Pertinent.

"Disorientation is the loss of the East. Ask any navigator: the east is what you sail by. Lose the east & you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what is & what may be, perhaps even your life...
...But let's just suppose. What if the whole deal - orientation, knowing where you are, & so on - what if it's all a scam? What if all of it - home, kinship, the whole enchilada - is just the biggest, most truly global, & centuries -oldest piece of brainwashing?  Suppose that it's only when you dare to let go that your real life begins? When you're whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever: suppose that it's then, & only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth & die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of those people who are, for reasons which unfortunately can't be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you've got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos & beyond: you've got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round & round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air." 

- Salman Rushdie, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet"


This book has been amazing thus far.

Midweek Mental Mirth

"What is it that frightens us about a "novel of causes," and conversely, does fiction have to exist in some suspended, apolitical landscape in order to be literary? Can it not be politically and temporally specific and still be in good literary taste? We are leery of literature that smacks of the polemic, instructional, or prescriptive, and I guess rightly so—it's a drag to be lectured to—but what does that imply about our attitudes toward intellectual inquiry? While I enjoy reading kitchen-table novels in which characters are distilled to their emotional essence and their lives stripped of politics and commerce, it simply is not reflective of my experience. I see our lives as being a part of an enormous web of interconnected spheres, where the workings of the larger social, political, and corporate machinery impact something as private and intimate as the descent of an egg through a woman's fallopian tube. This is the resonance I want to conjure in my books."

--Ruth L. Ozeki, authour of My Year of Meats [WHICH SHOULD BE READ BY ALL. GOOD. VERY GOOD].

{Agree x 1000}.


P.S. I went 3/4 ways across the country last weekend, namely, Toronto. I may blog about it. 
Later, scalliwags!