The Satanic Verses

by Salman Rushdie

while he lay unconscious, dying, with a blood-count that had fallen from his normal fifteen to a murderous four point two, a hospital spokesman faced the national press on Breach Candy’s wide white steps. ‘It is a freak mystery,’ he gave out.

Hemolytic anemia? A hemorrhagic virus?

‘Don’t you get it?’ he shouted after her, spewing sausage fragments from the corners of his mouth. ‘No thunderbolt. That’s the point.’

Would he become a devotee of professional wrestling? What further, diabolic humiliations were in store?

I feel this way about visiting my mother's family. They are Southern, y'all.

Con-stanti-nople.

It's Istanbul not Constantinople

She made love like a cannibal and he was her long pork.

Bhopal

The Union Carbide Sevin Plant disaster in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, happened on 12/3/1984. Tons of methyl isocyanate gas leaked, killing 3800 people. It may have contained other toxins. The Bhopal site is still contaminated.

‘I have the peculiar habit of getting my nerves after the show.

I knew a lot of band & drama kids like this.

He had started feeling insecure there of late, because the most recent batch of burglars had taken not only the usual video and stereo but also the wolfhound guard dog.

Note to self: Wolfhounds may not make the best guard dogs. They are pretty people-friendly. Huskies are terrible guard dogs. Seriously.

‘You’re Jewish,’ he pointed out. ‘I was brought up to have views on Jews.’ ‘So I’m Jewish,’ she shrugged. ‘You’re the one who’s circumcised. Nobody’s perfect.’

From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.

‘A poet’s work,’ he answers. ‘To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.’ And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him.

There is a god here called Allah (means simply, the god). Ask the Jahilians and they’ll acknowledge that this fellow has some sort of overall authority, but he isn’t very popular: an all-rounder in an age of specialist statues.

From a global point of view of history, when Yahweh and Allah showed up, they were just angry desert gods. Local patriarchal deities were a dime a dozen back then. Just like Mithra and Zoroaster. But Yahweh, Allah, and the western god named God, plus his kid, Jesus, (who is an analogue of crop cycle deities that die and return annually), have managed to spread and gain followers instead of fading away. Choose rationality over faith, folks. Religion's holding us all back, and has been for the past 2000 years.

What do you think? That Mahound’s one God will bankrupt your temples? Three-sixty versus one, and the one wins? Can’t happen.’

Yeah, it did.

He must know; knowledge is his narcotic, his addiction. He cannot tolerate what he does not know

It isn’t easy to be a brilliant, successful woman in a city where the gods are female but the females are merely goods.

ombú poison

Ombú is the National Tree of Argentina. It's a member of the pokeweed species (Phytolacca spp.). Its sap is caustic.

‘I just mean I know how it feels. Wham, bam. It felt incredible. It felt necessary.’ ‘Oh, my God,’ she said, turning to him. ‘Oh, my God, I’m sorry, but yes, it did.’

We have all known one another too long, Pamela thought as Jumpy left. We can hurt each other with memories two decades old.

People were always dying on her, leaving her with a mouth full of words and nobody to spit them at.

It was plain that Mr Maslama was bursting with words, and that, now that he had popped, there was nothing for it but to sit it out, to permit the torrent to run its orotund course.

Ayesha never acknowledged Osman’s presence, nor did he ask for such acknowledgement.

He's keeping her safe - and giving her space. This book is really hard to follow. It's interesting, though, and the characters are interesting. Poor ol' Chamcha. I've been reading a lot of train-of-thought/stream-of-consciousness books this year. *The Infinite Jest* by David Foster Wallace, *The Illuminatus! Trilogy* by Robert Anton Wilson, a few others. *Cloud Cuckoo Land* by Anthony Doerr has layers of stories, much like *The Satanic Verses*.

an immense banyan-tree, a single monarch that ruled, with its multiple roots, over an area more than half a mile in diameter.

Banyans are a type of fig. They grow roots from their branches that become new trunks. It's said that they 'walk', and for a tree, they can spread quickly.

lote-tree

A member of the Buckthorn family, Ziziphus spp.

he stood no more than sixty-one inches off the ground,

Dude's shorter than I am by 2".

from Lucius Apuleius of Madaura, Moroccan priest, A D 120–180 approx., colonial of an earlier Empire, a person who denied the accusation of having bewitched a rich widow yet confessed, somewhat perversely, that at an early stage in his career he had been transformed, by witchcraft, into (not an owl, but) an ass.

*The Golden Ass* by Lucius Aupuleius has bestiality in it.

‘Mister,’ Mishal said to Saladin as her mother fled downstairs, ‘anyone who scares her that way has got to be seriously bad.’ ‘Wicked,’ Anahita agreed. ‘Welcome aboard.’

I’m sorry, of course I don’t think you’re a freak; it’s just that you look like one.’

‘I refuse to accept the position of victim. Certainly, he has been victimized, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused; our passiveness colludes with, permits such crimes.’

I think this describes a bystander more than a victim.

‘I’m not your kind,’ he said distinctly into the night. ‘You’re not my people. I’ve spent half my life trying to get away from you.’

Wow, that's a lot of internalized racism there. It really just hit me exactly how much self-loathing Chamcha has been carrying around.

Where am I, and Sisodia, seeing the legendary features of the vanished demigod squashed up against the limousine’s windshield, was tempted to answer: Baback where you bibi belong: on the iska iska iscreen.

I appreciate Sisodia's sense of humor. This sounds exactly like something I would say.

mad barbers,

Sweeney Todd is the best bloody musical I've seen since Les Miserables. RIP Angela Lansbury. Your Ms. Lovett was the best.

scumbling

Opaque glaze or finish

Ave atque vale.

Hail and fairwell

In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality.

Under the gaze of stone lions he chased pigeons, shouting: ‘I swear, Spoono, back home these fatties wouldn’t last one day; let’s take one home for dinner.’

Don't eat city pigeons (or gulls). Their bodies have absorbed all kinds of heavy metals and industrial toxins. Gulls are the same way, only with more mercury. Heavy metals & toxins can't be rendered safe by cooking.

mushroom, meaning that he was kept permanently in the dark, and from time to time – for example in the present regrettable circumstances – people threw shit all over him.

This is one of my favorite witticisms. "Am I a mushroom?! Because everyone keeps me in the dark and feeds me bullshit!!!"

and, obeying an irresistible primal reflex, turned tail and ran,

Fight-or-flight, man, fight-or-flight.

It cannot understand, or demonstrate, what any of this achieves. These people are burning their own streets.

I was at work during the Las Vegas Rodney King riot. I witnessed this phenomenon myself. People were destroying businesses & agency offices in their own neighborhoods. POC are often pushed into little enclaves. These areas *are* close to the city's center, but often isolated from it. This can be due to a geographical feature, a highway, or social pressure. Low incomepeople tend to rely on public transportation. Or, they need to be close enough to walk or bike. Rioters can only effect what they can reach.

RSS

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is a radical right-wing faction in India. It was founded in 1925.

We can open up a secular front against this mumbo-jumbo.’

‘Life is pain,’ he said. ‘Life is pain and loss; it is a coin of no value, worth even less than a kauri or a dam.’