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.’”
Reason #482 Why Salman Rushdie is a Colossal Douchebag
– July 4, 2008Posted in: Rushdie, Salman
The Call by Yannick Murphy: The always interesting author of Here They Come and Signed, Mata Hari returns with a novel that whips up a worldview from a rather quirky set of limitations: namely, the call logs that a veterinarian maintains as his son is unexpectedly put into a coma and an unforgiving economy denies him work. What emerges is a surprisingly optimistic, often funny, and very moving account on how one family uses acceptance and forgiveness as a way to atone for hard knocks. (
Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber: Forget Franzen and Eugenides. If you're looking for a social novel that counts, Diana Abu-Jaber is the author you're looking for. Building from the free-form exploration of consciousness and identity in Crescent and the gripping procedural structure of Origin, Abu-Jaber's latest novel is her finest, equally fluent with gutterpunk culture and smarmy real estate men. It has been suggested by The Washington Post's Ron Charles that you will likely gain some pounds while reading this novel. This is certainly true. Abu-Jaber's description of food is so precise that it often made me want to do more cooking. But I very much admired the way in which Abu-Jaber presents all her characters as unwitting victims of rough capitalism, which permits them some dignity even as they perform terrible acts.
The Last of the Live Nude Girls by Sheila McClear: This memoir isn't so much about the decline of the Times Square peepshow, as it is about one young woman's efforts to pull herself up by by her bootstraps when presented with few economic options. Filled with self-introspective candor and a quiet dignity, McClear's story is one that might befall any of us in these volatile times. While McClear does get back on her feet, her book leads one contemplating the terrible fates of other young women now moving to New York and falling into deadlier vocations. (
Write the other 481 reasons and you got yourself a book that I will gladly fork over 23.99 for. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children excepted, is the most overrated writer of the last 30 years. I find him unreadable, his prose as pompous as he is.
“Overrated”, “unreadable”, “pompous”, yeah, Edward Y., you’ve totally nailed SR.
I don’t know the extent of Rushdie’s douchebaggery, but is this anecdote really supposed to illustrate it? Altman clearly suggests it’s bad luck for Rushdie to hold someone else’s Oscar, but he does it anyway because he doesn’t care about his own odds of winning one. One of his proudest moments is meeting Robert Altman on Oscar night, so that makes him a douche?
With two truly great novels under his belt (that would be “Midnight’s Children” and “Shame”), I don’t think Rushdie needs to worry about your spitballs, folks. I agree that his subsequent work has failed to match that one-two punch. But does he really deserve a flogging for palpating somebody else’s Oscar? It’s not a crime.
That curse is totally true, you know. When he was in his 40′s, my grandpa got to hold someone else’s Oscar. Fifty-three years later, he was dead.