Salman Rushdie is the Worst Recluse Ever

I wasn't aware Salman Rushdie was making public appearances again. But hell, if Craig Ferguson is one of the few people he grants interviews to, he's still okay in my book.

Aside from being pretty funny (granted Craig Ferguson makes just about anything or anyone funny), they talk about what might be the increasing trivialness of the novel toward the end of the interview...

In case you're an ass and didn't feel like watching the entire thing, here's what I'm talking about:

"But everybody's a novelist, haven't you noticed?" Sir Rushdie quips. "Probably Paris Hilton is writing a novel."

"Writing used to be the preserve of the Educated Class," said Ferguson,"it used to be monks and priests and, um, you know, schoolteachers I guess, and that was it. And so the written word was given a great deal of merit because you had to have some kind of education in order to write. Now, pretty much anybody can write."

Rushdie then spoke about going to the bookseller's conference and meeting Don Henley of The Eagles who had written a book (which Craig said must've been called Hotel California), and then of a woman who wrote how to improve orgasms (at which Craig of course made a nasty joke involving a Cockatoo).

Oh, man. That's harsh stuff when a Nobel-prize winning a brilliant and famous writer sees the current crop of published material to be such a bleak, vapid, frivolous wasteland. Granted I'm embellishing, but the sentiment remains, and this does go back to some things I touched on in the first of my "The Future Was Yesterday" posts: When everyone is a coincidental writer, of what value are the intentional writers?

You know what, scratch that question. I don't like grouping people into categories and especially not either/or categories.

I can't deny that the novel isn't the same feat as it once appeared to be, at least according to what all my Lit professors told me. But it feels wrong and presumptuous and elitist and fucking immature to say it's because the increase in literacy has over-saturated the market.

I feel like it's only the BUSINESS of media and publishing that's changing things. Media is technological advancement, which we all know never stands still, is always growing, always accumulating, always expanding outward and reaching further. I feel like media is doing the same thing it's been doing all along: growing new arms, while the ones that have already matured are simply more in touch with the masses.

Business, on the other hand, which is what most often drives the many arms of media to the masses, is more about containment. Make as much money off of one arm as possible, always keep it above the reach of the others, and when another arm grows bigger snare that one too, maybe ditching the other one or sewing them together.

I think there will always be this balance between media itself and the business of media, always struggling between containment and new arms that break free of the bindings. I guess we're just in that phase where the bindings have come loose.

I now have a giant, amorphous, pink fleshy blob with many human arms rolling about in my head. I have thoroughly creeped myself out with my own metaphor in the spirit of Salman Rushdie's magic realism (see! I tied it all together!).