"its great thingy grasp"

Thanks for visiting! I'll be on tour in New York with the New World Symphony until Thursday, when I'll have lots more to write. In the meantime, here's a passage I just read from a Salman Rushdie story, "The Firebird's Nest". It's collected in the anthology "Telling Tales" - you can find a link to that book over on the sidebar.

She cannot stop thinking of 'home': its nocturnal sirens, its cooling machinery. Its reification of the real. Amid that surplus of structures. of content, it is not easy for the phantasmagoric to gain the upper hand. Our entertainment is full of monsters, of the fabulous, because outside the darkened cinemas, beyond the pages of the books, away from the gothic decibels of the music, the quotidian is inescapable, omnipotent. We dream of other dimensions, of paranoid subtexts, of underworlds, because when we awake the actual holds us in its great thingy grasp and we cannot see beyond the material, the event horizon. Whereas here, caught in the empty bubbling of dry air, afraid of roaches, all your frontiers may crumble; are crumbling. The possibility of the terrible is renewed.

- Salman Rushdie, "The Firebird's Nest"