We hate you already
The Guardian ran a great article written by Martin Amis about Christopher Hitchens last Sunday. Of course, I hate Hitchens for almost everything but his rhetoric. Meaning, I think he oughtta be horsewhipped for about half of his political beliefs and shot for the other half, but whenever I spot an article by him, I read it. And I tend to read articles about him, too.
An excerpt:
Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand … My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.
"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts … nobody should ask me to submit to an interview … It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."
We sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
Well, I'm somewhere on that sliding scale, anyway. I sure as hell don't think like a genius, I don't write like a distinguished author, but I do speak like a child. In fact, I seem to turn stone fucking idiot the minute I'm put in any social situation. Which is, I guess, a kind of blessing, in that I avoid social situations and spend most of my time writing.
Read the article, though. It's very funny. Amis lets fly a couple of very funny barbed asides, and gives us four of Hitchens' best retorts. And a few quotes from the new The Quotable Hitchens, including two of my favorites: "Ronald Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife," and, "If you gave [Jerry] Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox."
It also ends with a very moving plea for agnosticism, which is something that's been on my mind of late.
