Essentialization - Christopher Hitchens Example

[Philip Coates]

Here's a good example of when less is more. These brief, very essentialized answers assume a certain level of intelligence on the part of the reader. One doesn't have to agree with Christopher Hitchens' positions to appreciate and try to emulate clear, terse writing. -->

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06fob-q4-t.html?ref=magazine

Questions for Christopher Hitchens

The Contrarian

By DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: May 31, 2010

Q: As a British-American critic, essayist and all-purpose iconoclast, you are known as one of the defining voices of the new atheism. But your just-published memoir, “Hitch-22,” is in fact an exercise in worship — male hero worship. Is it fair to say that you look upon the British novelist Martin Amis as the Messiah?

A: No, to the contrary. That’s exactly what would make us both throw up. Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

Q: Yet you seem to put unshakable faith in your guy friends, including Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton, who receive chapters of their own, while your two wives and three children are almost completely ignored.

A: The book is a memoir. It’s not an autobiography.

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Q: You’re a Washington-based polemicist who has written in support of the Iraq war but who was previously a self-described socialist with a column in The Nation. Why do you see yourself as consistent?

A: I still think like a Marxist in many ways. I think the materialist conception of history is valid. I consider myself a very conservative Marxist.

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Q: The most memorable person in your new book is probably your mother, Yvonne, a British milliner whose Jewish identity remained a secret even to her husband until after her death. Why do you think she raised you as a churchgoing Christian?

A: My mother had resolved to shelter my brother and me from being given a hard time when we were growing up.

Q: What does that say about England?

A: Nothing too terrible, in my opinion. In Britain, it’s not too terrible to be Jewish. British society has been enormously more hospitable than Russia, Germany, Poland or France.

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Q: Menopause is hardly an explanation for suicide. Do you think your mother’s discomfort with religion pushed you either consciously or not to become a champion of atheism?

A: There is absolutely no traceable connection between Yvonne’s Jewishness and my early and continuing failure to be able to regard other primates as divine or as mammalian messengers of the divine will. The failure is innate in me.

,,,,,,

Notice how much more Hitchens could have said in each answer, yet these answers are enough. They give you a good thumbnail picture of where CH stands on the intellectual spectrum. And no answer to a question leaves anything necessary unsaid.

Edited June 3, 2010 by Philip Coates

[9thdoctor]

I’m working through Hitchens’ new memoir, it’s very entertaining, here’s a few random items of interest.

He recalls a conversation with Salman Rushdie when the latter suggested alternate titles for Shakespeare plays, if Robert Ludlum had written them:

The Elsinore Vacillation

The Dunsinane Reforestation

The Kerchief Implication

The Rialto Sanction

Double checking the spelling of Dunsinane on Google I find that this material is recycled. Well, it was new to me, and I laughed out loud. He also includes the list of books a soldier (Mark Daily) who died in Iraq had taken with him, having volunteered after reading Hitchens. Among the books was Atlas Shrugged, to which Hitchens appends the comment, “well, nobody’s perfect”. I recall reading this in an article by him a few years ago.

In another more oblique Rand connection, Hitchens tells the story of his tracking down of his maternal Jewish roots. His earliest relative on that side was named Nathan Blumenthal, born in 1844 in Poland. A rather funny coincidence.

Here’s a good paragraph from the chapter on Iraq that jumped out at me.

“…I was most of all impressed by how accurately he quoted me, and how gently he delivered his reproofs. I had become too accustomed to the pseudo-Left new style, whereby if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he’d isolated the only real one. This vulgar method, which is now the norm and the standard in much non-left journalism as well, is designed to have the effect of making any noisy moron into a master analyst. ”

One last thing, he confirms Bill Clinton’s claim to having not inhaled. Cookies and brownies were the future president’s preferred methods of THC intake in his Oxford years. Thus writes Hitch the snitch.

[Philip Coates]

> The Elsinore Vacillation

The Dunsinane Reforestation

The Kerchief Implication

The Rialto Sanction

Ok, the first one is Hamlet, the second in Macbeth, the fourth is Merchant of Venice, but I can't figure out the third.

I have some more:

The Road to Crispin

The March Countdown

The Arden Mosaic

The Forestry Illusion

The Acrimonious Progression

Edited June 3, 2010 by Philip Coates

[9thdoctor]

> The Elsinore Vacillation

The Dunsinane Reforestation

The Kerchief Implication

The Rialto Sanction

Ok, the first one is Hamlet, the second in Macbeth, the fourth is Merchant of Venice, but I can't figure out the third.

[Philip Coates]

Ah! It's been fifteen-plus years since I read Othello. I forgot the handkerchief.

What about my five puzzles? (Not important, but in each case I took an actual Ludlum title and changed a word to make bobby into willy.)

Edited June 3, 2010 by Philip Coates

[syrakusos]

Of course, I am disappointed that Hitchens is not one of us. I watched one of his debates with Dinesh D'souza pon YouTube and I had to give D'Souza the win, sad to say. Even so, I was impressed with Hitchens' ability to drink his way to brilliance. Regarding the quote below, I have above my desk, this from Alberto Santos-Dumont: "The most rational consecration of such an effort is found in a serious money prize."

Did you write the book for money?

Of course, I do everything for money. Dr. Johnson is correct when he says that only a fool writes for anything but money. It would be useful to keep a diary, but I don’t like writing unpaid. I don’t like writing checks without getting paid.

I trust you answer the e-mail of your friends at no charge.

I haven’t got to the point yet where phone calls and e-mails are billable, but I am working on it. That would be happiness defined for me. What I’m hoping is to get a 900 number, so I can tell all my friends, “Call me back on my 900 number: 1-900-HITCH22.” I can talk for a long time.

[9thdoctor]

The Road to Crispin

The March Countdown

The Arden Mosaic

The Forestry Illusion

The Acrimonious Progression

Henry V

Julius Caesar

Don't know

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Don't know, maybe Titus Andronicus

[Philip Coates]

As You Like It & Romeo and Juliet

[9thdoctor]

I watched one of his debates with Dinesh D'souza pon YouTube and I had to give D'Souza the win, sad to say.

I’ve seen one or two of those debates, and couldn’t disagree more. D’Souza can keep his composure despite being rhetorically cut to pieces, that’s about all he’s got going for him.

Here’s a few more excerpts from the book, I think they give a good idea of its tenor. There’s a lot of name dropping, a healthy dose of thoughtful reflection, witty turns of phrase, and plenty of downright bawdy bits. He discloses a lot about his relationships with men, and hardly talks about his wives and children at all; you’d think he was trying to come out of the closet, in spite of his explicit denial of being gay or even bisexual.

His authority with the hyperbolic metaphor is, I think, unchallenged. Arnold Schwarzenegger resembled “a brown condom full of walnuts.” Of an encounter with some bore with famous halitosis Clive [James] once announced, “By this time his breath was undoing my tie.” I well remember the day in 1978 when he delivered his review of a biography of Leonid Brezhnev to the New Statesman and Martin read its opening paragraphs out loud: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” One could hear his twanging marsupial tones in his scorn for this world-class drone and bully.

...

…Margaret Thatcher and I were face-to-face.

Within moments, too, I had turned away and was showing her my buttocks. I suppose that I must give some sort of explanation for this. Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it happened) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. “No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words “Naughty boy!”

...

Through Tom I was eventually to meet Gore Vidal, and also to learn how when in Rome the two of them would hunt together and organize a proper division of labor. Rugged young men recruited from the Via Veneto would be taken from the rear by Gore and then thrust with any luck, semi-erect, into the next door room, where Tom would suck them dry. It shows what few people understand even now, which is the variety of homosexual conduct. “I do not want a penis anywhere near me”, as Gore would put it in that terse and memorable way he once had. Incidentally this double act also emphasized another distinction: Tom adored to give pleasure while Gore has always liked to boast that he’s never knowingly or intentionally gratified any of his partners. Not even a sighing reach around by the sound of it.

[9thdoctor]

Here's an interesting clip, a smoking gun perhaps, from when he was still a socialist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2jJN7oHifA

There's a part in the (new) book where he praises the British National Health Service, so I don't think he's come around to libertarianism even as of this date.

[9thdoctor]

I met Christopher Hitchens this evening at a book signing event in Miami. The format was an interview of him by humorist Dave Barry, followed by audience questions, then everyone queues up for sigining. There was 300-400 people there I think, maybe more. Someone (not I) asked him about Ayn Rand, particularly related to the Mark Daily case mentioned above in an earlier post. The questioner was clearly a Rand fan, though he pronounced her first name as Ann. Anyway, I whipped out the Iphone and started recording, here’s the relevant part of his answer:

And yes, I discuss the contents of his book bag, the books he took Thomas Paine, he took George Orwell, and he took Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged

, and I say, well nobody’s perfect. [Audience laughter]. I find her essays quite interesting, there’s a particularly good one called, um, Requiem for Man, which is an attack on the pope which she wrote in the 1960’s. Some of the other essays that she wrote with Alan Greenspan in

The Virtue of Selfishness

have a certain cogency. I would say the novels are a lot harder to read than they must have been to write. [Audience laughter] I would say it’s typing not writing. And I do slightly agree with William Buckley that in today’s world the position of recommender of more selfishness is one that needn’t be that sort of hotly combated for. Most people come to that conclusion on their own. So reinforcing people’s existing primate prejudices may not be what one needs.

When it was my turn to talk to him one on one I asked him about his reported one time phone call from Thomas Pynchon, but he didn’t have anything to add beyond what’s in his new book. I had him sign a copy of Unacknowledged Legislation, which carries a back cover blurb from Gore Vidal, the same blurb that appears on his new book, except now it’s crossed out with No! and his initials next to the strikethrough. I asked him to go ahead and deface my copy of this older book in the same way. He said I was the first person who’d asked him to do that, and he seemed to really like the idea. The blurb reads: ‘I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin of delfino, I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens’ Gore Vidal

[dan2100]

As You Like It & Romeo and Juliet

Side comment on Romeo and Juliet: Has anyone read or considered Tony Tonner's view of this play as a comedy?

[9thdoctor]

Side comment on Romeo and Juliet: Has anyone read or considered Tony Tonner's view of this play as a comedy?

Never heard of him. Is anything available online? Can you share more of the thesis? Sure, there are some laughs in the play, but this sounds nutty.

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

[dan2100]

Side comment on Romeo and Juliet: Has anyone read or considered Tony Tonner's view of this play as a comedy?

Never heard of him. Is anything available online? Can you share more of the thesis? Sure, there are some laughs in the play, but this sounds nutty.

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

A friend of mine read it in a collection of his [Tonner's] prefaces to the plays. This was a hardcopy -- not an online one. His basic argument, if my memory's correct and my friend related it accurately, is something along the lines of had Juliet awoken when Romeo arrived, they would have lived happily ever after. In other words, it's only the ending that makes it a tragedy. (This doesn't explain the deaths of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Count Paris, but I bet Tonner has something cogent to say about this -- as it seems like such an obvious problem for viewing this play as a comedy. Of course, Shakespeare's comedies aren't exactly free of killings. Think of Measure for Measure.)

[Brant Gaede]

Side comment on Romeo and Juliet: Has anyone read or considered Tony Tonner's view of this play as a comedy?

Never heard of him. Is anything available online? Can you share more of the thesis? Sure, there are some laughs in the play, but this sounds nutty.

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...

Who's laughing?

--Brant

[9thdoctor]

Who's laughing?

The audience hopefully, some of the dialogue about Rosaline, Romeo’s prior flame, some of the taunts between the henchmen such as Mercutio and Tybalt leading up to the fights…I can’t think of quotes of the top of my head. I think Hamlet has more laughs, but R&J isn’t devoid of them.

it's only the ending that makes it a tragedy.

This calls to mind the similarity between Othello and Much Ado About Nothing, particularly the Hero/Claudio relationship. I suppose the same case could be made there, but the one’s clearly a tragedy and the other clearly a comedy. I’m sure there are plenty of other examples of plot structures and/or character arcs common to both the comedies and the tragedies. There’s not much more to say on this, so here’s a couple Rowan Atkinson clips to inaugurate my avatar change.

[9thdoctor]

Hitchens has a new piece on his cancer treatment, naturally it’s a downer, but still a good read. For those who don’t read him regularly, here’s a link to his weekly Slate columns, the latest one on Hugo Chavez is particularly recommended.

[9thdoctor]

Here's some more of the same, but definitely worth watching.