The Chicago Cannonball and I went to a lecture to hear author Salman Rushdie speak.
Before going any further, I will be the first person to admit that sometimes I am not the most perceptive person on the planet. Being perceptive herself, the Chicago Cannonball has noticed this.
During the movie “Life is Beautiful,” which I thought was a love story about a bumbler, at the midpoint of the movie I yelled out, “What the heck? This is a Holocaust movie!” Watching “The Sound of Music” on video gave me the same shock. I thought it was a 2 hour love story, but apparently there was a third hour that had nothing to do with happy people singing “So long, fare well.”
As for the event with Salman Rushdie, I was expecting a political event. After all, this man has had more dangerous Fatwas against him than me. Heck, unlike my hate mail from hostile members of the NOW, this man had real serious Fatwas. It has been so long since the death threats against him were issued that I forgot that he was never even a politician. He was just a guy who wrote books.
The Chicago Cannonball pointed out that we were in the Writers’ Guild Theatre, but I never made the connection. Midway through the evening, which was devoid of politics, I thought to myself, “What the heck? I am attending a literature discussion.”
Fine. I’m a pinhead. I just don’t go to literature discussions. It’s not my thing. Nevertheless, it was a pleasant evening.
While the Fatwa was lifted years ago, some extremists did not feel it was revocable. Yet while I went to see Mr. Rushdie expecting maximum security, I was shocked that there was no security. When I say none, I mean absolutely none. We just walked in. It was like going to see some guy talk about a book.
At some point during the evening I decided that I was not going to ask Mr. Rushdie to do an interview with me. I had never read any of his books, and his intellect was so far above mine that I could not ask him any literary questions worthy of his time. The only thing I would want to ask him about was his fatwa over writing the Satanic Verses, which I suspect he simply would not want to discuss.
His newest book is “Echantress of Florence.” The person asking him questions was actress Carrie Fisher. The conversation was very disjointed. It seemed very unstructured. Rather than ask questions, she would interject periodically. It was an uneven flow, but Mr. Rushdie breezed through the conversation effortlessly.
With that, I shall bring the brilliance of Salman Rushdie, who again, is a fellow who writes books.
“My book is not an epic. It is an epiquette. It is a ‘Reader’s Digest Epic.'”
“Some people are upset that I have a bibliography, like doing so is showing off. a form of bullying.”
“My book involves gardeners, except that the gardeners are royal executioners.”
“There are different strata. For condemned women, they get sacked and stoned. For condemned men, there is ritual strangulation. It is done by many men, but at least they do not know the number of them. For condemned aristocrats, they are given the option to spin and run away. If they escape, they get exiled instead of executed. However, the head gardener is chosen for his running speed, so it just delays the inevitable.”
“Who would not use Kharma Sutra as a choice? The creator of Kharma Sutra was an ornithologist. That is why during sex people make and hear bird noises.”
“Nails can be used to increase sexual pleasure, but people don’t want to know where they are placed.”
“This what I consider to be fun research.”
“In Florence, male homosexuality was rampant, which led to a decline in birth rates. The Vatican built a Red Light District to show boys in Downtown Florence that girls were cool. Only homosexual prostitutes were punished. The brothel worked, because the population is still there.”
“The Rennaissance is when witches went from being hunched and warty to being gorgeous, sucha s Cerces.”
“All women need all men less than all men think. This is why I write of an invented woman. It is easy to divorce an invented woman. One just replaces her.”
“Machiavelli has a bad rap. He was not even Machiavellian.”
“The world of the 16th century was better than any romance novel.”
“People back then believed deeply in magic. They believed in love potions and hexes, not science.”
“Who did people go to? There were people. They didn’t have signs up.”
Mr Rushdie then shifted away from his new book to himself.
“I don’t get 5 out of 10 reviews. I either get a negative one or an 11, but not inbetween.”
When asked about being compared to his previous work, Mr. Rushdie replied, “Compared to yourself? In my case, that is a terrible fate.”
“It is good to be young and hot, or dead. The critics get more generous. Chronology stops mattering, and one is excused from the competition with oneself. After one id dead they cannot be in decline.”
“When the author who wrote ‘Catch 22’ was told that he did not write anything better than this work, he replied, ‘but neither has anybody else.'”
“Good writing divides readers.”
“To quote another famous author, ‘Some books should not be put down. They should be hurled across the room with great force.'”
“I decided on lecturing at Emory because nobody else asked me.”
“My condition for doing it was that I would not do any grading. It was going to be pass or fail.”
“I would like to apologize for my past advertising career. I did an advertisement for creamcakes. I called them ‘naughty but nice.’ They make people fat.”
In a surreal moment, Mr. Rushdie then mentioned his work at Clairol on the ‘Nice and Easy’ campaign in the same story as a local police officer that was doing an impression of a character on ‘Starsky and Hutch.’
“The man desperately wanted to clear the streets, but it was not necessary. Everything was fine. Finally, he asked again, and he I told him he could. He was so happy, everybody dispersed, and then moments later went back into the streets to do what they were doing before he needlessly interrupted.”
He then told some bizarre but true stories.
“Some incompetent con artist tried to impersonate me. He called people up, and said that he needed exactly $409.34 to be brought to a Rite Aid. He had an American accent.”
“Somebody has a fake My SPace page where they are impersonating me. The page uses my name. The profile says that I have ‘been in hiding, am out now, and I need friends.'”
When Ms. Fisher asked about any fake E-Harmony accounts, he rapidly replied, “No, it’s J-Date.”
The crowd howled with delight, and The Chicago Cannonball and I took special joy in that remark.
He continued entertaining the crowd.
“With regards to critics, this may be hard to believe, but the literary world can sometimes be meanspirited.”
“Big guns require having big ammunition.”
When asked about how he enjoyed his life, he replied that “I wake up every morning, and win another prize.”
Ms. Fisher then carefully alluded to his being divorced, since apparently his wife was not comfortable having a price on her head due to her choice of spouse. When asked if he enjoyed traveling as a single man, he replied that “There are hot women everywhere.”
When Ms. Fisher asked if this was even the case in Milwaukee, Mr. Rushdie replied, “Yes…on J-Date.”
He then told more stories.
“When Christopher Hitchens and I get together, we come up with other names for various works.”
“Hamlet is the Elsinore Vacillation. Othello is the kerchief Misapprehension. There is also The Big Gatsby, Farewell to Weapons, Mr. Zhivago, For Whom the Bell Rings, and Hitch 22.”
“Hitchens went to Oxford. I was at the other place.”
“I even overlapped with Prince Charles. He gives good overlap.”
“How does England make due with only one language?”
“In America, they play football with pointy balls.”
“The trick to being hated comes down to three things. First, you have to be clever. Second, you have to be foreign. Third, you have to be bad at games. This is the triple whammy. If you only possess two of these qualities, you will be ok without the third.”
“One person I knew when I was 18 recognized me at age 60. To remove 42 years, not even a good plastic surgeon can do that. I let the fellow know that I did not like him back then, and I still don’t.”
“Since being knighted, only journalists call me ‘Sir Salman Rushdie.’ We don’t even get armor. T he ceremony is nerve wracking. The Queen is 82 years old, and she is holding a sword. There is a big backlog. They only do these ceremonies twice per year. Pop stars get knighted right away, as do theatre people. With prose, it happens rarely.”
“Making a good play or movie adaptation of a book requires being most disrespectful to the text. Fans of the book hate this, but those going in blind love it.”
“As for acting, it is difficult for me to even play Salman Rushdie. I want to be nice, not arrogant. Also, there were not enough lines.”
“I played Helen Hunt’s OBGYN. This was method acting. An ultrasound is like a spaceship.”
“‘Alice in Wonderland’ made me want to write.”
“I love ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ but I hate Toto. He is a yapping hairpiece.”
“I once received a fan letter from somebody who was featured as one of the Munchkins. In fact, he was the Muchkin coroner. He sent me a gift certificate with with my name on it instead of the Wicked Witch. So I actually have a framed Muchkin death certificate.”
Ms. Fisher then read Mr. RUshdie a passage from his own book. Mr. Rushdie replied, “I agree with him.”
He was then asked about his religiosity.
“I believe an all powerful God infantilizes us. I prefer to work it out myself. When asked how I can have an ethical life outside of religion, I respond ‘Rather easily.'”
He was then asked about how he got back to normal following his Fatwas.
“The key is to bore people back into normalcy. When you keep showing up, people lose interest.”
“India is my home. I have never lived in Pakistan, although my parents did.”
“After a few days in India, my dreams even switch languages. I become another version of myself.”
(At that point I pictured Nancy Wilson of Heart singing the song ‘These Dreams. I kept that to myself rather than disturb the room.)
Mr. Rushdie then told a fabulous story about a tough woman in a previous audience.
“The woman said, ‘I read your novel through and through. It was very long, but that is not the issue. After reading it all I have to ask…what’s your point?’
I then tried to answer her, but the woman cut me off and said, ‘I know what you are going to say. The whole book is your point. That is what you were going to say, wasn’t it?’
When I told her that she was correct, the woman replied, ‘That won’t do.'”
He then offered some fascinating insight.
“I am not didactic. I am not trying to teach you. I don’t want to be lectured. Leave space for the reader.”
“I hated having to constantly explain what I meant in the Satanic Verses. Every writer detests explaining everything. They do not like determining the text. Overdetermining a book ruins it. People should read books without knowing the author.”
“As for why I have an American version of my books, it is because I have an American publisher. It was Winston Churchill who said that the United States and Great Britain were separated by a common language.”
“In America, quite is positive. It means better than. In British English, it means adequate or average. When I got to America, and was told that my book was quite good, I was insulted.”
I had the pleasure of meeting Salman Rushdie after his lecture. The conversation lasted between one and two minutes.
“Mr. Rushdie, if I lived in a vacuum, based on this lecture only, I would think that you were the most non-controversial person on the planet. You don’t seem controversial.”
He laughed, and made it clear that he was fine with that.
I then asked him how he felt about the problem Mark Steyn is having in Canada, given what he himself went through. His reply was simple yet important.
“I am aware of what is happening in Canada, and it is vital that we have freedom of speech.”
It was an absolute pleasure meeting him and hearing him speak, even if it was a literary event and not a political one. I suspect that my disappointment in that fact was a joy for Mr. Rushdie. He now lives in a world where people can just walk into a theatre and listen to him talk about a book, free from other political nonsense that he never sought.
I cannot imagine how it could have been worse for him.
Actually I can. He could have publicly converted to Judaism.
I suspect the only conversion that night were those unfamiliar with his works becoming fans of his.
eric
While I’d concede that Steyn shouldn’t face any legal persecution for his lousy blather, I do not see any infringement on his free speech by those who would choose not to print his hateful, paranoid, insanity.
JMJ