RIP, Christopher Hitchens

[Hammer of Los]

This reminds me of something Alan Garner once said in an interview. He was asked why he had left Oxford a year early without a degree, despite having been an exceptionally gifted student who had originally aspired to become Professor of Greek:

"I didn't want to spend all my days being witty and cruel."

Decades earlier, D.H. Lawrence and Wittgenstein had also been repelled by the intellectual-social style of Oxford. It's hard to imagine three more different people, but it's not hard to see what they have in common: a deep aversion to superficial smartness, to male ego, to blank will and to an ingrained feeling of entitlement; and also, not unrelatedly, a stubborn sense of what has to be called the religious, or at least the numinous.

Wow Mac. That's great. I so love Alan Garner*, you know. The whole interview was a treat. Thanks a million, Mac!

I liked the voice thing too! I love to rumble and hum and sing in my gravelly bass voice, coming from deep in my diaphragm.

I think I'm off topic now, but I don't have anything more to say about Hitchens. Someone should start a thread on Alan Garner, who I believe is still alive, now 77 years old: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Garner




ps Hey Mac, I hope you enjoyed your salmon.

* And I learnt a great deal from Wittgenstein. D H Lawrence, not so much.

[Laodicean]

[bks]

I only wish that Edward Said had outlived the backstabbing, blood-soaked, butterfly-turned-slug. Hitchens didn't deserve the last word on him.

[lupercal]

Two points about Hitchens: one is that I don't think he pulled that much of a 180, as he was pretty establishment even in his Nation days, and when you get down to it, Nation and Vanity Fair aren't all that far apart politically. So I don't fault him for moving on like any other media apparatchik.

Secondly I have more respect for an openly bellicose culture warrior like Hitchens than his erstwhile Nation pal Alex Cockburn, who as proprietor of the sheep-dipped CounterPuke makes me want to do just that. Maybe they both got tired of being harassed, or maybe they were spooks all along, but Cockburn and fellow sneaky left gatekeepers like Joshua Holland and others I won't name are more disgusting than Hitchens ever was, at least IMHO.