of dictionary, describing words and phrases, usually with some sort of clever associated story.

My coworker insisted that I read the entry for "bagel" and also for "schmuck."

Rather than spoil it here, may I suggest that if you're searching for stories with camels then Leo Rosten's definition of "schmuck" is a short and clever possibility.

"Look at that schmuck on that camel!"

Re: Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish

[fauxklore]

I've known the "schmuck" joke most of my life. I probably first heard it from my father.

But it isn't exactly suitable for a family audience and could require too much explanation for a general, non-Jewish audience. Teve, my camel puppet, hasn't gotten dragged out for the more Jewish themed shows I do.

By the way, Yiddish scholars tend to denigrate Leo Rosten, but I find him quite entertaining. And his transliterations are infinitely better than Michael Wex's, though "Born to Kvetch" is a more linguistically accurate book.

Re: Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish

[guyklose.livejournal.com]

Ooops...I didn't catch the family audience part. That makes a big difference!