{"id":110,"date":"2005-09-21T21:26:42","date_gmt":"2005-09-22T03:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/index.php\/2005\/09\/21\/falling-from-a-planes-easy\/"},"modified":"2010-05-25T22:20:24","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T03:20:24","slug":"falling-from-a-planes-easy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/09\/falling-from-a-planes-easy\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling from a plane’s easy"},"content":{"rendered":"
Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock<\/h6>\n

Book’s as easy as falling out of a plane<\/h3>\n

Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005.<\/strong> I own a lot of books, hundreds, and have read nearly all of them. This isn’t bragging, as I haven’t read all that much since college, except for my first copy-desk stint of 1985-87. They just add up. Here in my 40s, there ought to be more. Yet among them are some, fewer than a dozen I think, I bought intending to read and haven’t.<\/p>\n

I’ve finally gotten into the top volume of that stack. It’s been sitting on the lower shelves since 1989 or ’90, and I have read the first five to 12 pages three or four times in the last 15 years and then the new New Yorker<\/em> arrived or the X-Files<\/em> or later West Wing<\/em> came on.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week I pushed through the first 50 pages of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses<\/em> and since then I’ve read 20 to 40 pages daily. I understood that the late Iranian ayatollah’s fatwa<\/em> was proclaimed over some surface sacrilege taken out of context and overall offensiveness to fundamentalists (fundamental Islam, that is). That may be part of it.<\/p>\n

But Rushdie’s sin was writing a masterpiece. It is an ‘onest-to-Allah work of wild imagination in the first and last, not the increasingly favored alleged fiction of disguised memoir.<\/p>\n

This isn’t to say Rushdie has committed a flight-of-fancy from hallucinations. His reading of Western and especially, of course, Eastern literature, philosophy and religion are well shown here. I’m taking his word for it.<\/p>\n

In the above-referenced reading mania of the mid-80s, I concentrated on humorous essays of the 1930s and a bit later — the Algonquin Round Table members, in short, their biographies and actual works. This includes people before them — Don Marquis, Damon Runyon and Ring Lardner, and contemporaries who did their drinking elsewhere: Thurber and Perelman chief among them. S.J. “Sid” Perelman was frustrating. Intricate sentences and always, always obscure words. Building vocabulary by reading with a dictionary at the ready is great, but the point when you’re spending more minutes looking up words that often aren’t there than actually reading, you give up.<\/p>\n

I realized a couple of things: Perelman used foreign words, including a lot of slang, and sometimes he invented words. Second, if I quit being so darned literal and just pushed through, I was not only happier but laughed. When Sid got elite, I would guess what he might mean from the context and move on. That is good enough. There is no test on this tomorrow.<\/p>\n

Back to Salman: I am well educated, by today’s sad standards, but my off-the-cuff knowledge of India and Britain is spare. I ought to know much more about Islam. That is, the various theologies (just like Protestant Christianity, can’t persuade me there’s only one), the histories, the Koran and other sacred writings (don’t tell me it doesn’t have scripture that didn’t make it into the authorized edition, as well as mythology and midrash), its intersections with geo-political entities. I just don’t, outside of a firm belief that at its core Islam has kindness and godliness, as do all major religions<\/a>. They all have viciousness, too, but that’s obvious.<\/p>\n

So let’s try the first five, 10, 20 pages of The Satanic Verses<\/em>. You accept that some of this dancing, singing narrative is Rushdie, but a lot comes from history, and the intersection of Hinduism and Islam, including plot points and the characters’ names and personalities. You keep reading.<\/p>\n

Is it sacred, or magic realism? At least it’s not autobiography. At worst, it’s well-hidden memoir because Self is not the point for a wonderful change. The story is the point, all the stories here. You keep reading.<\/p>\n

When you get confused, you don’t put the book away, nor do you skip to the next chapter (then you’re really lost and you’ll sell this trade paperback to Dickson Street Bookshop for $3). You do a Sid and move to the next sentence. You enjoy the fancy, even if the flight started as some other group’s gospel.<\/p>\n

Now every day I must learn what happens next to Gibreel and Saladin. -30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Book’s as easy as falling out of a plane Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2005. I own a lot of books, hundreds, and have read nearly all of them. This isn’t bragging, as I haven’t read all that much since college, except for my first copy-desk stint of 1985-87. They just add […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-course-of-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":147,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/05\/mothers-day-2005\/","url_meta":{"origin":110,"position":0},"title":"Mother’s Day 2005","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"May 8, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Sunday, May 8, 2005: An ode to Mother's Day. It's the first one since Mom passed last November. I've started reading a new, and perhaps the only so far, full biography of Ogden Nash. Here is a lede that won't work in my eventual newspaper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":107,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/10\/havent-they-been-through-enough\/","url_meta":{"origin":110,"position":1},"title":"Haven’t they been through enough?","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"October 2, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Monday, Oct. 2, 2005: Refugee, evacuee, ban, persecute. Who could object -- well, I couldn't -- when Oprah Winfrey in the second week after Hurricane Katrina pronounced from New Orleans that people who made it through the devastation \"survivors\"? It's uplifting, optimistic, triumphant and, well,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":136,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/07\/auld-friends\/","url_meta":{"origin":110,"position":2},"title":"Auld friends","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"July 3, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Sunday, July 3, 2005: Several times a year I do a book report, oops, a book review (I am a grown-up), for the paper. This last one, critiquing the first full biographical treatment of poet Ogden Nash, brought out a couple of e-mails from old\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":117,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/03\/a-secure-site\/","url_meta":{"origin":110,"position":3},"title":"A secure site?","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"March 22, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Tuesday, March 22, 2005. How can you tell if a Web site is not secure? It's easy to tell. Hey, who are you? What do you want? Can I believe you? Will you like me? They are after me, don't say they're not. What's that,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Technical Difficulties"","block_context":{"text":"Technical Difficulties","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/briefs\/technical-difficulties\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":132,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/07\/a-block-is-not-a-brick\/","url_meta":{"origin":110,"position":4},"title":"A block is not a brick","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"July 13, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Wednesday, July 13, 2005. So what I do is just admit my fear. Look at this gap in time: days since the last Brick, feels like a month. Why? A lack of topics as well as a lack of opinions? No. It was the feeling\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Technical Difficulties"","block_context":{"text":"Technical Difficulties","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/briefs\/technical-difficulties\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":120,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/08\/short-term-newspaper-memory\/","url_meta":{"origin":110,"position":5},"title":"Short-term (newspaper) memory","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"August 21, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Copyright 2005 Ben S. Pollock Sunday, Aug. 21, 2005. Saturday, in The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas the local column of my old Little Rock colleague Doug Thompson (an earnest journalist, sardonic in conversation) wrote glibly and at times carelessly of Wehco Media purchasing from Community Publishers the assets of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Body, Home, Street"","block_context":{"text":"Body, Home, Street","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/body-home-street\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1916,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions\/1916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}