Saturday, November 10, 2007

Busy, Busy, Literary

Near the weekend, I found myself in a literary vortex. On Thursday, the great Salman Rushdie was the visiting writer of our university's Center for Literary Arts Margaret and Jim Jimenez' Lecture Series program. In the past, the CLA had already brought in such names as Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer (who died today while I was writing this blog ), Toni Morrison, Allen Ginsberg (whom our writer's group honored with an open-mike reading of his Howl during the anniversary of the dropping of the obscenity charges against that poem), Derek Walcott, J.M. Coetzee, Russel Banks, Ken Kesey, Adrienne Rich and Edward Albee.

Rushdie was wit ("the novel is not dead, look at those shelves in bookstores") and wisdom ("novels will not change humanity, it will only make better persons out of humanity") incarnated who enthralled the audience who didn't mind paying $35 admission ticket to listen to him and even they were packed in the full house auditorium. Which is clearly the reason why he is a favorite in the lecture circuit. That night, one did not see any trace of the "damage" and "violation" he felt when he received what he called an "unfunny Valentine gift," a fatwa from the Ayatollah, which he compared to having "men wielding clubs burst into your room" while "you're standing naked in the shower." He was, on the other hand, all "patawa", as we Filipinos are wont to say of one so funny and witty. Up close, during the cocktails in his honor, he resembled Jack Nicholson to me with that trademark smirk. No accent there. He was clear in his British twang that comes out a little bit guttural.

I first got acquainted with Rushdie through my La Salle professor, Doods Santos, in our class on World Literature several years back. She assigned me then to report Midnight's Children in class through some kind of a lesson plan. At first, I found it difficult to divide the novel into teachable segments, as the novel does not follow a traditional narrative trajectory. It does not have a clear beginning, middle and end but it does provide some fixed points (the spittoon and chutney) where a reader will be able to recollect the story as a continuing thread, as if he were listening to a traveling bard. Having seen its roots from oral tradition then, I was able to translate the novel into interesting lessons in postcolonial history and literature. I did not expect that the very fantastic birth of Saleem Sinai along with 1000 other children at the stroke of midnight in August 15, 1945 signaling the birth of India, would set me years later to thinking of doing my thesis on the birth of nations. That in the Anderson sense, indeed, nations are our "imagined communities." Neither would I expect that years later I would meet the writer himself. Its indeed a fantastic world!

On Friday evening, with my classmates we read our fiction works at the Barnes and Noble, Almadden branch. I read my latest fiction in years, my own tale of the immaculate conception and victoria's secret. An old lady told me she came all the way from Robin Hood Road in Roanoke, Virginia, just to hear us read. I don't know if she was kidding but, the world of truth like fiction, is a fantastic world.

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