Final post from Hitches Arguably! Starting on a new book on Monday....

“Prisoner of Shelves”

An excellent (though very light) way to end the collection. Hitchens laments about how “bibliomania cripples my…life”. In his last paragraph he writes, “Some kind friends argue for a cull, to create more space and to provide an incentive to organize. All right, but I can’t throw out a book that has been with me for any length of time and thus acquired sentimental value, or that has been written by a friend, or that has been signed or inscribed by its author. I also can’t part with one that might conceivably come in handy as a work of reference, however obscure.” I know how he feels.

Hitchens with his books:

 

This essay has his best quote (should have been the tile to the collection), “But the thing is, you never know.” 

New learning: Bruce Chatwin has a novel titled Utz, …just like the potato chip company!...as the novel takes place in cold war Czechoslovakia, I don’t think there’s any relation.

New word: Porzellankrankheit = mania for porcelain acquisition

Penultimate Hitchens blog entry...

“Avery, Very Dirty Word”

Hitchens starts with an anecdote:

On the eve of independence for the colony of South Yemen, the last British governor hosted a dinner party attended by Denis Healey, then the minister for defense. Over the final sundown cocktail, as the flag was about to be lowered over the capital of Aden, the governor turned to Healey and said, “You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things.” What, Healey was interested to know, were these imperishable aspects? “The game of soccer. And the expression ‘fuck off.’ ” 

Hitchens then seems to go on and try to make the case that the English phrase, “fuck off,” is a much more multifarious term than the American phrase, “Fuck You” or “Fuck off.” That’s all I have to say about that.

New learning: “[VP] Cheney…recommend that Senator Patrick Leahy go and attempt an anatomical impossibility. The latter advice received the signal honor of being printed in full, without asterisks, in the Washington Post, thus provoking some ombudsmanlike soul-searching on its own account by the paper’s editor…”

New word: effendi = Arabic for lord or master, you may recall this from the movie Lawrence of Arabia.

After a few days off for the Holiday and traveling...

“Suck It Up”

Hitchens was evidently “disgusted” by the response to the Virginia Tech shooting. Here are few excerpts:

Those who died…were not martyrs…

…the exhausting national sob fest…

For an academic president to have equated thirty-two of his fellow humans with their murderer in an orgy of “one-ness” was probably the stupidest thing that happened last week, but not by a very wide margin. 

Almost everybody in the country seems to have taken this non-event as permission to talk the starkest nonsense.

I watched disgustedly as the president of the United States declined to give his speech to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner…

…everyone united in mawkishness and sloppiness and false sentiment. 

What,,,is the dismal rush to lower the national colors all the damned time?

…the signs of sickness and foolishness were incipient…

…Billy Graham’s disgusting sermon at the National Cathedral 

Wow.

To Hitchens’ credit, Billy Graham is prone to disgusting sermons:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k_n-q_0qej4

New Learning: The phrase “no man is an island” is not from Ernest Hemmingway, but from John Donne’s Devotions. Also where the source of the title of the book, For Whom The Bell Tolls:

No man is an Island, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

New Word: lachrymose = tearful or given to weeping

“The You Decade”

Hitchens’ rant about the use of the term “You” in advertising. Unclear why he thought it was important to get these thoughts on paper in the April 9, 2007 issue of slate. One example:

I have just been sent a link to an Internet site that shows me delivering a speech some years ago. This is my quite unsolicited introduction to the now-inescapable phenomenon of YouTube. It comes with another link, enabling me to see other movies of myself all over the place. What’s “You” about this? It’s a MeTube, for me. And I can only suppose that, for my friends and foes alike, it’s a HimTube…

Or, even more ridiculous:

It reminds me of the exasperation I

used to feel, years ago, when one could be accused of regarding others as “sex objects.” Well, one can only really be a proper “subject” to oneself. A sentence that begins with I will be highly solipsistic if it ends only with me, and if the subject is sexual, then the object of the sentence will be an object. Would people rather be called “sex subjects”? (A good question for another time, perhaps.) Or “sex predicates”? Let us not go there.

“Let’s not go there”…and yet he does. Maybe a good idea here if it was re-written by, say, Dennis Leary of Bill Maher.

New Learning: That an editor could let this sentence into a piece in his publication, “Perhaps global-scale problems and mass-society populism somehow necessitate this unctuous appeal to the utter specialness of the supposed individual.”

WTF?

New Word: solipsistic = the theory that the self is all that can be known to exist (I think I had this as a new word in a previous post as well so, I guess, it’s an old new word).

Great Hitchens YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkU3a2eor3U

“The Other L-Word”

Hitchens’ attack on the modern usage of “you know”, “like” and “OK” as well as the emergence of “up speak” (raising the tone of the end of all sentences as if they were, like, questions, you know? He writes, “Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‘like’ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that..the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary like candy expels vegetable.” How does candy expel vegetables? …correct use of “like” but a terrible simile.

New Learning: “…CAROLINE KENNEDY managed to say ‘you know’ more than 200 times in an interview with the New York Daily News, and on 130 occasions while talking to the New York Times...” while being interviewed about a possible appointment to fill her uncles Senate seat.

New Word: déclassé = French for fallen in social stature.

Here is the audio of Caroline Kennedy talkting to the NYTs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/nyregion/28kennedy.html?_r=0