"He hadn’t read more than 'a couple pages' of my work, but he had seen me lecturing on YouTube, and concluded that I was 'disingenuous.'"

"'I don’t like people who are disingenuous like that,' he said, somewhat opaquely. Disingenuous like what? He did not elaborate. 'I wanted to murder him because he was disingenuous' would be an unconvincing motive if one were to use it in crime fiction, and my strongest feeling, after reading his remarks, was that his decision to kill me seemed undermotivated."

Writes Salman Rushdie near the beginning of his new book, "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder" (commission earned).

Things I talked about with Meade this morning.

1. How Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that Bari Weiss is a fraud and not honest at all. She called Tulsi Gabbard a "toady" and she didn't know what "toady" meant.

2. The similarities and differences between the Bob Dylan song "You Got to Serve Somebody" and the Band song "Unfaithful Servant."

3. The use of the tuba in popular music recorded in the last 60 years and why it matters if they had an actual tuba player in the studio as opposed to a digitalized tuba sound.

4. "Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole."

5. Whether flags of foreign countries should be waved by members of Congress and how the use of the flag may mean different things to different people.

6. It was Richard Nixon who originated the wearing of a flag lapel pin and how everyone followed along and now they can't stop.

7. The way some people these days are calling their loved one "my person." I heard it in Salman Rushdie's new book "Knife" and I opened The New Yorker at random and saw it in a Roz Chast cartoon.

8. Some people call a dog's owner the dog's "person," and that seems related to the old joke "Are you walking him or is he walking you"?

9. Bill Maher asked why people want drag queens reading to children and said it would be better to have disabled people reading, but drag queens are entertainers and disabled people are not. 

10. How little children shouldn't be exposed to overly exciting entertainment and even peekaboo can be too intense for young minds.

11. How it's already too late to go south for warmer weather and we are better off here in the north, where there was frost on the grass this morning.

12. How fluent and funny Tucker Carlson was describing his boss at the New York Post who had a hairy back that he would rub against the door jamb while he talked to Tucker and the 5 or 6 ways that Tucker could have known that the man had a hairy back.

13. What a big part of life hairiness is — for the lower animals and for us, the humans. 

14. Was the hairy-backed man John Podhoretz? Carlson mutters the name.

15. The annoyingness of Carlson's laugh and how hard you have to commit to do a good enough imitation of it.

16. The energy Joe and Tucker had. Doesn't Tucker wear a hairpiece and Joe just shaved off all his hair.

17. Meeting for coffee and not an entire meal so you're free to leave whenever you want and how some people have trouble getting out of small-talk conversations and this one simple trick that's all you need.

18. The perception that a conversation can't end until both participants want it to end and the way some people keep adding new topics as if keeping a conversation going is a game.

19. The very low level of tennis playing that has you just trying to keep the ball in play as long as possible.

20. How all this talk is taking the place of writing on the blog, but I could just make a blog post out of all the topics that didn't make it onto the blog because I was talking about everything with Meade.

"The black-clad man, stabbing wildly, had 27 seconds alone with him. That is long enough, Rushdie points out, to read one of Shakespeare’s sonnets..."

"... including his favorite, No. 130.... Rushdie is initially held together by staples. His ruined eye bulged out of its socket and hung down his face 'like a large soft-boiled egg.' He spends time on ventilators.... No one will permit him to look in a mirror. Mentally, he tortures himself. Why had he not defended himself? Was it that he was 75 and his attacker 24? 'On some days I’m embarrassed, even ashamed, by my failure to try to fight back,' he writes. 'On other days I tell myself not to be stupid, what do I imagine I could have done? This is as close to understanding my inaction as I’ve been able to get: The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.'..."

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Salman Rushdie Reflects on His Stabbing in a New Memoir/'Knife' is an account of the writer’s brush with death in 2022, and the long recovery that followed" (NYT).

"I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way."

"So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, 'So it’s you. Here you are.'"

Said Salman Rushdie, quoted in "'So it’s you. Here you are': Salman Rushdie describes moment he was stabbed/In first interview since his stabbing, writer tells how knifeman was 'last thing my right eye would ever see'" (The Guardian).

"One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, 'First you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky.' I said, 'What’s the lucky part?' and he said 'Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife'"....

The best-seller list is "a little susceptible to artificial intelligence because the books on it are written without any particular gift in the nature of their expression."

"Stephen King is susceptible to artificial intelligence. Danielle Steel is even more susceptible to artificial intelligence. The worse the writing, the more susceptible it is to artificial intelligence. I was talking to Salman Rushdie in Frankfurt, and he told me that someone had instructed ChatGPT to write a page of Rushdie. He said it was hilariously inept. I’ve had a couple of anxious emails from authors saying should I be concerned about artificial intelligence. It’s out there, and no one knows quite how to deal with it, but it’s not relevant to the people that we represent. It is relevant to other people who tend to be very popular."

Said the literary agent Andrew Wylie, quoted in "When Ruthless Cultural Elitism Is Exactly the Job" (NYT). The NYT interviewer, David Marchese, had prompted him to talk about A.I. 

I'm amused by Wylie's blithe snobbishness: That's got nothing to do with those of us who deal in literature.

I asked ChatGPT to write a blog post in the style of Salman Rushdie and assigned a topic — the subject of the previous post on this blog — home schooling. Here's the result, which I presume Rushdie would find hilariously inept:

"This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art."

Said Salman Rushdie, quoted in "Salman Rushdie to Write Memoir About Stabbing Attack/Rushdie, who was grievously injured onstage last year, said the forthcoming book was a way 'to answer violence with art'" (NYT).

At first, Rushdie balked at the thought of writing about the stabbing, he said in an interview with The New Yorker, as if “the attack demanded that I should write about the attack.” 

 The book, to come out next April, is "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder" (paid link).

"Over the years, Rushdie’s friends have marvelled at his ability to write amid the fury unleashed on him."

"Martin Amis has said that, if he were in his shoes, 'I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.' And yet 'Victory City' is Rushdie’s sixteenth book since the fatwa.... During the pandemic, Rushdie... was already toying with an idea for another novel. He’d reread Thomas Mann’s 'The Magic Mountain' and Franz Kafka’s 'The Castle,' novels that deploy a naturalistic language to evoke strange, hermetic worlds—an alpine sanatorium, a remote provincial bureaucracy. Rushdie thought about using a similar approach to create a peculiar imaginary college as his setting. He started keeping notes...."

From "The Defiance of Salman Rushdie/After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act" by David Remnick (in The New Yorker).

"... Rushdie suffered three serious wounds to his neck and 15 more wounds to his chest and torso in the attack that took away sight in an eye and left a hand incapacitated."

According to his literary agent, Politico reports. 

“He’s going to live ... That’s the important thing,” [the agent] said. The attack was along the lines of what Rushie and his agent have thought was the “principal danger ... a random person coming out of nowhere and attacking... So you can’t protect against it because it’s totally unexpected and illogical"....

"It was on a trip to Lebanon in 2018 to visit his father that Hadi changed from a popular, loving son to a moody introvert...."

"'The first hour he gets there he called me, he wanted to come back. He stayed for approximately 28 days but the trip did not go well with his father, he felt very alone.... I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job. But instead he locked himself in the basement. He had changed a lot, he didn't say anything to me or his sisters for months. I couldn't tell you much about his life after that because he has isolated me since 2018. If I approach him sometimes he says hi, sometimes he just ignores me and walks away. He sleeps during the day and wakes and eats during the night. He lives in the basement. He cooks his own food...."

From "Distraught mother of alleged Iranian sympathizer accused of trying to murder Salman Rushdie says her son returned home as religious zealot after a month-long trip to the Middle East and says he is 'responsible for his actions'" (Daily Mail).

"Though 'obscurantism' may be a word that is, well, obscure, to Americans, [Macron] is right. The line between the fight for freedom..."

"... and the surrender to hatred is absolute. The assault on Rushdie only clarifies its contours."

Writes Adam Gopnik, reacting to what Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, said on Friday evening:

“For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied freedom and the fight against obscurantism. He has just been the victim of a cowardly attack by the forces of hatred and barbarism. His fight is our fight; it is universal.”

That comes at the end of "Salman Rushdie and the Power of Words/Efforts are bound to be made to somehow equalize or level the acts of Rushdie and his tormentors and would-be executioners. This is a despicable viewpoint" (in The New Yorker).

"Many of the comments on the Rushdie affair over the past 24 hours have pointed out that for many years he has been living quite freely..."

"... that the fatwa had been revoked by Iran (although the bounty remains) and that society has moved on from the dark days of book-burning, even if lone attackers remain a threat. I would suggest that this is delusional, a fantasy conjured up by western liberals to distract from a more sinister truth: over 30 years they have worked as the de facto accomplices of the ayatollah, assisting in the task of dismantling free speech, sending fear through those who dare to criticise or ridicule religion or anything else. Rushdie, in this sense, is not — and never was — a historical affair but a live scandal running through the veins of British life, not to mention other western societies.... For initially noble motives related to the fear of giving offence to minority groups, we have committed the most grievous offence on our way of life. 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' was the view attributed to Voltaire by his most famous biographer. We must resurrect its spirit, reclaim its beauty. For today, with Rushdie hooked up to a ventilator, we continue to sleepwalk towards disaster."

 
Writes Matthew Syed, in "The ayatollahs have found their accomplices in western liberals/We blame the Rushdie attack on Muslim fanatics, but we shouldn’t ignore our own complicity" (London Times).

"Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms."

"This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences.... [W]e all must... defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion.' Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect."

Said Salman Rushdie, in 2015, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, quoted at HuffPo (and at Rushdie's Wikipedia page).

From NBC New York: "Who Is Hadi Matar? NJ Man Suspected in Salman Rushdie Attack Had Shia Extremist Sympathies."

"There was just one attacker. He was dressed in black. He had a loose black garment on. He ran with lightning speed over to him."

Said Elisabeth Healey, 75, an audience member, quoted in "Salman Rushdie Is Attacked Onstage in Western New York/The author was set to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution when an assailant rushed at him" (NYT).

"For many years, Yusuf Islam has been pretending he didn’t say the things he said in 1989, when he enthusiastically supported the Iranian terrorist edict against me and others."

"However, his words are on the record, in print interviews and on television programs. … I’m afraid Cat Stevens got off the peace train a long time ago.”:

Salman Rushdie emailed Howard Fishman, the author of a long Washington Post article called "The Meaning of Yusuf/Cat Stevens/After a brilliant but turbulent career, he is reemerging on the public stage. How should we feel about him­ — and his music — now?" 

Fishman, who is a culture writer, and who clearly wants to be able to indulge himself in the pleasures of listening to the wonderful old Cat Stevens recordings, goes on to say:

"Rushdie fears that writers no longer trust their imaginations, and that the classroom imperative to 'write what you know' has led to dullness, angst and dead ends: cold and bony literary mumblecore."

"There is nothing ordinary about ordinary life, Rushdie writes. Behind closed doors, family existence is 'overblown and operatic and monstrous and almost too much to bear; there are mad grandfathers in there, and wicked aunts and corrupt brothers and nymphomaniac sisters.' He praises the 'giant belchers' and 'breakers of giant winds.' He sees himself as a maximalist in a minimalist world; a wet writer in a dry one; a lover of bric-a-brac in an era of Shaker modesty.... I read Rushdie’s arguments with much interest and little agreement, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. used to say. He is fencing with a poorly stuffed straw man. For one thing, there have been autobiographical novels — 'David Copperfield' is one — since the form was invented. And if there has been a boomlet in autofiction, it is surely in part an attempt by writers to claw back breathing space from the culture-strangling juggernauts that are Marvel movies and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe and George R.R. Martin’s 'Game of Thrones.' Fantasy has quite won over America, in nearly every sphere. What’s more, contra Rushdie, we’re in a fat period for deep and sustained invention in literary fiction. Two examples: Among the most revered and popular novels of the past decade are Colson Whitehead’s 'The Underground Railroad' and George Saunders’s 'Lincoln in the Bardo.' In the first, the metaphorical underground railroad becomes an actual underground railroad. The second is a garrulous ghost story, reality as seen through the eyes of people stuck in an intermediate state between death and rebirth. No lukewarm autobiography here...."

From "In ‘Languages of Truth,’ Salman Rushdie Defends the Extraordinary," a book review by Dwight Garner (NYT).

ADDED: For balance, there's an essay by Salman Rushdie in the current NYT — "Ask Yourself Which Books You Truly Love" — an essay adapted from the book Garner is reviewing.

"[A]void books that are supposed to be 'good' for us. It isn’t necessary to read a single turgid sentence of Boring Saul Bellow..."

"... when there is a James Lee Burke to hand. Not every 'classic' is worthy of veneration: Tristram Shandy honks like John Coltrane, and is not nearly so funny. As for Midnight’s Children, it’s more fun to walk round town with a nail in your boot." 

From "Reading books is not meant to be a competitive sport" by Michael Henderson (London Times), which is mostly about not trying to read as much as possible, but that paragraph jumped out at me.

Are Americans still reading what is supposed to be good for us? Or is that a concept of the past? What's the last thing you read — or tried to read — because it was supposed to be good for you? If you wanted to force yourself to read something because you believe it's considered to be good for you, what would you pick?

"[Cat] Stevens said he had originally wanted to serve as a bridge between two great cultures, yet, while Islam welcomed its famous convert, western audiences were hostile."

"'On the other side, people said, "He is a bit of a traitor." He has "turned Turk," if you like. So I was often used as a bit of a spokesman, and I was useful for certain occasions.... I thought, "Everybody should get this," but it didn’t work out quite like that.'... One of the most upsetting times for Stevens, he reveals, was his portrayal as a supporter of the Iranian fatwa that forced the novelist Salman Rushdie into hiding in 1989. 'I was certainly not prepared or equipped to deal with sharp-toothed journalists,' he said. 'I was cleverly framed by certain questions. I never supported the fatwa. I had to live through that.'... Stevens emphasised the importance music has in his life once more. 'It is a mystical thing still. It is something that permeates our emotion, our soul, sometimes our intellect. Our body moves to it. I didn’t know where I was going but music helped me to get there.'"

From "Yusuf Cat Stevens on Islam, the fatwa and playing guitar again/The singer-songwriter tells Desert Island Discs about walking away from his fans, and the difficulties of following a spiritual path" (The Guardian).

"I never supported the fatwa" — you can believe that or not. He's crying "fake news." I choose to believe him, because I've always loved Cat Stevens.

"It was nonstop ticks the whole time."

"Two dogs, three adults, one state park add up to 100 ticks in less than 24 hours" (Star Tribune).

ADDED: Just thinking about that story, I hallucinate ticks crawling on me!

IN THE COMMENTS: Tommy Duncan said, "Both my dog and I have had Lyme disease. It was a awful experience for both of us." That makes me want to link to this new NYT story, "Living With Lyme Disease, Stronger With Love/Brian Nicholson thought Brooke Geahan was the most beautiful woman he had ever met. He also knew that she was very ill." It's the "Vows" story of the week (that is, a wedding story). When the 2 met, the woman, who was 40, was already struggling with the disease:

A summer tick bite had dropped Ms. Geahan to a low beyond her imagining. Formerly wildly social, an avid tennis player, and a mainstay of New York City’s downtown literary scene, the illness kept her in her apartment for days at a time. At the Catskills house, she ensconced herself in a “sick fort,” wrapping herself in blankets and nesting into a couch with Paddington, her beloved rescue dog....

Mr. Nicholson felt a tinge smitten, but he was also a realist. “It’s crazy to think of someone that ill out of your league, but that’s what I felt,” he said. Instead he pinned his hopes on a possible friendship.

Ms. Geahan had zero energy for any starry-eyed attachment. “I was older than Brian, miserably sick, and broke from treating Lyme,” she said. “I was not a great catch.”...

One night, Mr. Nicholson exposed deeper feelings, but for Ms. Geahan, a relationship was still untenable. “I was a total freak who didn’t eat regular food, couldn’t drink, couldn’t exercise, couldn’t dance, and was stinging herself with bees every other day,” she said. “I didn’t want to be a burden to anyone.”

There's something called "bee venom therapy." She had that, and she also had Salman Rushdie speaking at her wedding. He said: “It takes patience, understanding, determination, passion, tenderness, tough-mindedness, originality, desire, imagination, and love, above all, love.”

ALSO: In yesterday's post "Today, the heart of Facebook is blackish-purple," mocking Facebook's promotion of "groups," I wrote in the comments:

I actually am in 2 Facebook groups — both are about the place I lived when I went to high school. I joined them long ago. I considered, just now, joining some other groups. I was especially interested in the one about Wisconsin State Parks, but I considered joining one of the groups about Bob Dylan and one of the groups about anosmia. But the Dylan groups didn't follow the paths of interestingness I want to travel, and the anosmia group required you to request admission and I didn't feel like explaining myself. Actually the Wisconsin State Parks one, the only one I tried to join, requires them to accept you. If I'd realized that, I wouldn't have clicked "join." I don't like asking for acceptance. That's what I like about this blog!

Well, I was accepted into the Wisconsin State Parks group and, as a consequence, the first thing I saw was that "nonstop ticks" article. I followed my passion — going for walks in Wisconsin state parks — and the first thing that happened was passion-crushing. Facebook is evil.

"He looks a little like you. Maybe you should get a hat like that."

The quote is from me, talking to Meade. The painting is of Rabelais. We've been talking about Rabelais since yesterday. What have you been talking about for the last 2 days? Anything? Topics come and go, but sometimes the same topic recurs within new conversations. Yes, this fits with that thing we were saying, yesterday, as we crossed Monroe Street, and the subject was Salman Rushdie's new novel with a Donald Trump character, and then again, today, as we're discussing the Harvard plaque-on-a-rock memorializing the contributions of slavery in a text written by a law professor who has written a book about Sally Hemings.

Wikipedia on Rabelais:

François Rabelais (/ˌræbəˈleɪ/; French: [fʁɑ̃.swa ʁa.blɛ]; between 1483 and 1494 – 9 April 1553) was a French Renaissance writer, physician, Renaissance humanist, monk and Greek scholar. He has historically been regarded as a writer of fantasy, satire, the grotesque, bawdy jokes and songs. His best known work is Gargantua and Pantagruel. Because of his literary power and historical importance, Western literary critics consider him one of the great writers of world literature and among the creators of modern European writing. His literary legacy is such that today, the word Rabelaisian has been coined as a descriptive inspired by his work and life. Merriam-Webster defines the word as describing someone or something that is "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism."

But you don't get credit as Rabelaisian just by using gross robust humor and extravagant caricature. You must wield literary power or you're just obscene and exaggerating.

Here's the Rabelais quote I'd excerpt for you even if I didn't think it's the one that Meade is, right now, adding to the comments in the previous post (the one about the Harvard plaque-on-a-rock and Sally Hemings):

All their life was spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure. They rose out of their beds when they thought good; they did eat, drink, labour, sleep, when they had a mind to it and were disposed for it. None did awake them, none did offer to constrain them to eat, drink, nor to do any other thing; for so had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed,

Do What Thou Wilt;

because men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and conversant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions, and withdraws them from vice, which is called honour. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which they formerly were inclined to virtue, to shake off and break that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved; for it is agreeable with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to desire what is denied us.

Yes, here's the Meade comment, using that quote, with the added statement "Place making, plaque making...." "Place making" goes back to another post, about Madison's effort to stave off murder in local disaffected communities by enlisting a New York firm to bestow its expertise in a mysterious process called "placemaking" — the creation of "vibrant public spaces at the heart of their community."

A quick writer: "Salman Rushdie launches a novelistic attack on Trump."

How did he manage that? The book, "The Golden House," is 400 pages long.

This is WaPo's book editor, Ron Charles:

“The Golden House” doesn’t mention Trump by name — Rushdie wouldn’t give him that satisfaction — but there’s no doubt about the real identity of the “giant victorious green-haired cartoon king.” That gothic villain rages around the background of this story, setting the tone for a nation in peril. The narrator howls, “The best had lost all conviction, and the worst were filled with passionate intensity and the weakness of the just was revealed by the wrath of the unjust.”

"Howls." Thanks for using a verb to telegraph that you hate the book. 

In the foreground, “The Golden House” is a family epic that cobbles together contemporary drama, ancient myths and modern films. We follow the rise and fall of a fabulously wealthy businessman named Nero Julius Golden (the quality of subtlety is not strained in these pages). He arrives in New York in 2009 with his three doomed sons. Refusing to speak of the country they left, Nero sets up his family in a grand mansion — a “palace of illusions” — in the Gardens Historic District of Greenwich Village. “We are snakes who shed our skins,” Nero announces, and so a glittery new family is born, “shedding their Gatz origins to become shirt-owning Gatsbys and pursue dreams called Daisy or perhaps simply America.”

That strikes me as not merely anti-Trump but anti-Semitic. The WaPo reviewer, declaring the Nero Julius Golden character unsubtle, never mentions the potential second meaning. (Trump is often accused of anti-Semitism, but consider the hypothesis that the hatred of Trump is a displacement of anti-Semitism.)