[Film clip above deleted from Youtube for “copyright infringement.” Ummmm… how much “copyright infringement” can you have in 10 seconds?]

Salman Rushdie has spoken out against the appearance of Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) at a weekend rally: “I’ve always liked Stewart and Colbert but what on earth was Cat Yusuf Stevens Islam doing on that stage? If he’s a ‘good Muslim’ like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar then I’m the Great Pumpkin. Happy Halloween.”  You may recall that the popular singer supported the fatwa against Rushdie, way back when.

The case of Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam is a troubling one.  He was one of my favorite singers in my misspent youth — one of those cases where I don’t want to believe the truth, either.  I applaud his charity work for UNICEF, Palestinian refugees, and the children in Gaza. But the data on basic human freedoms are pretty damning.

This from the Observer‘s Andrew Anthony: “He told me in 1997, eight years after saying on TV that Rushdie should be lynched, that he was in favour of stoning women to death for adultery. He also reconfirmed his position on Rushdie. He set up the Islamic school in Brent, which is currently undergoing council-backed expansion. Its mission statement three years ago explicitly stated that its aim was to bring about the submission of the individual, the community and the world at large to Islam. For this aim it now receives state funding. Its an incubator of the most bonkers religious extremism and segregation, and is particularly strong on the public erasure of women. Why do people go to such lengths to ignore these aspects of Yusuf Islam’s character and philosophy?”

A recap: While I don’t care for the hectoring tone of the BBC inquisition by Geoffrey Robertson, Queen’s Counsel, the 1989 grilling is here.  An excerpt:

Robertson: You don’t think that this man deserves to die?
Y. Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Y. Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Y. Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.
[Later, Robertson discusses a protest where an effigy of Rushdie is to be burned]
Robertson: Would you be part of that protest, Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Y. Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing.

Troubling, also, is the disappearance of Rushdie’s youtube comments here and here and here, due to “copyright claims by Yusuf Islam.”  How much of a copyright infringement can you do in 10 seconds?  (Isn’t ten seconds of anything fair use?)

I’d like to believe that the singer’s objections to these youtube clips signals a reconsideration of views.  But a low-key objection (let alone legal threats) is not enough at this point; what is needed is a full repudiation.

In 2007, Rushdie wrote a letter to the Sunday Telegraph:

However much Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam may wish to rewrite his past, he was neither misunderstood nor misquoted over his views on the Khomeini fatwa against The Satanic Verses (Seven, April 29). In an article in The New York Times on May 22, 1989, Craig R Whitney reported Stevens/Islam saying on a British television programme “that rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author Salman Rushdie, ‘I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing’.”

He added that “if Mr Rushdie turned up at his doorstep looking for help, ‘I might ring somebody who might do more damage to him than he would like. I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is’.”

In a subsequent interview with The New York Times, Mr Whitney added, Stevens/Islam, who had seen a preview of the programme, said that he “stood by his comments”.

Let’s have no more rubbish about how “green” and innocent this man was.

All in all, his Saturday appearance was a strange way to revel in sanity. His appearance in a rally to celebrate post-modern irony goes beyond irony — especially remembering the solidarity of Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Voznesensky, Tariq Ali, Adam Michnik, Harold Pinter, and many, many others in 1989.  Mr. Yusuf, I still love your music, but… I’ll stand by Rushdie, even though I don’t like him much.

Am I missing something in this picture?  Please let me know.

Cat Stevens/Yusuf Muslim sings “Peace Train.”  Rushdie remains in hiding.

Postscript on 11/2:  More dispiriting news from Rushdie posted above, here.

Postscript on 11/14: The Atlantic weighs in — more here.

Still thinking about evil after my post a few days ago, in keeping with Halloween.  Where better to turn than a Dostoevsky scholar?

Joseph Frank sent me his book Between Religion and Rationality some time ago.  Morgan Meis over at The Owls would have found the cover sexy.  My tastes, alas, are a little more flashy and vulgar.  I found it too sedate.  Perhaps that’s why the book remained in a pile of books I meant to read.  But I picked it up at last for his chapter on “Dostoevsky and Evil.”

I was pleased to see Joe’s essay style is lucid and unaffected — and as digressive and roundabout as he can be in conversation.  So the effect is halfway between formal essay and a conversation in Joe and Marguerite’s book-crammed campus flat.

He opens with J.M. Coetzee‘s Elizabeth Costello, discussing the title character’s revulsion at Paul West’s The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, which describes degrading,  obscene details of the execution of Hitler’s would-be assassins.  But the details recounted are fictional.  No one was there to say what had actually happened.

Not sexy

“What troubles her above all is that, while appalled and repelled by the book, she had not been able to push it away entirely. It had resisted her feelings of revulsion and disgust, and she feared that some of the ‘absolute evil’ it depicted had, as it were, also infected her; ‘she felt, she could have sworn, the brush of Satan’s hot, leathery wing.”

(The protagonist also shares Coetzee’s passionate vegetarianism: “If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of its wings over the beast … where is he?”)

Mario Vargas Llosa, author of The Feast of the Goat, another book that portrays evil in graphic detail, has a different take.  (And here’s where Dostoevsky comes into play.)  Joe quotes the Peruvian author:

“Perhaps we would be able to read what Mr. West wrote and learn from it, and therefore come out stronger rather than weaker. … The manner in which a poem, a novel, a play works on the sensibility or on a character varies to infinity, and much more as a result of the reader than rather than of the work.  To read Dostoevsky may, in some cases, lead to traumatic and criminal consequences, while on the other hand it is not impossible that the spermatic iniquities of the Marquis de Sade have increased the percentage of virtuous readers, vaccinating them against carnal vice.”

Sorry.  I’m with fellow vegetarians Coetzee and Elizabeth Costello on this one. I know what it is like to feel polluted even by a brilliantly written book (perhaps more so then).  But the good Prof. Frank has a different p.o.v. altogether:  “The details chosen to evoke the scene are his [West’s] own creation, and her [Costello’s] horrified response cannot simply be fobbed off as a private reader reaction.”  Recalling Dostoevsky’s murders in Crime and Punishment, he writes:

Pity, terror, and dinner soon

“One would be hard put to match such grisly details in either the European or the Russian novel of the same period, but their effect is ultimately offset by the intensity of Raskolnikov’s inner suffering and his final inability to endure his total estrangement from the rest of humanity.  …  One can find example after example in Dostoevsky’s works of the same boldness in depicting evil at work and the same effort to overcome its effects.”

He returns to Costello, Coetzee, and Paul West:

“… as author he [West] is responsible for the manner in which he depicts this episode; and there is no evidence here of pity, only terror and even horror.  It is such horror that leads Costello to level against him the charge of ‘obscenity,’ and to arrive at her extreme conclusion. ‘To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must for ever remain off-stage.  Paul West … has shown what ought not to be shown.'”

Costello longs to argue with West, “some confrontation leading to some final word” — however, concludes Frank, “one cannot help thinking that the person Costello really wishes to meet, rather than Paul West, is an incarnation of Dostoevsky.”

And perhaps Charles Dickens, as well.  And Victor Hugo.  Maybe Lev Tolstoy, too. May I come to that dinner?  Soon?

Why is this woman smiling? Click last year’s video to find out.

There is indeed life after lawsuit – although you may not believe it while the ordeal staggers on,  sucking the life out of everything around you.  Carol Shloss successfully slayed the notorious James Joyce Estate dragon last year.  So I had dinner with her last week to learn her latest ventures in her post-lawsuit life, and they are legion.

At the California Café, over gnocchi (for me), crab (for her), and a nice Ravenswood Zinfadel for both of us,  she told me she is negotiating a contract to edit The Collected Unpublished Letters of James Joyce for Oxford University Press. Asking for trouble?  Not likely.  The Joyce oeuvre at last lurches into public domain next year.

Carol is also busily working on Treason’s Child: Mary de Rachewiltz and the Real Estate of Ezra Pound The book will be the second volume of a projected trilogy.  (The first was the disputed 2003 Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake about James Joyce’s daughter; the third will consider Anna Freud.)

That’s not all.  She’s also heading “The Stanford Finnegans Wake Visualization Project,” which involves computer graphing of 62 languages in the Wake.  She laid the groundwork for the project with a Modern Language Association presentation two years ago, and also spoke on “Geological Computer Tools in the Mapping of Joyce’s Texts” in Tours, France, about the same time.  With the project, she’s treating the layers of language in the book as if they were layers of the earth and its atmosphere.  I don’t quite understand  it … maybe it was the wine…

Meanwhile, at the Addison, Maine, cottage where she spent the summer and early fall, she also launched a project to teach some of the local disadvantaged kids via graphic novels.  We outline a little about how that works here. “In the university, graphic novels are trendy,” she said.  “In rural Maine, they help to overcome resistance to literacy for kids who can’t or don’t like to read.”

Worthwhile ventures, wonderful dinner. Life is good.  Especially over Zinfandel.

Thoughtful critics suggested Shirley Jackson‘s oeuvre was a little slender for a Library of America volume.  After all, she’s mostly famous for a single short story.

Some think the Library of America is running out of ideas.  I mean, really.  American Food Writing: An Anthology with Classic Recipes? Poems from the Women’s Movement?

Over at When Falls the Coliseum, Ricky Sprague wanted to offer a few ideas of his own. Think  Snooki, if you can. Think  William Shatner.

He also suggests a special volume for Rotten Tomatoes, including such RT selections as “Give up your career as a ‘critic’ or die!”

Check it out here.

Ever wonder why Shakespeare’s rhymes don’t rhyme? You know, love/prove, eyes/qualities. For couple of language scholars, these linguistic mismatches are the keys to unlocking an archaeology of sound.

Kansas University’s Paul Meier has been collaborating with Stratford’s David Crystal, one of the greatest living authorities on original pronunciation of Shakespeare’s English.  Together, they are making what is likely to be an unforgettable production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that will “wind the language clock back to 1595,” according to Meier.

How will it sound?

“American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,” Meier said. “The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.

The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.”

Actually, I think the performers sound more like the usual portrayals of, say, Audrey in As You Like It.

Passing through the Plains?  You’ll have a chance to see the show beginning November 11 at Kansas University.  It will be the first time in North America that a Shakespeare production is being performed entirely in the original pronunciation, and only the fourth time in the world.  Which is kind of cool.

(For those of you who think of Dorothy and Auntie Em when you think Kansas — Dana Gioia tells me the university, too, is kind of cool.)

Some time ago I wrote about Mary Skinner‘s new documentary,  In the Name of Their Mothers, about Irena Sendler and the women of Żegota.

Another opportunity comes at 7 p.m., this Thursday, at the Language Corner.  Followed by a Q&A conducted by yours truly.

I really wouldn’t miss it, if you haven’t seen the film already. Tad Taube, president of the Koret Foundation and founder and advisory board chair of Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, offered not only praise, but help, saying the film “should be seen by every Jew in the United States” when the film had a screening earlier this year at San Francisco’s Jewish Community Center.

Irena Sendler, with the women of Żegota, saved 2,500 babies and children from the Warsaw Ghetto (I also wrote about some time ago here).  The film tells you how they did it, and why.  It includes rare footage of Sendler, who died in 2008, interviewed by her friend, the fimmaker Mary Skinner.

I know, I know.   That’s more than twice as many people as Oskar Schindler saved.  So why have you never heard of her?  It’s so easy for those in the U.S. to forget that there was no happy ending after the end of World War II for half of Europe.  Poland was swallowed in the Soviet maw, and Polish patriots were on the hit list — remember Ashes and Diamonds?  Or Katyń, another Andrzej Wajda film.

Some time ago I wrote about the Auschwitz hero and martyr, the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe.  While at Auschwitz in 2008 (a horrible place to “visit,” I know, but Adam Zagajewski convinced me that my work in Poland would not be complete without this trip), I spoke with one of the researchers there, Piotr Lipiński.  Kolbe had offered his life to save a Polish soldier and father — no one ever made such an offer in the history of the camp.  The place was designed to discourage any vestiges of humanity.

I asked Piotr how they could be absolutely sure no one else had ever made the sacrifice.  He told me the Soviets had tried and tried to find some alternate hero — someone who was not a Polish Catholic priest.  The best they could find after years of efforts was a schoolteacher may have volunteered, though others claimed he had been pushed forward.

Such was life under the U.S.S.R.  The Fall of the Wall in 1989 is bringing many names of heroes to light. Think of Polish Army Captain Witold Pilecki.  The communist regime in Poland censored any mention of his name in the public record.

The comparisons with Schindler are limited.  One has to remember that Poles could be shot on the spot without trial for helping Jews; Schindler was a German industrialist. In any case, Sendler’s friend and my friend, Lili Pohlmann, objects strongly to any comparisons.  Quite right.

But let me make one more:  Despite this post, I’m not a big fan of movies, but I did see Schindler’s List.  I was impressed by the ending, when Schindler desperately wished he could have done more.

Apparently, Irena Sendler, too, used to wake up at night, remembering, wishing, she had done more.  She said it often to her friends.