Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie is one of those authors whose work I always adore. I've read far too few of his books. On the other hand, I've read the ones I have read multiple times, which counts for something I suppose.
He was in town tonight, giving a lecture which I attended and from which I've come home a bit giddy. I want to type in all the quotes I scribbled down, but there are so many that I actually don't think I'll have time tonight.
The talk covered a lot of topics. The primary focus was on what he called at one point "the surrealism of the real," which he discussed in terms of politics, fame (his own and others'), and writing. Conventional realism, he argued, no longer works, partly because "if you want to represent the world you have to do some weird stuff, because the world is full of pretty weird stuff," but also because realism depends on a shared view of the world that authors can no longer assume.
One subset of this weirdness that he discussed in some detail: the shrinking distance in the last century between public and private life. His response to this, he said, is to foreground it in fiction, "to show the connection and interpenetration of public and private" - which, since that's pretty much my Rushdie dissertation chapter in a nutshell, made me quite literally bounce in my seat and squeak, to the vast amusement of the colleague sitting to my left.
He also talked about storytelling as the thing that distinguishes humans as a species; the historical importance of blasphemy; democracy, civil liberties, and freedom of speech; the differences between speech and action; California politics; colossal fame as American godhead, and the historical spectacle of classical gods (Greek, Roman, and Indian) behaving badly; the illusion of normality and the universal mayhem of family life; geographical and internal frontiers; John Ashcroft's fear of librarians; the use of "Dixie Chick" as a verb; the fashion insults visited upon Rushdie himself in the film International Guerrillas; his screen kiss with Hugh Grant, sadly edited out of Bridget Jones' Diary; the idea of home; and a vast and sprawling array of authors, including Saul Bellow, Jane Austen, Dickens, Tom Stoppard, Nabokov, Heraclitus, Thomas Paine, Kafka, Coetzee, Balzac, Zola, Soviet dissident writers en masse, a handful of contemporary Indian writers whose names he rattled off so fast that I couldn't get them down, and possibly others that I'm not remembering.
And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go re-read my favorite parts of Imaginary Homelands; for lo, I am a geek, and I am at one with my geekdom.
He was in town tonight, giving a lecture which I attended and from which I've come home a bit giddy. I want to type in all the quotes I scribbled down, but there are so many that I actually don't think I'll have time tonight.
The talk covered a lot of topics. The primary focus was on what he called at one point "the surrealism of the real," which he discussed in terms of politics, fame (his own and others'), and writing. Conventional realism, he argued, no longer works, partly because "if you want to represent the world you have to do some weird stuff, because the world is full of pretty weird stuff," but also because realism depends on a shared view of the world that authors can no longer assume.
One subset of this weirdness that he discussed in some detail: the shrinking distance in the last century between public and private life. His response to this, he said, is to foreground it in fiction, "to show the connection and interpenetration of public and private" - which, since that's pretty much my Rushdie dissertation chapter in a nutshell, made me quite literally bounce in my seat and squeak, to the vast amusement of the colleague sitting to my left.
He also talked about storytelling as the thing that distinguishes humans as a species; the historical importance of blasphemy; democracy, civil liberties, and freedom of speech; the differences between speech and action; California politics; colossal fame as American godhead, and the historical spectacle of classical gods (Greek, Roman, and Indian) behaving badly; the illusion of normality and the universal mayhem of family life; geographical and internal frontiers; John Ashcroft's fear of librarians; the use of "Dixie Chick" as a verb; the fashion insults visited upon Rushdie himself in the film International Guerrillas; his screen kiss with Hugh Grant, sadly edited out of Bridget Jones' Diary; the idea of home; and a vast and sprawling array of authors, including Saul Bellow, Jane Austen, Dickens, Tom Stoppard, Nabokov, Heraclitus, Thomas Paine, Kafka, Coetzee, Balzac, Zola, Soviet dissident writers en masse, a handful of contemporary Indian writers whose names he rattled off so fast that I couldn't get them down, and possibly others that I'm not remembering.
And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go re-read my favorite parts of Imaginary Homelands; for lo, I am a geek, and I am at one with my geekdom.