Salman Rushdie speaks [was re. The future of the list?]

[Vaska]

>From Salman Rushdie's _Imaginary Homelands_:

I cannot bear the idea of the writer as secular prophet; I am remembering
that one of the very greatest writers of this century, Samuel Beckett,
believed that all art must inevitably end in failure.  This is, clearly, no
reason for surrender.  "Ever tried.  Ever failed. Never mind.  Try again.
Fail better."

Literature is an interim report from the consciousness of the artist, and so
it can never be 'finished' or 'prfect'.  Literature is made at the frontier
between the self and the world, and in the act of creation that frontier
softens, becomes permeable, allows the world to flow into the artist and the
artist to flow into the world.  Nothing so inexact, so easily and frequently
misconceived, deserves the protection of being declared sacrosanct.  We
shall just have to get along without the shield of sacrilization, and a good
thing too.....

Imagine this.  You wake up one morning and find yourself in a large,
rambling house.  As you wander through it you realize it is so enormous that
you will never know it all.  In the house are people you know, family
members, friends, lovers, colleagues; also many strangers. [...]  The house
is not what you'd have chosen, it's in fairly bad condition, the corridors
are often full of bullies, but it will have to do.  [...]  You recognize
some of the voices, others are completely unknown to you.  The voices are
talking about the house, about everyone in it, about everything that is
happening and has happened and should happen.  Some of them talk exclusively
in obscenities.  Some are bitchy.  Some are loving.  Some are funny.  Some
are sad.  The most interesting voices are all these things at once.  

"Is Nothing Sacred," 1990