The subtle influences of alcohol, and Rushdie

It's funny, sometimes, the random, bizarre and yet ultimately trivial and pointless twists that life takes.

On Tuesday night, having completed my final exam, and hence being able officially to bestow upon myself the meritorious title of a 3rd-year-in-waiting, it was obviously a night to remember. Or forget, as it in fact turned out. However, one thing that was memorable was heading from the pub to the apartment of a bunch of international Macquarie uni students, due to my taking a great liking to one British chap called Fish because he hailed from a place less than 100 km away from Elland Road football ground, as well as my 'follicle fraternity' (not that I could pronounce that many syllables at the time) with an American guy named Clarke. Well, intricate details are easily forgotten when one has imbibed that much ancient hop-grain juice (That one's for you, Jez), but it was rather amusing this evening upon finishing three hours' slaving over a greasy grill that on the south side of the QVB whilst waiting for my bus I should run into none other than Mr. Fish, my friend from Elland Road. Or nowhere near but of course nearer than I've ever been.

It is in fact the first time to date that I have managed to cross paths for a subsequent time with a person to whom I have never shared anything except too much to drink. This is something of which I have previously been most grateful, as anyone will be aware who has heard me talk of my experiences crashing in the garage with Kieran the Blackthrone fan and Curly the 22-year-old-Lebanese-guy-who-was-dating-a-14-year-old girl. But in the case of Fish it wasn't all that awkward and he seemed a fairly amiable guy even without the aid of nine or so beers and a whole lot of goon. We managed to have an entirely sober chat about working in McDonald's, his planned road trip around Australia, and the amount of head we like. (Initially this was referring to the top of a glass of beer, although I'm sure by the end one or both of us was insinuating something in a really subtle, mature and not-completely-and-utterly-obvious-pun way).

Anyway, subsequent to this little adventure, I boarded a bus home and flipped out my current perusing fodder, Grimus by none other than of course the greatest living writer Mr. Rushdie, pictured a few posts below this one. Now it was only yesterday that I finished reading my fourth of his books, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. For those of you unfamiliar with this latter, it's essentially India's premiere novellist writing a work aimed primarily at preteens, and at times it's like reading Dr. Seuss's appropriation of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. Now I'm sure that comes across as an insult but it was both a smashing good read and a very quick, easily-achieved read. The trouble is of course that now getting back into complicated, erudite-to-the-brink-of-utter-pomposity Rushdie is about as easy as reciting Hamlet's soliloquy but simultaneously translating it into modern Khmer. We are talking about a writer who, in the space of less than four pages of text, uses all of the following words/phrases: "momentarily tautologous", "foray into necrology", "elucidate", and "disinvestiture". Now obviously this is not a difficult task in itself. In fact one could, and I often do, make the observation that somehow my own writing style manages to unintentionally resemble Rushdie's in a number of different ways, the most notable of all being the fact that we both like to use intimidatingly polysyllabic words just for the sake of using intimidatingly polysyllabic words, of which the phrase "intimidatingly polysyllabic" is a prime, obvious and very deliberately used example. I'm not trying to point this out, although I have done on many other occasions, in order to draw a delusional comparison-of-grandeur between me and the greatest living novellist, but rather to reflect upon my own amazement at how much my naturally-developed writing style could have been directly influenced by his, even though it wasn't. (I draw your attention, for a prime example, to p. 38 of Grimus, where Virgil Beauvoir Chanakya Jones esquire [which, as a sidetrack, is another amusing pretension-in-common] utters the phrase "the efficiency of my trousers is somewhat impaired")

It also makes me think about 1st-year English, when we read Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and I remember her categorical denial that her writing was in anyway influenced by Rushdie, despite her neologisms & use of hyphenated-verb-synonyms, subtle underlying Indian politics and the fact that in her novel, two siblings lose their virginity to each other, which also happens in the first few pages of Grimus. (as just a few examples)

But yes, yet again I have created on my blog a rant with very little substance, or discernible beginnings or ends, and so of course there would in fact, never be a really suitable or fitting way to end it, and so instead