RKS Literature: Washing of Brains by the World’s Head Laundry (Salman Rushdie)

Most of you won’t do it. The world’s head laundry is pretty good at washing brains. Don’t jump off that cliff don’t walk through that door don’t step into that waterfall don’t take that chance don’t step across that line don’t ruffle my sensibilities. I’m warning you now don’t make me mad you’re doing it you’re making me mad. You won’t have a chance you haven’t got a prayer you’re finished you’re history you’re less than nothing, you’re dead to me dead to your whole family your nation your race, everything you ought to love more than life and listen to like your master’s voice and follow blindly and bow down and worship and obey; you’re dead, you hear me, forget about it, you stupid bastard, I don’t even know your name.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999

RKS Literature: Types of Rock n Roll Bands (Salman Rushdie)

There are bands that are hit machines, bands that earn the respect of the music crowds, bands that fill stadiums, bands that drip sex; transcendent bands and ephemeral boy bands and girl bands, gimmick bands and inept bands, beach and driving bands, summer and winter bands, bands to make love by and bands that make you memorize the words to every song they play. Most bands are awful, and if there are aliens from other galaxies monitoring our radio and tv waves, they’re probably being driven crazy by the din, And to the whole half-century-long history of rock music there is a small number of bands, a number so small you could count to it without running out of fingers, who steal into your heart and become a part of how you see the world, how you tell and understand the truth, even when you’re old and deaf and foolish.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999

RKS Literature: India Only Discovers Sex in the Mid Twentieth Century! (Salman Rushdie)

And this in the far off 1950’s! In “underdeveloped” India, where boy-girl relations were so strictly controlled! True, true: but permit me to say “underdeveloped nation” or not, one of our prime cultural artifacts was a highly developed apparatus of hypocritical disapproval, not only of any incipient change in social mores, but also of our own historically proven and presently hyperactive erotic natures. What’s the Kama Sutra? A Disney comic? Who built the Khajuraho temples? The Japanese? And of course in the 1950’s there were no girl tarts in Kamathipura working eighteen hour days, and child marriages never took place, and the pursuit of the very young by lecherous old humberts-yes, we’d already heard of the new Nabokov shocker-was utterly unknown. To hear some people talk you’d conclude that sex hadn’t been discovered in India by the mid twentieth century, and the population explosion must have been made possible by some alternative method of fertilisation.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999

RKS AMERICAN LITERATURE: Letter from Birmingham Jail (Martin Luther King Jr.)

My friends I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was not ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’. We must come to see with one of our distinguished jurists that ‘justice delayed’ is justice denied.’

Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, 1964.

RKS Literature: Celebrating Non-Belongers (Salman Rushdie)

But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-believers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves, we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our places of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask; if we did not recognize them in our least fulfilled needs we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999

RKS Literature: Outsideness (Salman Rushdie)

 For a long while I have believed-this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness-that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identifies beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belonger’s seal of approval.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999

RKS Literature: Lurid Story Telling at a Party of Indian Intellectuals (Salman Rushdie)

 Clusters of intellectuals had formed around certain beautiful women – the starlet Pia Aziz, the artist Aurora Zogoiby – while most of the other women were sitting at the feet of a boozy but celebrated Muslim writer of low-life stories which was shocking them by providing, in the most exquisite and ornate Urdu Sir Darius Xerxes Cama had ever heard, detailed and hair raising descriptions of the worst things in the world, undisguised by circumlocution, unfettered by good taste. He spoke naturally in that famous glittering prose which was somehow both voluptuous and precise, at once dainty and appalling of the degraded interiors of the local insane asylum, of the brutal murders and casual rapes that were the city’s hidden news, of the corruption of those in authority and the violence in the hearts of the poor, of incestuous love affairs in high society and the killing of daughters in slums, of the caged whores of Falkland Road and of the mafias who ran the city’s organized crime and would order men’s penises to be severed as casually as they would call for a bunch of red bananas in a bazaar.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999

RKS Literature: Emerging Rock n Roll in India as a Decadent Virus (Salman Rushdie)

He began to hold music responsible for the world’s ills and would even argue in his cups, that its practitioners should be wiped out, eradicated, like a disease. Music was a virus, an infection, and music lovers were comparable to those globe-trotting sexual immoralists whose nameless activities had resulted in the global spread of syphilis.

Salman Rushdie, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, 1999

RKS AMERICAN LITERATURE: Hymie’s Bull (Ralph Ellison)

Bulls are pretty bad people to meet if you’re a bum. They have head-whipping down to a science and they’re always ready to go into action. They know all the places to hit a bone to turn it into jelly, and they seem to feel just the place to kick you to make your backbone feel like it’s going to fold up like the old collapsible drinking cups we used when we were kids. One a bull hit me across the bridge of my nose and I felt I was coming apart like a cigarette floating in a urinal. They can hit you on the head and bust your shoes.

(A bull in hobo slang in this case means a railway security guard)

“Hymie’s Bull”, Ralph Ellison, 1937

PRESS RELEASE: RORY DYLAN STEPHEN TO CONTINUE HIS ADVENTURES AND SHARING WITH THE WORLD: “BEYOND PUPPYDOM”

Canine News: Alstätten, Switzerland; 5August2026: In an exclusive interview with Bob, master of the famous soon to be one year old West Highland Terrier Rory Dylan Stephen, we can confirm the following;

  • Rory is undergoing intensive trauma therapy at the Kay Nine Clinic in Alstätten, Switzerland
  • Rory will continue publicizing his observations, trials, adventures and misfortunes in the upcoming “Rory Dylan Stephen: Beyond Puppydom”
  • A full theatrical release “From Hostage to Hero” based on his first set of memoirs “Lost in Puppydom” is being finalized produced and starring Nicole Kidman, Kelly Riptide and Argentinian actor Rodrigo Noya
  • The Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Ottawa has announced an upcoming tour of China with Rory to be called the Canada China Friendship Tour in an effort to “encourage eternal friendship between the citizens of Canada and China”. A media event has been scheduled on October 6th and the Chinese Embassy to provide details of the tour at that date
  • Amy Pickenbobber Enterprises in Guelph, Ontario has announced production of Rory dolls and coffee mugs
  • A new dog walking park called “Rory Brave One” will be opened in Singapore on 16October2026
  • A new tour of the Eastern and Oriental Express will be operational in 2027 recreating the mayhem and murders witnessed by Rory on his last ride there. “Train Murder in Malaysia” is the name of the tour and will feature actors and Raffles a bestie Westie friend of Rory.

We were unable to see Rory as he was undergoing a therapy grooming.