Breyten Breytenbach, an unnamed editor, Philip Gourevitch, and the man himself (Photo: Zygmunt Malinowski)

Bright spots  in dark times: My photographer friend Zygmunt Malinowski dropped a note to say he enjoyed the Tom Lehrer video in my post a few days ago, about First Amendment freedoms and  Iranian crazies raising the bounty on Salman Rushdie‘s head.  Then he asked me if I’d see the New York Times‘ Q&A with Rushdie, who has just published a book, Joseph Anton, describing his time in hiding after the 1989 Valentine’s Day fatwa.

Rushdie’s response to the news of $3.3 million for his death:  “I’m not inclined to magnify this ugly bit of headline grabbing by paying it much attention.” In his interview with Charles McGrath, he recalled the imposition of the fatwa, and the day “my picture of the world got broken”:

“We all have that — we all have a picture of the world we live in and we think we know what shape it has and where we are in it. Another word for that would be sanity. And then suddenly it was very difficult to know what shape the world was and where I stood in it and how to act. All these decisions we make and suddenly I didn’t know anything. Another name for that is insanity. I do think there was a period there when my sanity was under intense pressure and I didn’t know what to say or do or how to act. I was literally living from day to day.”

Rushdie unevenly occupies the momentous role that has been given him. He has always struck a disheartening pose, seesawing between cerebral heroism and the uncharitable dig at an ex-wife, between high-mindedness and silliest self-serving vanity – he’s too small for the historic chair he sits in.  So let’s pick out the best.  Here are a couple highlights from the interview (you can read the whole thing here):

Q. … the book also has a bigger agenda. It’s meant to document something important?

A. I found myself caught up in what you could call a world historical event. You could say it’s a great political and intellectual event of our time, even a moral event. Not the fatwa, but the battle against radical Islam, of which this was one skirmish. There have been arguments made even by liberal-minded people, which seem to me very dangerous, which are basically cultural relativist arguments: We’ve got to let them do this because it’s their culture. My view is no. … Killing people because you don’t like their ideas — it’s a bad thing. We have to be able to have a sense of right and wrong which is not diluted by this kind of relativistic argument. And if we don’t we really have stopped living in a moral universe.

Q. What advice do you have for someone who might find himself under a similar threat?

A. Two bits of advice, really. One has to do with the head and the other is practical. The thing in the head is: Don’t compromise. It’s a question of self-knowledge, knowing who you are And why you did what you did. Stand up for it. The other thing is that if I were to do it again, I would refuse the hiding. I’d say: “I’ve got a house, I’m going home. Protect me.”

The young Hopwood winner

Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Arthur Miller was born and reared in New York City – but he loved Ann Arbor, where he attended university.  Go figure.

It would be swell if Ann Arbor returned the love, but it appears the city is about to tear down his digs at 439 South Division Street.  The street holds memories for me – I lived at 701 South Division.  For one academic year, I lived even closer to his ghost, around the corner on Thompson Street, somewhere in the 500 block.

So how did he wind up so far away from the endless pavements of Manhattan?  “Miller’s father, a practical-minded businessman, was amazed to hear of a faraway school called Michigan that would actually pay students money for writing.  His son told him about the prestigious Avery Hopwood Awards, built from a legacy given by  another MIchigan alumnus who had made a fortune on Broadway with such slight bedroom farces as Getting Gertie’s Garter and Up in Mabel’s Room … Miller’s father was impressed, but he reminded his son that he had to make some money first – before trying his hand at the Hopwoods.” Elnora Nelson writes in Arthur Miller’s America: Theater and Culture in a Time of Change: “He arrived in Ann Arbor after a circuitous bus ride and a hitchhike, he said, quite simply, ‘I felt at home.”

From Ryan Stanton at AnnArbor.com:

A house where famous playwright Arthur Miller once lived when he attended the University of Michigan could be demolished if no one steps forward to buy it and relocate it.

That’s what U-M officials indicated at a neighborhood meeting Thursday night as they gave an update on the $29 million expansion of U-M’s Institute for Social Research building.

The 3,210-square-foot wooden house at 439 S. Division St. stands next to the ISR building, a block south of downtown Ann Arbor, and was Miller’s first residence when he attended U-M in 1934.

“I just think it should be known, before it is demolished, what it is,” said Ann Arbor resident Marilyn Bigelow, a self-described informal historian who showed up to Thursday’s meeting to let U-M officials know she’ll be fighting to preserve the house, which dates back to the late 1800s.

420 Maynard, home of the 5-cent Cokes.

Of course the article includes photos:  The homely wooden buildings of an earlier era, the soulless dark-glass facade of the Institute for Social Research, which needs ever more space, ever more parking.  (The new $29 million expansion will have a “green roof,” of course.)  The relics of Ann Arbor’s most eminent writers – Arthur Miller during the 1930s, Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky in the immediate years after his exile, briefly Robert Frost and W.H. Auden – don’t stand a chance.  Not even a plaque to commemorate the building I must have walked past hundreds of times.

“Although most Miller studies trace the beginning of his literary career at Michigan to his undergraduate submissions to the Hopwood Awards Committee, he first made his mark in Ann Arbor as a writer for the Michigan Daily.”  It was then, and is still, at 420 Maynard Street, a few convenient blocks away from our homes on South Division (and Thompson).  I expect the 5-cent Cokes that formed the main of our diet in the 1970s were much the same as he had swallowed – and the hot-type presses were already pleasantly passé in my time.  In my era, Tom Hayden had cut a greater swath in the Daily‘s consciousness – I remember Hayden on a return visit to the offices, to talk to the editors about Indochina.  But Miller’s influence has proved the deeper and more lasting one.  And we both got two Hopwoods in the end.

In his autobiography Timebends, Miller reflects much on the radical legacy of Ann Arbor and the Daily.  But I liked this paragraph the best:

“In the thirties, one of Ann Arbor’s small-town charms for me was its reassuring contrast with dog-eat-dog New York, where a man could lie dying on Fifth Avenue in the middle of an afternoon and it would take a long time before anybody stopped to see what was the matter with him. A short ten or twenty years later people were looking back at the thirties nostalgically, as a time and caring and mutuality.”

Many nonsensical things have been written about First Amendment rights since a completely obscure schleppe made an anti-Islam  Youtube video that sparked riots across the Islam world.

Salman Rushdie has come out on cue with a disappointing statement, and in “Does ‘Innocence of Muslims’ meet the free-speech test?” Sarah Chayes at the Los Angeles Times discusses actions that might fall outside protected speech, arguing that First Amendment freedoms distinguish between speech that is simply offensive and speech that deliberately aims to put lives at immediate risk. She concludes:

Disappointing

“Finally, much 1st Amendment jurisprudence concerns speech explicitly advocating violence, such as calls to resist arrest, or videos explaining bomb-making techniques. But words don’t have to urge people to commit violence in order to be subject to limits, says [First Amendment authority Anthony] Lewis. ‘If the result is violence, and that violence was intended, then it meets the standard.’

“Indeed, Justice Holmes’ original example, shouting ‘fire’ in a theater, is not a call to arms. Steve Klein, an outspoken anti-Islamic activist who said he helped with the film, told Al Jazeera television that it was ‘supposed to be provocative.’ The egregiousness of its smears, the apparent deception of cast and crew as to its contents and the deliberate effort to raise its profile in the Arab world a week before 9/11 all suggest intentionality.

You can read the rest here – but don’t skip the comments.  Problem is, the vague wish to be  “provocative” doesn’t necessarily anticipate torched embassies, murdered people, and riots in 20-or-so nations.

For myself, I wish we were called upon more often to defend heroic, brilliant, artistically accomplished efforts at free speech, and less often called to defend idiotic, immature, and deliberately offensive expressions of free speech. But on the other hand, someone may find my statements fit into exactly that category.  In fact, I believe someone said so just the other day.

Hence, the most eminently sane comment came, as it often does, from my colleague medievalist Jeff Sypeck over at Quid Plura?  An excerpt:

… I wrote a book in which Muslims guzzle wine, Jews own slaves, and Christians kill in the name of religion—so even when the spotlight is on some inept, ne’er-do-well “filmmaker” and a loony pastor, I don’t find it hard to imagine myself in their shoes. As I wrote in 2010:“If doodles can incite worldwide riots, how can I know that my 20-page depiction of a liberal, even libertine, Baghdad won’t light a madman’s fuse?”

Should that happen, I hope I won’t be condemned by diplomats, denounced by the Secretary of State, investigated by the Department of Justice, or blamed by the White House. I hope the government won’t ask publishers and distributors of my work to consider shutting me down. I hope my supporters won’t get phone calls from generals. I hope I won’t be encouraged to hide. I hope artists, writers, and scholars will realize it could be them next.

Read the whole thing here.  It’s short, readable, and to-the-point.

So who’s next?  Tom Lehrer’s tune from the 1960s was running through my head as I wrote… I checked it out on Youtube, and though it’s on a different subject entirely, what the hey…I include it for the fun of it…

The price has gone up (Photo: Mae Ryan)

The bounty on Salman Rushdie‘s head has been raised, from $2.8 million to $3.3 million, thanks to a generous offer from the semi-official Iranian religious organization, the 15 Khordad Foundation.  According to newspapers in the area, the foundation is capitalizing on recent regional interest in murder and mayhem.

Hardliners say that the fatwa, issued on Valentine’s Day in 1989, is irrevocable, since it can only be rescinded by the person who issued it. That would be the Ayatollah Khomeini, who died a few months after pronouncing it, in June 1989.

The hardline Jomhoori Eslami daily said the decision to boost the original reward came from 15 Khordad Foundation’s head, Ayatollah Hassan Saneii.  “As long as the exalted Imam Khomeini’s historical fatwa against apostate Rushdie is not carried out, it won’t be the last insult. If the fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have continued would have not happened,” he said.

Coincidentally, in this week’s New Yorker, Salman Rushdie reflects on life under a fatwa, “The Disappeared: How the Fatwa Changed a Writer’s Life” – it’s here. He describes his early years of hiding, and shifting from residence to residence.  A sample:

As he crouched there, listening to Michael try to get rid of the man as quickly as possible, he felt a deep sense of shame. To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect. Maybe, he thought, to live like this would be worse than death. In his novel “Shame,” he had written about the workings of Muslim “honor culture,” at the poles of whose moral axis were honor and shame, very different from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that culture, even though he was not religious. To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed.

Midnight's child

Some years ago, Rushdie began to live more openly.  He even appeared at Stanford and Menlo Park’s Kepler’s Books (I wrote about the latter visit here).  In the New Yorker article, he concludes:

But as well as fighting the fight, which I will surely go on doing, I have grown determined to prove that the art of literature is more resilient than what menaces it. The best defense of literary freedoms lies in their exercise, in continuing to make untrammelled, uncowed books. So, beyond grief, bewilderment, and despair, I have rededicated myself to our high calling.

Remember her?

Suzannah Lessard wrote a piece in the March 6, 1989, issue of the New Yorker, shortly after Rushdie’s famous Valentine’s Day card:  “The terror we feel when we put ourselves in Salman Rushdie’s shoes is a new kind. As far as we know, never before has an international lynch mob of millions called for the blood of someone like him—someone who is not a leader or an official, someone who until now was probably unknown to most of the people calling for his death and of whom they still know little…”

What can we add the illustrious New Yorker?

A far less talented artist, the man who made the film that is getting so much attention of late, The Innocence of Muslims, was visited by the authorities at his Southern California home in Cerritos.  They paid their visit after midnight, and invited the filmmaker off location somewhere for a friendly chat.  He left with his face heavily covered.  “For shame,” said the Daily Mail.  Actually, he probably didn’t wish to have a photo of himself online for target practice.  Many are crying out that this heavy-handed government action bespeaks 1984 and the thought police – after all, freedom of artistic expression is guaranteed under the First Amendment.

I have a very different take.  It’s said he won’t be returning to his home.  But I don’t think he’ll be going to any gulag or penitentiary.  I suspect the authorities arrived under cloak of darkness to give him a few friendly tips for his own safety.  He’s probably going to the same kind of black hole that Molly Norris disappeared into, after her cartoons garnered her death threats, international hatred, and other signs of ruffled feathers two years ago.  If the filmmaker suddenly “disappears,” it’s a win-win.

But hey, I’m an optimist.

You guessed it. It’s another one of those poncey art installation projects. 10,000 discarded books gathered by the Salvation Army have been artfully dumped on the streets of Melbourne.  “We know how some of you bristle at the sight of used books repurposed in art, so it’s with more than a little trepidation that we tell you…” Flavorwire began somewhat hesitantly to explain.  I stopped at the word “art,” but then I’m old-fashioned.

It’s the latest effort from the Spanish art collective Luzinterruptus, and it’s a traffic-stopper.  The exhibition was commissioned as part of Melbourne’s Light in Winter festival (winter is just winding to a close Down Under, you’ll recall).

Since the theme of this year’s festival was “reading,” according to the post on the Architizer website, the Spanish team repurposed “Literature vs Traffic,” previously had installed in New York City:

While the installation in New York City had been a far more subversive undertaking, the recreation in Melbourne allowed the artists to expand upon the project, allowing it to grow for a month, eventually making it their largest installation to date. …

Luzinterruptus began creating an intimate public space that encourages reading within the modern Federation Square. …

The installation aimed to take control of the public space “in which the traffic withdrew, yielding ground to the modest power of the written word.” The dimly lit books began overflowing in the streets, stealing space amongst the dense traffic. On the closing night of the installation, the books were offered up to the visiting pedestrians, each allowed to choose their favorite books out of the thousands presented to them.

Looks like a few are making their choices already.