Rushdie's got us all a-twitter

OK. What could be more amazing than finding Ben Okri on Twitter and learning that "Ben will be here from time to time to share his poetry and writing, but otherwise this page is maintained by Rider Books"?

It's finding Salman Rushdie. The author of 'Midnight's Children' is on Twitter and rearing to go.

It began when @SalmanRushdie1 wrote on his twitter account, "With some trepidation, I am beginning to tweet. If you want to hear what sort of noise I end up making, please follow me."

Why 'SalmanRushdie1'? Well, because, there was already a 'SalmanRushdie' on Twitter, and Sir Salman said as much on his first profile, revealing that Twitter was refusing to verify that this indeed was him. One of his first tweets was to stare down at his own shadow, so to speak, to confront the man, woman or thing masquerading as 'Salman Rushdie': "Who are you? Why are you pretending to be me? Release this username. You are a phoney. All followers please note." [Update: Rushdie has since dropped the '1' from his handle, having reclaimed 'SalmanRushdie' from the imposter]

Twitter may have been refusing to verify, but readers recognised an original voice straightaway. Thousands signed up to follow Rushdie between yesterday and today alone. And they were amply rewarded. For where else will you have a great author chatting on tweeter with Kylie Minogue, Patrick French, Mia Farrow, Stephen Fry and Margaret Attwood ("Hi Peggy, I just joined the madhouse...")? Or refraining from going into the details of Christopher Hitchens' illness in public ("Allow me to not say more, please...")?

Rushdie racked up the excitement further by declaring that he was going produce a whole new short story, titled A Globe of Heaven, starting today, entirely on Twitter. Shrewd negotiator, the author noted this morning that he'd pulled in nearly 10,000 followers, and promised that once the magic number was reached, he would start tweeting the story. In minutes, 10,000 followers were in the bag, and the story began.

A thousand retweets, two profile images later, and Twitter verification almost almost a certainty, Rushdie posted his third bio in less than 24 hours: "...As Popeye the Sailor Man said, I yam what I yam and that's what I yam."

We know. We know.

This is going to be so much fun, and Rushdie no doubt is enjoying himself. No doubt whose fingers are tapping out those tweets, definitely not some publishing rep. It's the real article.

But for any writer tempted to stay glued to Rushdie's twitter account permanently, a note of caution from the man himself. As he said in one tweet to another author, "I've just handed in revised MS of my memoir, so I have time to waste here."

--Follow Rushdie on Twitter

--Update The Guardian: Salman Rushdie's Twitter debut

She's gonna blow

"Originally I was going to read from the ending. But the ending is dark, gloomy and tragic at best and I thought that would be a low way to end this evening of very intelligent and witty writing. So instead I’m going to read from the beginning when things are still looking up for our ill-fated protagonist. It all goes swiftly south from here, but these are the good days. This is a little short story that I wrote, I should say, some years back when I had the good fortune to meet an amazing American writer named Toni Morrison; and she asked me if I could send her some writing. And I said Yes, as you do..."

One moment you’ve never heard of someone and the next, they’re all over the place and popping up every other day. And in the case of Taiye Selasi, you know it’s only going to get more so.

If as a published writer you’ve ever had your work turned down by Granta, then you know what a leap it is for someone to make their fiction debut there, as happened with Ms Selasi, whose father is Ghanaian while her mother, a Nigerian, lives in Ghana. From her story ‘The Secret Lives of African Girls’ published to rave reviews in Granta’s The F-Word issue to a literary reading celebrating the edition to an interview on the journal’s website as well as growing press mentions, the momentum builds for Taiye Selasi’s debut novel, ‘Ghana Must Go’ – due out in the next year or so.

The writer tells Granta about her short story: “I was rather surprised to discover that I’d painted such a devastating portrait. It was only months and months after I’d finished editing – focusing narrowly on rhythm, image, pacing, form – that I noticed how dark the content was, how fundamentally damning the comment.”

From there she’s at the BBC pleading for more fictional portrayals of the African middle class (I’d say Amen! to that – and I’d add that there should be more of the African middle class in stories singled out for recognition by international awards and prizes).

Then she’s over at the NPR which proclaims thus: African Writer Helps Put Her Community On Media Map. Although I seriously question whether Ms Selasi, delightful though she seems, could be credited with putting her “community” on the map, as though others didn’t come before her. One of those daft declarations the Western media makes about our “community” as par for the course, all the time.

Anyway, the writer is fashionably thin, has chiselled features, soul singer hair and speaks in a ‘smiling’ American voice – all of which helps, I’m sure. What matters most though is that by all accounts, she’s loaded with talent, which is always welcome.

Her ‘Ghana Must Go’ – a very Nigerian title if I ever heard one – has been sold by the Wylie Agency to Penguin, and is being championed by Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison. What’s that like?

Wylie is said to have promised blurbs by Rushdie and Morrison for the book. In fact, ‘The Secret Lives of African Girls’ was first submitted to Toni Morrison (“She would like to help you” – Morrison’s son told Selasi - some help!), who very likely had a hand in the story then ending up on the pages of Granta. Talk about the dream endorsement.

I love the deliberate casualness with which Selasi drops the revered name of Morrison in her YouTube appearance for Granta. I also love the fact that she couldn’t actually pull off the casual name-drop without touching her nose, as superstitious liars do when they fear their nose might grow.

Anyhow, Taiye Selasi is gonna blow. Watch out.

Another thing
Meanwhile, Salman Rushdie's in today's Observer talking about his latest book, Luka and the Fire of Life; and musing about the shift from writing from the child's eye view ('Midnight's Children' and others) to writing as a father (Haroun and the Sea of Stories). He also rules out a fifth marriage, especially after the much publicised ill-fated one to model Padma Lakshmi, but we'll leave that alone, for now.
In the same Observer, constrast Rushdie's view of London to that of Helen Oyeyemi, who muses about packing up from the British capital to roam through cities including New York, Prague, Berlin and Paris. Any chance of Oyeyemi ever touching down in Lagos?

New Read

Salman Rushdie is in fine form in this enthralling short story published in the New Yorker, The Shelter of the World.

Akbar, whose name means great, but whose same name must accentuate the 'greatness' twice over, such that he is known as 'Akbar the Great'. Whose wives pleasure themselves in ways unspeakable in the tale, when he loves only an imaginary wife he dreamed into being - and who naturally loves him back. Akbar has been made by the accident of history a Mongol when he fact he feels Hindustani. On his way back from wars he stops to dispatch a handsome feudal ruler who speaks of Freedom, but who will learn the hard way that "it is futile to argue with Death." Akbar is a poet with a barbarian's history.

As with all great Rushdie characters, Akbar is teeming with plurality, and seeks to wrestle himself from the royal "we" - with all the plurality it encompasses - for some progress. Progress relates to the singular "I" he strives for, especially to enchant his beloved, the imaginary one who waits for him in Sikri, his "victory city." Best to just lose yourself in this one.

Excerpt

At dawn the haunting sandstone palaces of the new “victory city” of Akbar the Great looked as if they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day’s heat pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real.

Even the Emperor succumbed to fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of many living, if floating, consorts, the Emperor was of the opinion that it was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him. Within the privacy of the women’s quarters, within the silken corridors of her palace, Jodha’s influence and power grew. The great musician Tansen wrote songs for her, and Master Abdus Samad the Persian portrayed her himself, painted her from the memory of a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when the Emperor saw his work he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page. “You have captured her, to the life,” he cried, and Abdus Samad relaxed and stopped feeling as if his head were too loosely attached to his neck; and, after this visionary work by the master of the Emperor’s atelier had been exhibited, the whole court knew Jodha to be real, and the greatest courtiers, the Navratna, or Nine Jewels, all acknowledged not only her existence but also her beauty, her wisdom, the grace of her movements, and the softness of her voice. Akbar and Jodhabai! Ah, ah! It was the love story of the age.

• Read The Shelter of the World...

'Sir' Salman Steps Across Empire Lines

I don't suppose the photo helps, since it's pretty hard for most people to empathise with a man who has the gorgeous Padma Lakshmi for a wife. The above readers' page from the London Metro gives a cross section of (mostly negative) reactions to the decision to give a knighthood to Salman Rushdie. It's dismayed some observers to see how the author of Satanic Verses can still inspire effigy burning in parts of the Muslim world. What the UK government's decision has demonstrated for me, however, is not just the hatred by Islamists - but the resentment of the author in British society itself. If Rushdie were not who he was, with his baggage of fragmented identities, he would have been declared the greatest living British author long before now. Instead we have many people complaining about how all he has ever done for Britain is cost the taxpayer 10 million for his protection from the fatwa. The dead-eyed, empty-souled phillistinism of it, to say Rushdie has given nothing to Britain!

"Smoked Salmon" has been one of the more tongue-in-cheek paper headlines on the inflamed Muslim anger in the wake of the knighthood. "Was knighthood for Salman a foolish decision?" asks the Metro.

Seems to me, that the question really is this: Was Salman Rushdie's acceptance of the knighthood a foolish thing? And this is not so that he doesn't play into the hands of the fundamentalists. It is simply that Rushdie is one of the rocks upon which Postcolonial Literary theory is built. You don't write landmark essays like 'The Empire Writes Back to the Centre" & books like Imaginary Homelands and then go and accept the knighthood, tempting though it might be to be called 'Sir Salman'. What, the empire comes to the centre to become a knight now?

As it happens, Satanic Verses is the only Rushdie book I was never able to finish, because I got mid-way and didn't for the life of me know what the hell it was about. I got lost between the fictive real and the fictive imaginary. I allow this failed attempt was some 15 years ago. I wanted to try again last year and went to my bookshelf only to find that someone had secretly made off with my copy.

Salman Rushdie could have saved the fundamentalists, the UK government, we his devoted readers - and himself - unnecessary headache by refusing to become a 'Sir'.

When the offer came, the author might have done well to recall Keith Richards' outrage at Mick Jagger's acceptance of the same 'honour'. The Rolling Stones, come to think of it, had in their anti-establishment days released an album titled Their Satanic Majesties Request. "I told Mick it's a paltry honour... It's not what the Stones is about, is it?" said Richards. "I don't want to step out onstage with someone wearing a coronet and sporting the old ermine."

Richards recently admitted to snorting his father's ashes up his nose (aren't we supposed to be offended by this? I asked when the reports came out) - though he later back-tracked. He was pretty sensible in his indictment of Jagger's decision to accept the knighthood though. "Ludicrous."

I feel like telling 'Sir Salman' the same.