In the following interview, recorded in 1983, Salman Rushdie speaks about his book Midnight’s Children, winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 and the Best of Booker award in 2008.
Category: Literature
Upheaval in Souls, Bodies, Imaginations
Christopher Lydon of the wonderful Radio Open Source interview joins the great Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury for a stimulating discussion on art, politics and literature.
CAIRO — Elias Khoury is the sort of novelist we rely on to tell us what is going on. Himself of Lebanese and Christian antecedents, he wrote Gate of the Sun (1998), a stylized and much-admired fictional account of the Palestinian naqbah or “catastrophe” from 1948 to the infamous Sabra and Shatillah massacres in Lebanon in 1982. Writing, he remarks, is his means of discovering his ignorance and overcoming it.
Clive Bell Is a Fathead
by George Bernard Shaw, The New Republic, 21 February 1922
[In his article, The Creed of an Aesthete (in our issue of January 25th), Mr. Clive Bell said: “Mr. Bernard Shaw … is not an artist, much less an aesthete … he is a didactic.” He referred to Mr. Shaw’s rejection of the Darwinian theory because, by depriving Beauty, Intelligence, Honor of their divine origin and purpose, this theory deprives them of their value. To Mr. Bell’s mind, Mr. Shaw feels that “if Life be a mere purposeless accident, the finest things in it must appear to everyone worthless.” The sooner Mr. Shaw knows that this is not so, the better, says Mr. Bell, and proceeds to explain his own creed: “always life will be worth living by those who find in it things which make them feel to the limit of their capacity.” “The advantage of being an aesthete,” he declares, “is that one is able to appreciate the significance of all that comes to one through the senses: one feels things as ends instead of worrying about them as means. … Whatever is precious and beautiful in life is precious and beautiful irrespective of beginning and end.”]
As will be seen in the above article, my friend Clive Bell is a fathead and a voluptuary. This a very comfortable sort of person to be, and very friendly and easy and pleasant to talk to. Bell is a brainy man out of training. So much the better for his friends; for men in training are irritable, dangerous, and apt to hit harder than they know. No fear of that from Clive. The layer of fat on his brain makes him incapable of following up his own meaning; but it makes him good company.
Gore Vidal on the South Bank Show
Gore Vidal on the South Bank Show in 2008, with extracts from Point to Point Navigation.
Kurt Vonnegut on Bookworm
Kurt talks to Michael Silverblatt about “Bagombo Snuff Box” and his life’s work. Broadcast Nov 11 1999. KCRW own the audio. (via Doug Tarnopol)
Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal – BBC Omnibus 1995
Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal is a BBC Omnibus documentary first screened in 1995. The two part film biography covers Vidal’s life by visiting scenes from his past.
Episode One
Continue reading “Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal – BBC Omnibus 1995”
Gore Vidal, RIP
The great Gore Vidal is no more. One of the greatest prose-stylists of the last 100 years, he had a rapier-like wit, and remained a non-conformist to the end. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate his life than to leave you in Gore’s own company. Here is an archive of Gore Vidal’s writings and media appearances, some of them rare, that PULSE has published over the years. Also, don’t miss this blistering 1986 response to the Norman Podhoretz in which Vidal is identifying predilections, particularly the neoconservatives passionate attachment to Israel, that 17 years later would lead the US to disaster in Iraq.
