Hey there, kids, welcome to the Phile for a Wednesday... Tax Day. Man, it feels like January, February, March and April were all four different years. So, just in case you didn't know... the state of Florida is shut down! Except for when you have to go to Walmart, the liquor store, McDonald's, get gas, pick up dog food at Petsmart, walk your dog, go to work, go check on your grandma, take your car to the dealership for warranty work, go to a restaurant and wait outside for your dinner, or to go get your weed... other than that and 27 other exceptions, the state is shut down.
A struggling German zoo is saying it might have to take what are probably the most drastic measures a zoo can possibly take when the going gets tough: that they might have to start feeding the animals to each other. The Neumünster Zoo, which is an hour north of Hamburg, Germany, is saying that because no one is visiting and the institution isn’t making money, and because it’s not eligible for state relief, things are starting to look so grim that they may have to start feeding animals to each other, partly in order to keep them fed and partly because slaughtering some animals is more humane than letting them starve to death. The zoo did not mention which animals would potentially be slaughtered to sustain the others but it seems unlikely they’re going to slaughter the lions to feed the otters. I guess this is the second most drastic measure a zoo could resort to, right before feeding zookeepers to the animals. RIP to every cloven animal in that zoo. You are no longer a zoo animal. You’re livestock. You thought you were a gazelle? Nope. You’re just a skinny cow now. Can’t the zoo staff at least kill some local pigeons or something first before they start offing seals and whatever monkeys are the most delicious to feed the cats and bears? This does not feel like a natural progression of solutions. How financially terrible are the people who run this zoo that it only takes like a month before they have to start feeding the animals to each other? What? Every time the Dippin’ Dots stands’ sales trend downward for a month the zoo executives start eyeing the flamingos as crocodile food? Literally throwing things to the wolves should never be your Plan B.
Someone should pay Walmart for accidentally recording the sociological history of America’s buying patterns behind the coronavirus pandemic. Hilariously, in recent weeks, this multi-billion dollar company that has served as an all-purpose department store has seen a pattern in their products that they’ve sold out on. People have been panic buying because of COVID-19 to stock up. And I’m sure Walmart was planning to have a supply shortages of their products during the first wave. Specifically, these products. Walmart CEO’s must have gotten a real fright. Now, tell me, what consumable products do you think you would buy to stock up on in the midst of a global crisis? I mean, my first thought is food. I would ask myself, “What would need to be bought to sustain daily lives during quarantine?” However, Americans have truly outdone themselves in defining how we react to public phenomenons. Panic buying has become both a comedic topic and a serious issue in our economy. But I think it’s what we buy that tops the cake. According to CNN business, first went the disinfectants, hand sanitizers, soaps, and basically all cleaning products. Okay, that makes sense. It’s totally understandable to buy these in the midst of a pandemic. But the items that Americans were panic buying after, however, were a little more questionable. Next, the supply chain store ran out of toilet paper. Yes, toilet paper. Suddenly, you had to be aware of your toilet paper stock, especially if you needed to go number two and were running low on crucial bath tissue. Anytime you walked into any convenience store, hoards of people would be walking out with surplus amounts of toilet paper as if a major storm just occurred. Why did COVID-19 make us do this? Who knows, but it was a continuous ripple effect that even distancing measures couldn’t control. Thirdly, back in early March, I noticed my fellow peers were suddenly master bakers. Everyone was baking all kinds of bread as if to prepare for a famine or something. Which didn’t make sense since other foods were never really out of stock like the hand sanitizer, toilet paper, and paper towel products, but Walmart reported accordingly with the buying patterns. They ran out of baking yeast and spiral hams. These seem to be more reasonable consumable products to run out of. And who knew baking yeast sales would be at an all-time high. But what came next for Walmart to run out of is the most ironic thing to run out of stock for in a crisis: hair clippers and hair dye. Everyone knows a few people who have gone through these crazy hair color’ phases of crises giving themselves haircuts, using some crazy hair color, and/or both. Last month, Americans, in general, decided that they were all going through crises that demanded hair cut changes. Walmart has officially run out of hair clippers and hair dye, and it couldn’t be more appropriate. Of course, with quarantine making everyone stay at home, it might be that time for beard trimmers, hair cuts, the works. However, the coronavirus pandemic has caused hair salons and barbershops to close down, causing people to become their own hair stylists and resort to their own haircutting skills. I think putting a sociological perspective on Americans’ shopping patterns versus Walmart’s increasing hand sanitizer sales, aerosol disinfectant sales, and baking yeast sales during this coronavirus pandemic is not only interesting but entertaining. Nevertheless putting Walmart’s sales of hair clippers and shortage of hair coloring products versus Americans’ shopping patterns is more than ironically hilarious. If quarantine was to end within a short amount of time, our country might be distinguished as pink-haired for awhile.
Take your family’s dinner table out to the backyard. Burn it. Then go buy a trough, put it in your dining room, and fill that slop chute to the brim with Costco’s nearly 30-pound bucket-o-Mac and Cheese. There’s no point in fighting the future. We are self-aware pig people with magical tools powered by fire. We may as well dive headfirst into our destiny. Into these cheddar cheese buckets.
Costco, the store that insists that you feed your family like it’s actually a 70 person church cookout in Alabama, has a new 27-pound, 10-ounce industrial bucket of macaroni and cheese from the brand Chef’s Banquet. The macaroni & cheese bucket can serve 180 people and is available for delivery for $89.99 (shipping included) at Costco.com. If you’re imagining a big bucket of wet cheese sauce and elbow pasta though, you would be wrong. The food isn’t premade. According to the Costco website, “The Cheese and Pasta are packaged in separate bulk Metalite pouches with oxygen absorbers, to protect the quality and ensure a long shelf life.” A 20-year shelf life, according to Costco. It’s the perfect mac and cheese for when that nuclear apocalypse hits. It’s the sort of comfort food that will make your bunker feel like home. If a 6-gallon paint bucket of mac & cheese sounds convenient but maybe not quite so appetizing, fear not. Reviewers actually love the product. It has 4.7 out of 5 stars on Costco’s website. Cheese lovers, you can also find the 27-pound bucket of macaroni available on Amazon. If you have an Amazon Prime account, take advantage of it. Emergency foods are going quickly due to the coronavirus pandemic. Embrace it, America. This is our future. At least it’s tasty.
If you didn’t think the coronavirus pandemic could cause any more distress, then just keep checking the latest news. A few weeks ago, in Lockport Township, Illinois, sheriff’s deputies responded to a welfare check on a home. They had gotten a call from an individual who was asked by Patrick Jesernik’s parents to check on him, because they had not heard from him in a while. What the Will County Sheriff’s Office stumbled upon was horrific. The bodies of 54-year-old Patrick Jesernik and 59-year-old Cheryl Schriefer were found in what appeared to be a murder-suicide. Jesernik’s body was found in a separate room from his wife’s, both with one gunshot wound. The gun was found near Jesernik’s body, indicating that he must have shot Schriefer first before turning the gun on himself. The couple had no past history of calling the sheriff’s office for domestic disputes. Family members had told police that Jesernik was worried that he and his wife had contracted the coronavirus. Two days before the murder-suicide, Schriefer was tested for COVID-19 because she was having difficulty breathing and was still waiting for the test results. She was shot in the back of the head with no signs of a struggle. But the worst part? They both tested negative for COVID-19. A news release from the Will County Sheriff’s Office states that out of fear of contracting the coronavirus motivated Jesernik to shoot his wife and then himself. It also states that the vast majority of service calls they have been responding to are crisis intervention calls and domestic disputes. These are rising because of the COVID-19 virus, and it’s encouraged to reach out to your local authorities if you are or someone you know is trapped by an abuser. Although this Illinois couple may not have had a recorded history of domestic violence, it’s important to realize that many others are needing protection now more than ever.
Ouch, talk about a freak accident! A freak trampoline accident, to be more specific. A 12-year-old boy was rushed to the hospital after a metal coil from a trampoline spring dislodged and shot into his back. Tell me about a graphic image to picture. The coil ripped through Jamie Quinlan’s t-shirt and struck him just a few centimeters away from his spine. He was immediately taken to Sheffield Children’s Hospital in Lincolnshire where he underwent emergency surgery to remove the coil. Hanging out at his friend’s house, the boy stated he was mid-jump in the air on his friend’s trampoline when he heard something pop, and the 15 centimeter metal coil snapped off the bouncer and catapulted into his back. After the spring shot through the youngster’s back, the boy said he felt a “strange and heavy” sensation, and collapsed to the floor due to the intense shock. Luckily, the boy remained conscious while he was being transported to the hospital and in the waiting room. According to his father, Ian Quinlan, the spring came off the trampoline like a bullet and was most likely traveling at an estimated 70 mph. The metal spring remained embedded in the boy’s body until specialist doctors could physically remove it by surgery creating a six inch deep hole in his skin. Ian stated, “It could have happened to anyone. Jamie has been so brave. I want people to be aware of how dangerous trampolines can be if there’s no cover on the springs, or if there’s a gap. If it had hit elsewhere on Jamie’s body, in his head or throat, we could have lost him.” The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission states that there are thousands of trampoline-related injuries each year. In 2012 there were 94,000 emergency room treated trampoline injuries. Children under six are the ones who are more at risk. The American Academy of Pediatrics noted several broken bones, sprains and strains, concussions and neck injuries are the most common. Safety experts recommend using safety nets and pads to cover the trampoline frame, springs and surrounding land surfaces with protective pads to try and prevent more terrible things happening from freak trampoline accidents. Maybe we need to be more careful about what goes on in our own back gardens. I cracked a rib once on a trampoline. I have those things.
I have good news, kids. Wildlife is finally taking back the world. Nature is healing.
Since this coronavirus business church signs are getting to be very creative and entertaining...
Haha. When Broadway reopens some shows will have brand new titles and slightly different storylines. Like this one...
You know its good to wear gloves and face masks when you go out but some people are taking it a little bit too far.
Do you ever see those pan-handers on the street? Well, some are very creative...
I wonder if he uses a Jedi mind trick to get people to give him money. So, I think Trump has the virus. Here's why I think that...
Wait. Maybe he's the virus. Hmmmm. Hey, future kids, this is the Royal Family...
So, this is March versus April...
It does feel like 84 years. Now from the home office in Port Jefferson, New York, here is...
Top Phive Ways 2020 Could Get Worse
5. I'd look out my window and see Godzilla.
4. Plastic bubbles mandatory for social distancing.
3. The world's supply of beer runs out. 2. Aliens show up with a cure for COVID-19 and the governments of the world start a galactic war with them.
And the number one way 2020 can't get any worse is...
1. Pizza gets criminalized.
If you spot the Mindphuck let me know, kids. You know I live in Florida, right? Well, there's stuff that happen here that happen nowhere else...
Those toilet paper thieves. Hey, let's see a live shot of Port Jefferson, shall we?
No ferry today but there is a guy walking down the pathway. Okay, let's talk about Trump.
Nations and health experts worldwide reacted with alarm today after President Donald Trump announced a halt to the sizable funding the United States sends to the World Health Organization. They warned that the move could jeopardize global efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic. At a briefing in Washington, Trump said he was instructing his administration to halt funding for the W.H.O. pending a review of its role “in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus.” The United States is W.H.O.’s largest single donor, contributing between 400 million dollars and 500 million dollars annually to the Geneva-based agency in recent years. “I will always put the well-being of America first,” Trump said in a statement today. Trump has repeatedly labeled COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” and criticized the U.N. health agency for being too lenient on China, where the novel virus first emerged late last year. Outside experts have questioned China’s reported infections and deaths from the virus, calling them way too low and unreliable. And an investigation by the Associated Press has found that six days of delays between when Chinese officials knew about the virus and when they warned the public allowed the pandemic to bloom into an enormous public health disaster. The W.H.O. has been particularly effusive in its praise for China, calling on other countries to emulate their approach and repeatedly praising their transparency. But China only agreed to a proposed W.H.O.-led mission to investigate the coronavirus after W.H.O.’s chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus personally paid a visit to Chinese President Xi Jinping, a highly unusual move to secure a country visit during an outbreak. The European Union today said Trump has “no reason” to freeze W.H.O. funding at this critical stage and called for measures to promote unity instead of division. Trudie Lang, a professor of global health research at Oxford University said attempts to hinder W.H.O.’s work could have significant consequences for the pandemic response. “The reason we’re making such fast progress on diagnostics, vaccines and drugs is because of W.H.O.’s role as a neutral broker,” she said. “It’s their role to bring together the best science.” On Twitter, Bill Gates... whose foundation was the second-largest donor to the W.H.O. for its latest two-year budget, contributing over 530 million dollars in 2018 and 2019... wrote that stopping funding for W.H.O. during a world health crisis “is as dangerous as it sounds.” “Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them. The world needs W.H.O. now more than ever,” Gates wrote. Worldwide, the pandemic has infected over 2 million people and killed over 128,000, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, pushed back at Trump’s announcement. “Placing blame doesn’t help,” he wrote on Twitter. “The virus knows no borders. We must work closely against COVID-19.” The Netherlands also threw its support behind the WHO. “Now is not the time to hold back funding. Once the pandemic is under control, lessons can be learned. For now, focus on overcoming this crisis,” Sigrid Kaag, minister for foreign trade and development cooperation, said on Twitter. Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, called Trump’s decision “extremely problematic,” noting that W.H.O. is leading efforts to help developing countries fight the spread of COVID-19. “This is the agency that’s looking out for other countries and leading efforts to stop the pandemic,” Sridhar said. “This is exactly the time when they need more funding, not less.” Sridhar said Trump’s move was a short-sighted political decision that would likely have lasting consequences. “Trump is angry, but his anger is being directed in a way that is going to ultimately hurt U.S. interests,” she said. Sridhar and others said it was still unclear what the precise impact of Trump’s funding cuts might be, but that other health priorities funded by the U.S., like polio eradication, malaria and HIV, were likely to suffer. Aid workers in developing countries worried they might be hardest hit by Trump’s decision. “Trump’s decision to withhold support from the W.H.O. is pulling the rug out from under our feet at a pivotal moment. It will impact the humanitarian community as a whole,” said Tom Peyre-Costa, regional media adviser for Central and West Africa for the Norwegian Refugee Council. “It defies logic at the height of a global pandemic and will lead to many more deaths.” In Beijing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian says the country is “seriously concerned” about the U.S. government’s decision to suspend funding. Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov warned against politicizing and said he believed W.H.O. had “acted effectively” in its handling of the pandemic. The W.H.O. did not respond to repeated requests from the Associated Press for comment. Some experts say W.H.O. dallied in declaring a pandemic; it did so only on March 11th, long after the surging outbreaks on multiple continents met the agency’s own definition for a global crisis. “They were really behind the curve,” said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh. The U.N. health agency also insisted for months that the virus could be contained and was not as infectious as influenza. But many outbreak experts, including at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, say COVID-19 is spreading many times faster than flu and that its rate of spread was apparent in January. Still, some global health academics said Trump’s attacks on W.H.O. might actually strengthen the agency’s credibility. “If Trump was making a great success of the pandemic response in the U.S., if there were minimal cases and deaths there, that might be different,” said Sophie Harman, a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. “But things are getting worse and that reinforces the need for W.H.O.”
Hank Steinbrenner
April 2nd, 1957 — April 14th, 2020
Fortunate Son
Phact 1. 2015 was 11111011111 in binary, making that year a palindrome year. We won’t have another one of these until 2047.
Phact 2. Florida Road Rangers will bring you gas if you run out. They also carry jumper cables, oil, radiator fluid, etc.
Phact 3. When Genghis Khan sent a trade caravan to the Khwarezmid Empire, the governor of one of the city seized it and killed the traders. Genghis Khan retaliated by invading the empire with 100,000 men and killing the governor by pouring molten silver down his eyes and mouth. Genghis Khan even went so far as to divert a river through the Khwarezmid emperor’s birthplace, erasing it from the map.
Phact 4. Texas abolished the last meal for death row inmates after a prisoner ordered a ten course meal including two chicken fried steaks, a triple cheeseburger and a pound of barbeque meat and then turned it down saying he wasn’t hungry.
Phact 5. Cheetahs can only run for about 30 seconds before their brain overheats and shuts down.
Today's guest is a Phile Alum whose latest book Quichotte is the 120th book to be pheatured in the Phile's Book Club. Please welcome back to the Phile... Salman Rushdie.
Me: Hey there, sir, welcome back to the Phile. How have you been?
Salman: Trying to stay alive, Jason. Thanks for having me back.
Me: So, your book Quichotte is it a modern retelling of Don Quixote?
Salman: It's not. I took a bit of inspiration from that book and I have a main character who is also an old fool in love with an impossible dream and he has a sidekick which is a son who he essentially made up. But once I had those same characters they don't go on the same journey as the Cervantes character, they go down their own road so to speak. The Quixote was a little bit of a starting point but I went rapidly my own way.
Me: You have a character in the book named Mr. Smile. Who is he?
Salman: Well, he's this elderly Indian-American gentleman who is working as a pharmaceutical salesman in the Midwest of the United States. He's essentially a little cracked, he's spent a lot of his life watching terrible television and he has developed this almost insane belief that, which people often do knowing the people on the TV screen that we spend so much time with them that we feel we know them. He falls in love with a daytime TV host who is described at one point as "Oprah 2.0." He decides that he's going to win her hand and he embarks in his beaten up Chevy Cruise on this quest of not only driving himself across America to where she is in New York City but also making himself worthy of her through deeds. He always wanted a child, he doesn't have a son but somehow in what he calls "the age that anything can happen" he manages to concur up a child by magic who he names "Sancho." The two of them set off on this cockeyed journey.
Me: Can you explain the "the age anything can happen" thing?
Salman: In our media and our television we are constantly told we can achieve our goals no matter how extreme they are. We can lose 150 pounds on a reality show and we can swap wives three states over on "Wife Swap." You too can be president, anything can happen.
Me: Do you think then anything could happen could be a negative thing?
Salman: Yeah, because we can't forecast the weather, there could be a hurricane or a tsunami out of nowhere, we don't know who is going to win elections anymore. Sometimes the results are depressing. Literally anything could happen. If, I didn't want to say his name, but of Donald Trump could be President anything could happen.
Me: Hahaha. So true. So, what are some of the parallels to your book that is in the Don Quixote book?
Salman: Don Quixote is inspired by junk novels and stories of his time to go on this foolish quest, similar to Mr. Smile who is inspired by junk television. I mention a bunch of these shows like "The Real Housewives of Atlanta," shows about plastic surgery, "The Apprentice."
Me: Are you a TV guy or did you have to do some "field work" here?
Salman: This is to put it mildly, this is not my preferred television. I had to understand that this was my characters preferred television and so I had to do my due diligence so to speak so I watched my share of "Bachelorettes." Ha ha ha.
Me: It's not bad, right? It's kind of gripping when you get into it.
Salman: Kind of gripping. Yes.
Me: Okay, so do you feel that reality shows now in 2020 have the same impact that stories had in the 17th century or more?
Salman: I don't know about more, it's our version of it. We don't anymore care about romances, we care about the phony romances on television. It's a fiction using real life people but pretending to be real. I think the business of blurring the boundary between reality and unreality is one of the dangers of our time.
Me: I always buy into it when I watch a reality show. It's real, I tell you, Salman. Haha.
Salman: It's very carefully constructed to deceive. but I think we have arrived at a moment not just in television but the media in general including the Internet where deception can be done extremely skillfully so there are websites that are completely garbage which look as authoritative as news websites. So I think its hard sometimes for people to be able to distinguish. So if we live in an age that truth and lies can't be distinguished from each other then liars can rise.
Me: The book also talks about the opioid crisis, sir. When did you realize you wanted to talk about that?
Salman: Well, it was actually a long time ago because in 2007 my youngest died very suddenly of a heart attack.
Me: I'm sorry to hear that, sir.
Salman: Thank you. It became clear to me after that it happened she had been, in a way I didn't know, she had been addicting to and was using a large number of these drugs like Vicodin and Percocet. If something as significant in someone's life as the death of ones sister takes place and is attributable to these then it becomes a subject for me. Ever since then I've been quietly digging into it and trying to learn about what's going on. Eventually that found its way into this book.
Me: Is there an advocacy in your work as this is a personal pursuit now?
Salman: Yeah, I'm clearly concerned about the opioid crisis but in the novel it acts as part of the story. One of the main characters does go in search of illegal opioids. Apart from anything else that becomes an important plot point. The book is not a polemic about this, I think we all know what the truth is about it but I wanted to dramatize it because it's a huge problem now. And still a little bit under discussed in my mind. So it just came into my book. I found one of my characters had this addiction and I followed that thread.
Me: Did you learn anything about the opioid crisis in the research for this book?
Salman: Yes, I learned a lot. Actually there's a character in the book who is a former employer of my main character who is actually involved in big pharma. He's based on real cases that I discovered. I guess the thing I discovered was this, we can easily believe that there are crooked people trying to pass off very dangerous drugs on people who don't need them or who want them for recreational reasons. What surprised me was how easy it was to corrupt the medical system, to find doctors who for relatively small amounts of money would play alone and prescribe these very dangerous drugs called "off label" which means for purposes they're not designed for.
Me: In 2012 I broke my humerus and I was given some kinda opioid, and I could see how addicted people get. I was taking way too many. The last time you were there which was about a year ago it was for the book The Golden House which predicted the rise of Donald Trump. I wonder in 50 years if people will write stories that take place in 2020 and talk about Trump, and the coronavirus and other things that are happening. Do you feel there writing about what's going on right now is important for the generations to come?
Salman: Yeah, I've always as a writer been attracted to writing right up to the present moment, and trying to capture it if possible. Actually the last there novels Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and The Golden House and Quichotte are all attempts and very different ways to do it. I tried to use in each of those books very different literary approaches so Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights uses an Arabian nights fairy tale way of approaching the story, The Golden House is more realistic and this one the real world has become so crazy that actually surrealism and absurdism is actually the most accurate way of representing it. So with this book I'm using a whole lot of the techniques of the novel, the picturesque comic novel, the genre novel, there are bits of this novel where it falls into spy fiction, there's a bit where it falls into science fiction. There's a bit to it where it completely falls into the surreal absurdist fiction. But I wanted to use as many ways of telling a story I could in order to approach this problem of the present problem from multiple angles.
Me: I just recently started to write my novel out of the blue and having a lot of fun writing it. I haven't a "novel" since 1993, which I never got published. Anyway, my novel is sci-fi based and a lot of fun to write. Is writing a book like this enjoyable for you?
Salman: The danger is that someone allows me to do anything. But the danger is that doing anything could be very off putting to the reader. I've got to make sure that everything I'm doing serves the story I'm telling.
Me: Doesn't Quichotte have a taking cricket in it?
Salman: Yeah, the talking cricket speaks Italian, he's one of my favorite characters.
Me: Recently you did a lecture on the 50th anniversary of Slaughter-House Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. Not long ago John Irving was here on the Phile and he talked about Vonnegut smoking on his doorstep at four in the morning and not going in his house. Did you ever meet him in person?
Salman: I did. He was very nice to me at the very beginning of my career. He came to New York for the publication of Midnight's Children. He showed up at this tiny little book launch that was given to me. He invited me out to his house on Long Island in the village of Sagaponack. My first ever visit to Long Island was to stay with Kurt Vonnegut and his wife Jill. It so happened I was there on the day that his neighbour, the novelist Nelson Algren died. Algren had just reviewed my book so it was very bizarre. We were invited over to Algren's house for a party and Algren had arranged the party and had a great heart attack and died in the middle of the floor. The first guests to arrive food the host dead on the rug. That was my first weekend on Long Island and my first experience with a weekend with Kurt Vonnegut who was quite depressed as a result as one would be over the weekend. But he was very nice to me. I always remembered his generosity.
Me: Has he ever influenced your writing?
Salman: Maybe with this new novel because there's a science fiction element with this novel. When I was younger I consumed a great deal of science fiction and of course Vonnegut is that the very high end of science fiction. Writers like Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula Le Gwin, those are the aristocrats of science fiction and I was very fond of their work.
Me: Is it the novelists job to document the times that we are in or...?
Salman: It's not exactly documentary. I don't see it as documenting, I see it as capturing a flavour or a mood.
Me: But is there a prerogative to offer solutions as well?
Salman: Uh, I'm not good at solutions.
Me: Hahaha. You know what I'm asking though. I'm trying to get advice here. Ha.
Salman: Oh, I know. What the novel I think does is to suggest the only valuable counterweight to the insanity of the present is love, human affection. And these are characters looking for love or trying in some cases to mend fences with loving relationships that have been damaged. Whether those are between fathers and sons or brothers and sisters. But the quest for love and for goodness is really at the heart of the book. I think that's the thing that a novel can do, it could remind us of the good. It could remind us even at a time we seem surrounded and overwhelmed by craziness and evil that there is such thing as the good and there are people including ourselves who strive for that.
Me: Is there anything that's going on in the real world that's inspiring you for your next work?
Salman: I truthfully do not have a clue about the next book. It worried me because I'm always happier when I know what the next thing is that I'm going to work on. I think this novel is a kind of everything novel, it's encyclopedic fiction and I think it took so much out of me that the tank is a little bit empty right now. I haw to wait for it to refill.
Me: How about the coronavirus? That might be something.
Salman: That's what I mean when I say the world is now a place where I can't make it up. Anything can happen is really true. The truth has generally become stranger than fiction.
Me: Is it a challenge coming up with ideas that will make a good book but then it really happening?
Salman: Yeah, I remember I had a conversation with my friend Ian McEwan and he said, "If we had written down the plot of what happened in the last two years and offered it to the publishers they would say go away and come up with something more convincing." The world has become unconvincing. We have people talking about nuclear bombs into hurricanes. Everyday there's some craziness that we wouldn't even dream of in our craziest dreams.
Me: Salman, sir, thanks so much for being back on the Phile. Take care and please come back again soon. Stay safe.
Salman: Thanks, Jason. You too. Keep up the entertaining read.
That about does it for this entry of the Phile. Thanks to my guest Salman Rushdie. The Phile will be back tomorrow with writer and actor Paul Rugg... not to be confused with Paul Rudd. Spread the word, not the turd... or the virus. Don't let snakes and alligators bite you. Bye, love you, bye. Stay inside.
I don't want you, cook my bread, I don't want you, make my bed, I don't want your money too, I just want to make love to you. - Willie Dixon
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