August / Salman Rushdie Reading Poll

[papayahed]

I'm on page two.

[NickAdams]

Will a seperate thread be started for the book?

[Pensive]

Will a seperate thread be started for the book?

I am wondering the same thing.

[Ron Price]

RUSHDIE and ME

A week after I retired from full-time work as a teacher and lecturer, after 32 years in the classroom and another 18 as a student, the website CNN Entertainment published an article entitled: “Rushdie’s new book out from under shadow of fatwa.”(1) The book referred to was The Ground Beneath her Feet and it was about a completely different world than that of his 1988 book The Satanic Verses. The new world of Rushdie’s 1999 book was: rock ‘n roll music, New York and the crossover cultures between the east and the west.

Rushdie, an Indian-born novelist, in 1999 was still getting used to a more visible life. A decade before, in 1989, Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a death edict against him for allegedly blaspheming Islam in that book The Satanic Verses. Khomeini died soon afterward, but Rushdie had to go into hiding for nearly a decade. It wasn’t until September 1998 that Tehran disassociated itself from Khomeini’s edict, as part of a deal aimed at restoring full diplomatic relations with Britain.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)the website CNN Entertainment, 15 April 1999.

Your book is a variation on the Orpheus/Eurydice
myth with rock music replacing the Orpheus lyre.
The myth works as a red thread from which you
sometimes stray, but to which you attach endless
references. You gave us a sort of report on life at
the end of the 20th century….I was far too busy to
read it getting-out from under 50 years of those
classrooms, Baha’i responsibilities in the big-city
and ready to take a sea-change from many jobs.

Your book provided a background and an alternate
history to those ‘50s to ‘90s period of rock music’s
growth……You give us, the reviewers said, humour
in a predictable unpredictability, a rat-tat-tat pace.
For clear shots of insight into the human condition
and the universe as it might be, you always moved
the ground beneath our feet.2 So perhaps during
these years of my sea-change, at 55+++, I may just
finally get ‘into’ you---but only time will tell since I
have had to recreate my life-style, my entire MO.3

1 On 10 May 1999, six hundred people attended a reading and book signing of author Salman Rushdie’s new book The Ground Beneath Her Feet. –Zarminae Ansari, “Salmon Rushdie’s “rock and roll” novel,” The Tech: Online Edition, 4 June 1999. By June 1999 I had finished marking the last pieces, scripts, papers, I was given after my classroom teaching had come to an end.
2 Linda L. Richards, “The Earth Moves,” January Magazine, April 1999.
3 modus operandi is a Latin expression used in who-dun-its. It means method of operating or way of going about things.

Ron Price
14 November 2011