The blood jet is poetry, but if there's stoppage?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Salman Rushdie at a social event. He was looking well. And while I was filled with relief and felt uplifted on seeing the images, it was a severe jolt to see again his customised spectacles, one dark lens covering the eye he had lost in the brutal stabbing at a public event in upstate New York in August 2022.

Earlier this year, shortly before the publication of his magnificent new novel, Victory City, Rushdie spoke to David Remnick of the New Yorker (bit.ly/3K41dTH) — his first interview since the attack — about how the stabbing has irrevocably changed his life. Looking at the pictures last week, I was reminded of Rushdie talking in that interview about how hard he finds it to type these days, and how sensation in his hand, which suffered knife wounds, has not yet returned. He talked about how difficult it is to read after being blinded in one eye.

He now usually reads, he said, on an iPad so that he can adjust the light and the font size. It was heartbreaking. Later in the week, I watched Hanif Kureishi in a Channel 4 interview (bit.ly/44S84Yi), his first since a debilitating fall in Rome last Christmas that has left him almost disabled.

Kureishi has been detailing his condition ever since on social media and other online platforms. He can neither hold a pen nor type. So he dictates and his partner, or one of his sons, types these trenchant postcards from the frontline of a disaster zone.