Category / Rushdie, Salman

by Edward Champion

Demand Curry Accountability from John Sutherland!

Despite John Sutherland’s previous pledge that he would curry and eat his proof copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence if the book did not win the Booker Prize, Mr. Sutherland revealed to the Guardian this morning that he would not fulfill his promise! He does say that he “might manage a custard pie on October 10.” But a custard pie isn’t good enough, Mr. Sutherland! A custard pie is not a curried proof copy! Not by a long shot!

This is curry hypocrisy of the first order!

The time has come to publicly scold Mr. Sutherland for failing to live up to the terms of the stunt. I therefore announce the John Sutherland Curry Hypocrite Photoshop Contest. Send in your graphical response to Sutherland’s curry flip-flopping, along with your URL and mailing address. I will post the entries over the next several weeks, as they come in. The winner of the contest will receive a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence. The email address is ed@edrants.com.

[UPDATE: Mr. Orthofer likewise takes Sutherland to task.]

by Edward Champion

Booker Shortlist Announced, John Sutherland Dinner Date In Works?

This year’s Man Booker Prize shortlist has been announced, and Rushdie is not on it.

What this means is that John Sutherland, who promised that he would curry and eat his proof copy of The Enchantress of Florence if Rushdie’s book did not win the Booker, is now under a certain gustatory obligation reminiscent of a certain German filmmaker.

If Sutherland does not eat his proof copy, then one can never take the man’s word seriously again. Never! Fair is fair, Sutherland. You promised to eat your proof copy. The time has come to live up to your pledge.

Here is the shortlist:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Amtiva Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

[UPDATE: Sutherland won’t do it! He is not a man of his word. Tread carefully around Sutherland’s culinary duplicity! For shame!]

by Edward Champion

Stanley Fish, Sherry Jones, and the Free Market Apparatchiks

I am certainly not a fan of Salman Rushdie’s limitless capacity for self-promotion, but I am even less enamored of smug academics who wish to split hairs over the term “censorship” to serve their partisan purposes. Rushdie, of course, expressed understandable umbrage over Random House’s decision to withdraw Sherry Jones’s debut novel, The Jewel of Medina from publication. Random House pulled the book because it feared that Jones’s book “could incite racial conflict.” This was, of course, a decision that was every bit as cowardly as those who stood against desegregated schools in the 1960s and 1970s. A bigot during those times might likewise oppose this small step for humankind by claiming that busing kids into other neighborhoods “could incite racial conflict.” It is, in other words, a speculative proposition. A decision based on a peremptory what if. The “all Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do” form of fearmongering popularized by Ari Fleischer is now just as applicable to spineless corporate goons who fail to consider that controversy has also been known to sell. (Indeed, in Rushdie’s case, The Satanic Verses sold very well indeed.)

But this is not really about Rushdie and it is not really about Random House. It is about Stanley Fish’s refusal to accept the possibility that the American publishing industry does indeed censor. Fish begins his post with free market bluster:

It is also true, however, that Random House is free to publish or decline to publish whatever it likes, and its decision to do either has nothing whatsoever to do with the Western tradition of free speech or any other high-sounding abstraction.

Change “Random House” to “Stalinist Russia” and Fish shifts from a capitalist crusader into a bona-fide apparatchik. But never mind that. In examining the etymology of the word “censor,” one must go back to the Roman era when magistrates were then in the habit of legislating public behavior and morality. To be as literal-minded as Fish (censorship only applies to government entities and not the free market), it seems to me that “censorship” is no longer viable as a noun, given that the Roman Empire is no longer around. Fish’s argument is an example of an equivocation. If I tell you that an bird must fly, and I then tell you that what cannot fly is grounded, and I point out that an ostrich is grounded and therefore cannot be a bird, you wouldn’t accept the terms of my argument. In fact, you would string me up and inform me that I am a moron, which would be a well-deserved assessment. And yet Fish has done the same thing with the term “censorship.”

Of course, Rushdie didn’t just use the word “censorship” in his letter to the Associated Press. As Bill Poser has pointed out, Rushdie used the phrase “censorship by fear,” conveniently elided by Fish to serve the terms of his fallacious argument.

Fish does offer a somewhat more valid thesis by comparing the restriction of Jones’s book to a library refusing to stock a book from the shelves. Unfortunately, he makes a comparison that is patently unmeasurable to what befell Jones. He claims that if you can’t get a book from the library, “[y]ou can still get it from Amazon.com or buy it in Borders.” But Jones’s book is not available anywhere else. It was dropped by Random House — i.e., it won’t be published. And, as the record shows, a Serbian publisher stepped in to print 1,000 copies, but stopped the presses when it received protests from a Belgrade mufti. What Fish doesn’t seem to understand is that you can’t obtain this book anywhere else.

If I wanted to go out and purchase a copy of Jones’s book right now, I simply couldn’t. Random House has thereby operated in a lieu of a government body and prevented this book from being distributed to a mass audience. An act of censorship applies to the writing, not the writer. It doesn’t matter that Jones hasn’t been imprisoned for her words. That Fish cannot understand this suggests that he hasn’t paid attention to the media developments of the past twenty years, in which imprisonment has been replaced by the penalty of being denied the airwaves or, in this case, denied a publisher, with contractual details preventing or delaying alternative means of distribution.

Rushdie is absolutely right to declare this “censorship by fear.” “Censorship by fear” is now the way in which magistrating “indecent” material occurs, whether it be networks terrified of airing Janet Jackson’s nipple and facing stiff FCC penalties, an NPR regular who fears speaking unscripted or like an actual human, or a cowardly publishing conglomerate who adds a morality clause to a YA writer’s contract or stubs out a novel because of Denise Spellberg’s threats of a lawsuit. Make no mistake. This is censorship, 21st century style. And it’s as American as apple pie.

by Edward Champion

Reason #482 Why Salman Rushdie is a Colossal Douchebag

Los Angeles Times: “It was as a puckish media figure rather than as that ’employee’ that he attended Vanity Fair’s post-Oscar party and met Robert Altman — one of Rushdie’s proudest moments. ‘Late that night,’ Rushdie said, ‘I found him leaning against a bench at the side of the room, cradling his Academy Award. I sat down next to him and said hi. And I said, ‘Can I hold your Oscar?’ He said, ‘It’s bad luck, you know. . . . If you hold someone else’s Oscar you’ll never win your own.’ I said, ‘Give me the damn Oscar.’ So I held Bob’s Oscar. He died a few months later. It was the last time I’d seen him.'”