Word is shooting around online at top speed.
Confirmation via Vanity Fair Twitter.
man for some reason I thought this was gonna be like steve jobs and he was gonna be around for a long time
rip
scorpions
a fine lush and sometimes good writer rip
Oh damn. I mean not a suprise I suppose but still wasnt expecting it :(
aaaand i think its just killed their website :/
having dug up some samples of misogyny and war mongering not sure what piece to post to demonstrate his expertise at character assassination since theres like all of them to choose from
journalists are being v strange on twitter, excellent unfollow opportunity
That’s because a lot of them wish they were as famous as he and had as much to drink as well.
true
RIP.
Was going to ask if he was the most famous person to be openly alcoholic, but presumably there are a load of musicians.
he had good zings
I liked his mother theresa book
I really admired some of his death penalty articles.
do not link to national post
he had good zings
― Matt Armstrong, Friday, 16 December 2011 02:31 (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
oh damn why couldn’t it have been peter?
like most writers who say what needs to be said he said a bunch of stuff that didn’t need to be said but it came with the territory. sleep well you brilliant, angry shit-stirrer.
^^ i f/w with this epitath
^Thirded. RIP Hitch :‘(
RIP and ty
never met hitch but we both wrote for the same ny tabloid for awhile in the late 80s. not trying to exalt myself rather i’d like to claim him as mentor of sorts, his weekly book review column became a touchstone for me. an instructive example of how much can be accomplished in just 500 or 750 words. quite a bit, in his case.
One of those writers who were part of the environment – I took him for granted. An incalculable influence on my thinking and writing over the years. I saw no reason to take it personally when we disagreed more often than not the last ten years.
for those keeping track, below the fold
I’d asked him last year to write a letter to the Immigration Services sponsoring me to finally become a permanent resident of the United States. Who better than my fellow Englishman immigrant of the last twenty-five years? A while later, he emailed:
“Safely in the US mail. I managed to say that your faith had allowed you to extend a warm hand to so many of your fellow men, and then remolded that bit to make it sound a touch less close to the heart’s desire.
Brunch? Sunday? Smooch Hitch”
I responded,
“lol. many many many thanks. an honor. brunch sounds great. we tend not to be conscious till around noon, tho. xx a”
He replied:
“Dearest Andrew I always think of Sunday lunch as beginning at about 2.30 (”a lavish and ruminative feast“, as Waugh says about elevenses). Want to come here?”
Yes, I do, Hitch. Yes, I do.
That “lol” must have advanced the crawl of Hitch’s cancer.
Yeah the difference in casual email tone does say it all.
Frum:
A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.
“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club. No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”
Also from that:
On one of the last occasions I saw him, my wife and I came to drop some food–lamb tagine–to sustain a family with more on its mind than cooking. Christopher, though weary and sick, insisted on painfully lifting himself from his chair to perform the rites of hospitality. He might have cancer, but we were still guests–and as guests, we must have champagne.
Hell the whole piece is one anecdote after another. I’ll stop with this one:
Hitchens was not one of those romantics who fetishized “dialogue.” Far from suffering fools gladly, he delighted in making fools suffer. When he heard that another friend, a professor, had a habit of seducing female students in his writing seminars, he shook his head pityingly. “It’s not worth it. Afterward, you have to read their short stories.”
That Frum obit is the best I’ve read so far.
Yeah, just finished it. Definitely the keeper at this point.
really really sad news.
I remember when this appearance inspired a lot of friends who’d never read him to give him a look:
rip. dude was a fucking gangsta
by which i mean with hitch basically goes the entire tradition of public intellectualism
how come DOOM or Ghostface never asked him to appear on a record
Perrin knew him quite well in the late ’80s and ’90s — he was his “hero” at the time — and the last 3/4 of this piece is pretty amusing:
http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/10/our-reflection-darkly.html
obv I loved his work for the Voice and the Nation before he lost his marbles. And I hope God is merciful to him.
And I hope God is merciful to him.
eh, fuck that. RIP, in the ground.
Perrin’s Hitchens obit... from 2003:
http://www.citypages.com/2003-07-09/news/obit-for-a-former-contrarian/
The man was so prolific that you can, if you wish, ignore the polemics and concentrate on the essays on literature. Unacknowledged Legislation is his best collection.
Perrin knew him quite well in the late ’80s and ’90s — he was his “hero” at the time — and the last 3/4 of this piece is pretty amusing:
http://redstateson.blogspot.com/2006/10/our-reflection-darkly.html
don’t think this piece answers the ¿Quien es mas Macho? question quite as Perrin intended
i think this is certainly a huge blow to the kind of foreign affairs intellectualism that Hitchens championed. he really made the most eloquent arguments for what could broadly be called a sort of post-neoconservatisim (lol), amid a larger group of polemicists who were neither as smart, ethical or interesting as him. thinking that i would never read another new piece by him again i felt so saddened and gripped by a great sense of loss.
I rather see what machismo is in Perrin (and he certainly cops to some, in a post-bullied Irish kid way) being rather more self-aware. xp
Hard to believe CH was so right-on as little as 12 years ago in analyzing what a horrible piece of shit Bill Clinton is.
he thought p much everyone was a horrible piece of shit tho
no, just most Important People
lol no
he thought p much everyone was a horrible piece of shit tho
― Cooper Chucklebutt, Friday, December 16, 2011 10:16 AM (9 minutes ago)
If you read any of the personal remininiscences posted and linked above, you’ll see that isn’t so.
I’d wager that we’ll be reading Hitchens on Byron, Powell, Waugh, Kipling, Wilde, Daniel Deronda, to choose a few, long after the political essays have gone on the shelf.
RIP HITCHENS you weren’t afraid to TELL THE TRUTH about ANYTHING. A true hero!
I only know of this guy as a nü-atheist with a penchant for annoying people even more than Dawkins does. Have never “read him” so I guess my conception is off.
xp kinda insane to tell an atheist to RIP also
lol billy
Amazing about Hitchens: his generosity to young people. He sought them out and befriended them. He responded when they called with requests to speak at their college, contribute to a symposium, or stand with any oppressed minority. He hated to say no to anything worthwhile, and cared less about getting paid than anyone I’ve ever known. After doing unaccountable favors for unimportant people, he named them comrades, which meant welcoming them into his circle of solidarity and acting as if they belonged in his home, with cocktails.
His atheism, which he always seemed to think was very important, always seemed like the least interesting about him. I read ‘God is Not Great’ and enjoyed it (and it even gave me some of the language I needed at the time to sort through my own feelings about religion) but it was so much of a lesser work than his other writings. Just fundamentally shallow + sad.
dude was funny, but I didn’t agree with him much. rhetorical skills were first-rate.
uncountable favors for the unimportant graduates of elite universities
he got college kids drunk—awesome!
“my first sanctimonious opinion” for kids to young to have lived through bill hicks
RIP, Opinionator.
BigBossOgg : 12/16/11 11:10
Yes, he is certainly in for a surprise, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it glorious.
In fact, I am betting my immortal soul on the probability that he’s begging for a chance for just one moment, to warn his brother, warn his friends back here in the realm of the living, of the horrors awaiting non-believers.
Spending eternity in heaven with someone called BigBossOgg sounds like hell to me, so.
c’mon, you could spend all of eternity chasing those goldurned Duke boys thru the swamp
till they crossed county lines
which is apparently some sort of force field
The glee among believers in eternal damnation was utterly predictable here. Now they get to let their imaginations run wild devising gory punishments for Hitchens, for daring to question what they imagine to be true.
foster the sheeple
lol
c’mon, you could spend all of eternity chasing those goldurned Duke boys thru the swamp
― OH NOES, Friday, December 16, 2011 12:45 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
i believe you mean the uke boys
hahah I did almost write that
Well I wondered what the other Hitchens was going to say:
ding dong the hitch is dead
A letter from Sully’s blog:
I’ve been reading and enjoying your work for years, but I’ve never felt compelled to write until now. I know you’ll get a million of these, but here’s my Hitch story:
I once went to hear Hitchens speak in San Francisco. Afterward, he was signing books. I was broke and didn’t have enough money for a book, but I got in line just to thank him for his articles denouncing Kissinger, which meant a lot to me and my parents, who were both deeply affected by the Vietnam War. I told him all this. He listened—he seemed as good at listening as speaking—and he asked me all kinds of questions. We talked for a bit, and finally he asked if he could sign something. I told him I didn’t have enough money for a book. Without hesitating, he pulled one off the pile, asked for my parents’ names, and inscribed the book to them. One of the best moments of my life. I loved the man. He’s left the world to a bunch of fucking lightweights, but we have to try our best.
Similar to my experience.
One of the best moments of my life.
:( :( :(
Yeah, why couldn’t that person have had a better life.
seriously
must be all the fucking lightweights
Looking back, I realize now I should have fucked more lightweights.
Perrin has a new piece up:
http://dennisperrin.blogspot.com/2011/12/letter-to-lost-friend.html
We then went to HBO Studios where you were to debate John Podhoretz on Comedy Central. It was a live show. You said “fuck” several times. Moderator Al Franken told you to stop. You replied, “I thought I was allowed to say whatever the fuck I wanted!” The segment ended early.
lol ned p sure perrin is just some guy morbs made up
We are all Dennis Perrin.
its full of stars
I’m not DP but we have the same initials
hitch taught us how politics could be rocknroll
who will teach us how politics can be rickroll
Obama
“Never Gonna Lock You Up”
i remember one july afternoon at a convention center in san antonio the louche figure of hitch was draped over a sedan wth two vassar girls, smoking rollups and downing a magnum of pol roger
a hieratic silence prevailed
‘never let the islamo-nazis win’, he intoned to the assembled press corps
everyone cheered
hitch was inspirational like that
A. Cockburn:
I never thought of him as at all radical. He craved to be an insider, a trait which achieved ripest expression when he elected to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen by Bush’s director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff. In basic philosophical take he always seemed to me to hold as his central premise a profound belief in the therapeutic properties of capitalism and empire. He was an instinctive flagwagger and remained so. He wrote some really awful stuff in the early 90s about how indigenous peoples — Indians in the Americas — were inevitably going to be rolled over by the wheels of Progress and should not be mourned.
...between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa. Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity.
Eh, fuck Mother Teresa.
ew
Hic-chens certainly did his part to make atheism the New Obnoxious Religion.
i can understand complaining abt having other peoples trip shoved down yr throat, particularly at the institutional level, but getting all excited over not believing in something is just kinda silly
its like you have as much attachment to this shit as the believers
also would be a good look for secular humanism to admit that mostly their core ideals first appeared in the historical record via religion, and that the situation is a lil more complex than lol spagetti monster
cooper chucklebutt is a brave new voice for the nu-sandbox era
u r
no i mean u r (otm itt)
he was also a misogynist
not sure I’ve seen the evidence to back this one up? (unless it’s the “why women aren’t funny” thing which, despite the headline, I don’t think qualifies.)
it totally qualifies!
but theres lots of thinking like this http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/05/12/but-if-youre-wearing-a-veil-how-will-i-know-that-youre-smiling-baby
i mean its not like his primary offense against humanity, more of a symptom of his generally incredibly entitled attitude, but still worth noting
Hitchens was obviously more urbane and well-written than the average neocon faux-warrior, but he was also often more vindictive and barbaric about his war cheerleading. One of the only writers with the courage to provide the full picture of Hitchens upon his death was Gawker‘s John Cook, who — in an extremely well-written and poignant obituary – detailed Hitchens’ vehement, unapologetic passion for the attack on Iraq and his dismissive indifference to the mass human suffering it caused, accompanied by petty contempt for those who objected (he denounced the Dixie Chicks as being “sluts” and “fucking fat slags” for the crime of mildly disparaging the Commander-in-Chief).
xxp There’s the ‘calling the Dixie Chicks “fat fucking slags” and “sluts” thing’ too.
Christopher Hitchens pointed out in this article in Vanity Fair, the only funny women around are “hefty, dykey, or Jewish”
yeah, “why women aren’t funny” qualifies, come the fuck on
maybe he’ll spend the afterlife w/ Sophie Tucker & Gertrude Stein
xp
i think jho’s right that his sexist and racist stuff stems mostly from how hilariously “provocative” he thought it was to throw his entitlement in his reader’s faces, but it’s not my job to psychoanalyze him. the stuff he said was still sexist and racist.
think it’s fair to assume he had some shitty ideas about gender
tho, psychoanaytically one might read his provocation as overdetermination
haha, no doubt
The quote that’s stood out for me most in the last few days of feasting: “The only known cure for poverty... is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
Is there any precedent for this?
that’s a pretty orthodox economic/utilitarian argument for contraception in the third world
been thinking abt this guy obvs and just to somewhat summarize my thoughts: clearly a v skilled writer tho imo not as great as most seem to think, the main flaw is in his tone which is just incredibly pompous, its good for zings but def limits his range of expression, hes generally just pugilistic, more interested in destroying his adversaries than an honest exchange of ideas, i think this stems from the fact that his thinking his really not v sophisticated, like its below ilx mean understanding of the world, so his agression is a defensive measure, if you bully people theyll find it harder to engage w/yr actual ideas, this imho rules him out as an irl public intellectual, our world is already full of that sort of behavior, its p unremarkable and doesnt really advance anything useful or otherwise particularly
feel like a lot of his fame is due to the fact that hes a top level hard drinking iconoclastic journalist, like readers dont really make you famous, editors do, they dole out the jobs, and it helps if those editors think youre omg the coolest guy in the world—from a readers standpoint its p awesome to have a clever englishman zinging yr enemies—hes fun to read when you agree w/him, and the cultural transplant thing worked in his favor for sure
should note that im not at all familiar w/his literary criticism which may be mind bendingly wonderful for all i know
no i mean u r (otm itt)
― nakhchivan, Sunday, December 18, 2011 12:10 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink
aw
I think that’s a fair take
and the MSM of course embraced him fully as a talking head only when he went neocon.
troo
Cooper OTM. I’ve been an atheist most of my life but the popularized new stuff is so smug and one-sided that it’s hardly an intellectual alternative to the dogmatic evangelical strawmen it kicks around for book sales.
This is really the only capacity I knew him in, so my superficial opinion of him was a master level troll with +50 intelligence points.
hard drinking iconoclastic journalist
When did it become a given that alcoholic writers are somehow really cool?
The brilliant alcoholic journalist is part of the mythology made by journalists about themselves, wherein the capacity for absorbing alcohol serves to underscore the presumed manliness of the journalist.
Let’s discuss his essays on literature, of which this is one of the best:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/may/28/powells-way/?pagination=false
Pareene’s take, starting with the mention that the man himself probably wouldn’t take too kindly to all the “treacle” suddenly poured his way:
http://politics.salon.com/2011/12/17/when_hitch_was_wrong/singleton/
...There was no more forceful intellectual voice in support of the Iraq War than Hitchens. There were others who were more prominent, more influential or more persuasive, but Hitchens was the perfect shill for an administration looking to cast its half-baked invasion plans as a morally righteous intervention, because only he could call upon a career of denunciations of totalitarianism and defenses of human rights. (The fact that the war was supposed to be justified by weapons Saddam was supposedly developing didn’t really matter to Hitchens.)
And so we had the world’s self-appointed supreme defender of Orwell’s legacy happily joining an extended misinformation campaign designed to sell an incompetent right-wing government’s war of choice. The man who carefully laid out the case for arresting Henry Kissinger for war crimes was now palling around with Paul fucking Wolfowitz.
Once he became an unpaid administration propagandist, Hitchens, formerly a creature of left-wing magazines whose largest mainstream exposure was in Vanity Fair and occasionally on Charlie Rose, was suddenly on TV rather a lot. The lesson there, I think, is that the popular American mass media will make room for even a booze-swilling atheist Trotskyite if he’s shilling for a the latest war.
And to be honest, his post-9/11 conception of an epoch-defining clash of civilizations between the secular West and the jihadists is more than slightly ridiculous. The secular West faces any number of graver existential threats — like unaccountable too-big-to-fail financial institutions and climate change, to name two that immediately come to mind — than that posed by the less-than 1 percent of the world’s Muslim population that subscribes to Salafist jihadism. Hitchens, the old Orwell worshiper, clearly just wanted a great big generational threat to tackle fearlessly, with polemics attacking the sclerotic establishment liberals who failed to see that the world was at the brink of disaster. He was looking for his own Spanish Civil War. That’s why he insisted on arguing that “Bin Ladenism” was equivalent to fascism....
The most hilarious photo in Hitch-22 is of our hero and a few Kurds lighting celebratory cigarettes after the US invasion, as if this was the point.
aimless otm
Whether or not you agreed with Hitchens, you can’t deny he was controversial!
Todd
Ah, yes, Todd.
(Skip to 4:40 if the direct link doesn’t work.)
*hugs*
Todd
hope i’m still alive when all the ribald tales of that rascally lush and inveterate bon vivant glenn greenwald show up in his obits.
The most hilarious photo in Hitch-22 is of our hero and a few Kurds lighting celebratory cigarettes after the US invasion, as if this was the point.
― Lord Sotosyn, Sunday, December 18, 2011 3:35 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink
lol
ugh of course
pareene OTM
feel like it could b a fun project to define “roiphe.” is it “gargling balls?” “licking boots, at payless shoes?” we could put the agreed upon definition on urban dictionary
why is it that every time I encounter something written by Katie Roiphe my main takeaway is “this is one of the worst people in the world”
i think it’s because you are literate
lol
you nice liberals are so literal-minded. she’s just a provocateur! isn’t it fun?
She claims Hitchens drank last July, but he said several times that he gave up drinking; he’d lost the taste for it.
good katha pollitt remembrance bit.ly/tjCN5l
TNC grapples with Hitchens’ support for Iraq.
Nevertheless, I think Glenn’s frame is wrong. Virtues don’t excuse sins; they cohabit with them. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. Perhaps worse he was a slaveholder who comprehended, more than any other, the moral failing of slavery, and it’s potential to bring the country to war, and yet at the end of his life he argued for slavery’s expansion, and on his death many of his slaves were sent to the auction block.
At his end, Jefferson sided with those who would eventually bring about the deaths of 600,000 Americans. He argued that the antebellum South would have either “justice” versus “self-preservation.” To paraphrase Churchill, it chose the latter and consequently got neither. But Jefferson was a beautiful writer, and a great intellect, whose thinking and prose I consistently find stunning. This admiration does not negate his moral cowardice. Both are true at the same time. (The same point could be made in regards to our conversation over Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)
Given Hitchens own ties to this magazine, of which I’m very fond, I’d like to say that—at least in this space—there’s no demand for exclusion, or any sense that Hitchens worthy of unalloyed admiration. No one should ever receive, or wisely desire, such a thing. I can’t really speak for other people, but I don’t believe in an essential, irreducible moral nature. I don’t see Hitchens, or anyone else, as a case of either/or.
pollitt’s piece is good. it’s kind of a trip for me to imagine them interacting irl.
What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns).
post graduate level zing
really who dreamed up this idea of a cruise as fundraiser for a political magazine
just imagining it is so strange and horrible
there should be a short story where it’s really some kind of bait and switch and they’ve all joined the navy reserve or an oil shipping line or something
shanghaied to write spam for the russian mob
I voted for him twice, and I wouldn’t want to be at sea w/ Ralph Nader (esp if Jim Hightower was also around)
what u voted twice for ralph nader how has this fact never come out on ilx before???
jk :)
morbs and nader bunked together in the navy how has this fact never come out on ilx before???
haha
i just cannot stop imagining a soused hitchen screaming at a tableful of old lefties just tryna enjoy their chicken a la king and then flipping the table and storming off in disgust
its really amazing
katha pollit clucking in the background
chainsmoking in his cabin angrily writing out a 1200-word screed about the variety show
threatening to quit if pollitt doesnt publish it immediately, on board the ship
puking over the side of the deck while his intern holds his hair
trying to charm an indifferent waitress with a story about dodging a militia in lebanon and then barfing over the side
xp lool
really who dreamed up this idea of a cruise as fundraiser for a political magazine
haha goole
I’m pretty sure couscous is favored over chicken a la king on The Nation cruise.
also Richard Dreyfuss was on it a couple years ago
why was Richard Dreyfuss on some couscous?
Dan crunches on indefinite pronounds like cornflakes.
RICHARD DREYFUSS OVER A BED OF COUSCOUS JOIN US NATION MAGAZINE CRUISE 2012
*pronouns
btw I hate to tell u this year’s returned to port yesterday
lol at puking while an intern holds his hair
omg he rode a folding bike, it all makes sense now
he was recreating Lenin’s arrival at Finland Station.
Not as funny as I wanted it to be.
still pretty funny
The first time I saw him, he had a bird on each arm and a woman by his side.
Sometimes the cheap laughs are the best.
overrated tumblr whites
Ron Jeremy? come on, bro.
okay “the MGD 64 of human beings” for McConaughey is pretty funny
yeah honestly I only disagreed with like 3 of them but Ron Jeremy is deserving of his status.
Oh man, I haven’t thought about Neil Pollack in years!
neither have i!
I don’t have a clue who he is!
he was a thing for a while!
The anthology of american literature is basically pieces like this about/in the style of most major macho literary figures of the 20th century. Since then, I guess he’s written a bunch of other funny stuff too.
Yeah, Anthology is hilarious