A New York state of mind

Tue, 01 Oct 2002 15:20:00 +0000

Salman Rushdie has been a full-time resident of Manhattan now for several years, but his pleasure at having made this indirect migration -- from India to England to the United States -- is still evident. He appeared for this interview, at the Manhattan offices of his publisher, dressed casually, upbeat and eager to talk about the world's new recognition of the threat of religious extremism and the best way to memorialize those killed on Sept. 11.

You're officially sick of talking about your experience living under the Iranian fatwa. But your new book of nonfiction, "Step Across This Line," deals extensively with your struggle against it. Do you think it will cause the issue to flare up again?

No. Really, in a way I thought it was a way of putting it to rest. Because clearly it's been a part of the last 10 years. And I can't pretend it didn't happen. And actually it was for me, in putting this book together, in the end one of the most rewarding things, [figuring out] how to deal with that stuff.

Now if anybody ever wants to know anything about what I think about the fatwa, there it is. And now I really never have to talk about it again. I think it's really been, in practical terms, over for a very long time.

Length does matter

Thu, 14 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

On Saturday the Flux Quartet attempted to do something no group had ever done -- perform Morton Feldman's "seemingly unperformable" "String Quartet No. 2." The mammoth composition, considered by some to be Feldman's masterwork, runs six hours when played as written. The players are given no rest or intermission. The audience at the Great Hall in New York, however, was free to come and go throughout the piece.

At 7:40 p.m., Flux took the stage and bowed the first notes of Feldman's behemoth. About an hour into the piece, which is nearly devoid of dynamic shift or tempo change, the 300-person audience began to wither. To my right, a man took off his shoes and slid to the floor. By 10 he was gone. Dozens more filtered out. Some left and returned. Others nodded off, drifting in and out of what I imagined to be shimmering mini-dreams with soundtracks. By midnight, the audience had thinned by a third. A focused few watched the musicians. The rest let the music wash over them and fill the hall while they sketched in books, read snatches of newspaper or drifted off.

Salon.com > Peter Catapano

A New York state of mind

Length does matter