Bokelskere.no

Jeg vil ikke lyve for dere: med sin mangel på utdannelse, manerer og ansvarsfølelse, er Skottlands underklasse vanskelig å like.

Chauffören säger att alla med stora bilar är kriminella. J protesterar, hon säger att hennes familj har en fin bil men de är inte kriminella.
Vad är det för en bil? frågar chauffören. En Skoda, svarar J.
Men det er inte sådana bilar jag menar, säger chauffören, jag menar stora bilar. (Jag tänker på vår Volvo hemma i Sverige. Den tillhör nog den kriminella kategorin.)

Men Majakovskij är optimist ända in i döden. Han skriver att han önskar alla människor ett liv i lycka. Sedan skriver han sitt förnamn. Sedan skriver han sitt efternamn. Sedan skriver han inget mer. Sedan skjuter han sig i hjärtat.

..she looks small and tense, as if someone has knitted her and drawn the stitches too tight.

..sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.

Laurie Anderson had called to ask if he had a text about fire. She was curating an evening of performances to raise money to build a children's hospital for the charity War Child, and she had an amazing fire video and needed words to go with it. He edited together passages from the 'London's burning' part of The Satanic Verses. Laurie had persuaded Brian Eno to record several loops of sound, which she was going to mix from a little desk in the wings while he read.

He had always been post-something according to that mandarin literary discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath - post-colonial, post-modern, post-secular, post-intellectual, post-literate. Now he could add his own category, post-fatwa, to that dusty post-office, and would end up not just po-co and po-mo but po-fa as well.

He met Jacques Derrida, who made him think of Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian, walking through life with an invisible wind machine permanently ruffling his hair. He soon realised that he and Derrida would not agree about anything. In the Algeria session he made his argument that Islam itself, Actually Existing Islam, could not be exonerated from the crimes done in its name. Derrida disagreed. The 'rage of Islam' was driven not by Islam but the misdeeds of the West. Ideology had nothing to do with it. It was a question of power.

Then Cat Stevens - Yusuf Islam - bubbled up in the Guardian like a fart in a bath, still demanding that Rushdie withdraw his book and 'repent', and claiming that his support of the fatwa was in line with the Ten Commandments. (In later years he would pretend that he never said any of these things, never called for anyone's murder, never justified it on the basis of his religion's 'law', never appeared on TV or spoken to the papers to spout his uneducated bloodthirsty rubbish, knowing he lived in an age in which nobody had a memory. Repeated denials could establish a new truth that erased the old one.)