I’ve been puzzling about Hitchens recently, partly as a result of listening to his session at the Hay On Wye festival with the Greatest Living Englishman on blasphemy (courtesy of Norman Geras). He veers in that debate between inspiring brilliance and unfunny rudeness — I cannot imagine what the GLE made of it. I disagree with him about the war in in Iraq, and find myself wondering how he squares his support for Bush with many of his other apparent beliefs. He often sounds shrill in his attacks on the left, even when he can beat his immediate opponent on reason and evidence alone. I thought, for example, that he got the better of Chomsky by a mile in the polemics over Afghanistan, but was taken aback by the energy he put into alienating himself from the left in general. Maurice Isserman quotes one of the Socialist Party leaders who negotiated the merger with Max Shachtman’s group in the late ’50’s as saying something like the following “as soon as it was over I realised that this guy was going to move as far to the right as fast as he could” and that was certainly how Hitchens seemed at the time. He hasn’t exactly fulfilled that promise (nor, IMHO, did Shachtman), though he certainly tries to give that impression from time to time. But I still find his prose, almost always, compelling; I’d certainly sooner read almost anything by him than anything by any other journalist working today. Norm quotes Ophelia Benson (with permission) as follows:
From the category archives:
Intellects vast and warm and sympathetic
It takes a long, long apprenticeship laboring the Augean stables of “Globollocks”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/19/gimme-an-air-gimme-a-miles/ to write “a sentence like this”:http://nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm:
bq. The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.
Amazing. Tom Friedman is a God. No, not a God so much as a moustachioed force of nature, pumped up on the steroids of globalization, a canary in the coalmine of an interconnected era whose tentacles are spreading over the face of a New Economy savannah where old lions are left standing at their waterholes, unaware that the young Turks — and Indians — have both hands on the wheel of fortune favors the brave face the music to their ears to the, uh, ground.
Do you know what’s interesting about comment spam? Nothing, of course. But consider this. No piece of comment spam has ever been able to mimic a human convincingly. It tries, but comment spam is like the aliens among us. They look like us, dress like us … but they also eat the houseplants. In obedience to the iron genre trope that there must be some obvious failure of mimicry that gives away this sinister presence. To read comment spam is to come to awareness that these creatures have travelled a long way to get to our little blue marble floating in space (whether they come in peace, or to breed with the ladies, or because their home planet is tragically polluted.) Consider this offering, left in response to a post about a passage from Thomas Mann:
I also have read some of the best articles I’ve ever read after coming into the blogoshpere. I check the indices such as Daypop for what are the most linked news stories and blogs. I used to go to the library and look through publications but I would never find the articles and stories I’m finding on the internet.
There is a pathos to it. (I’ve left it up to reward it for winning my heart.) I’m seeing an alien who has assumed a somewhat Walter Mittyish form. He is short with thick glasses. His suit is ill-fitting. Every day he goes to the library seeking information about this strange new world. The nice librarian – a mousy girl with glasses and pearls – very demurely executes a gesture that takes in a whole room of books full of articles and stories. Our protagonist clumsily examines a few volumes, sniffs them, turns them upside down. Where is the information? When he becomes frustrated he makes little honking noises that annoy a bosomy old blue-haired bluenose society-type. A rugged teenage boy in his proud letterman’s jacket is checking out a book on football. He openly laughs at the stranger. “Yer an oddball, fella,” causing the little man to back nervously against the shelves, eyes darting. A book falls on his head. The librarian, feeling sorry for him, whispers ‘shhhh’. Every day it is the same until one day the delivery man, polite cap in hand, presents the librarian with the heavy box containing the library’s new computer. She is nervous but excited, eager to make this new thing part of her little domain. She isn’t sure how it works … but the mysterious stranger is there by her side. Somehow his fingers find all the right keys. We see the light of scrolling pages reflected in the lenses of glasses. Daypop! He is happy. The light is in her glasses, too. She is happy, seeing that he is happy. Every day he is there, always Daypop sending him to new blogs where he leaves messages. Always the same. About how in the library he could never find anything, but now Daypop sends him to new blogs everyday. He can hardly type the messages quickly enough. (He has another amusing tick. He always drinks milk. Only milk. Which gives him a silly moustache. But the milk makes him slightly drunk – his alien metabolism. Hence he slurs his speech and types things like ‘blogoshpere’.) One day the librarian, out of curiosity, clicks on the little hyperlink that is his name – odd name, sounds foreign – at the bottom of one of those many comments he leaves all day, every day. It transports her to … the little stranger’s homeworld, where she is surrounded by golden (oh, hell with it.)
Kieran’s post on Irish Catholic culture and Matt Yglesias’ recent writings on Archbishop Stepinac reminded me of the controversy surrounding Hubert Butler, whose essay on Stepinac, “The Sub-Prefect should have held his tongue,” is now happily online. Butler was a scion of the old Anglo-Irish aristocracy, a liberal of a thoroughly unconventional sort (sometimes a little reminiscent of Burke), and one of the best essayists of the twentieth century. His collection, The Children of Drancy, is especially fine. Butler also spent a substantial part of his career being ostracized by the community surrounding him, because he deviated from the Catholic consensus that Stepinac was a martyr to religious freedom. The story is recounted in “The Sub-Prefect.” Butler unwittingly began to present his views on Stepinac at a meeting where the Papal Nuncio was present, prompting the Nuncio to walk out. This led to Butler being condemned by local and national politicians for having ‘insulted’ the Church and being driven out of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society (which he had founded). If Butler hadn’t had independent means, he would have almost certainly lost his livelihood. It wasn’t a proud moment for Irish Catholicism.
“n+1” magazine, which sent out its second issue a few days ago, is really very good indeed. It’s a nice mixture of politics and literature – a deliberate antidote in 248 pages to both the self-congratulatory coyness of McSweeneys and the ghastly sincerity of the Believer. The stand-out article in the current issue is Elif Batuman’s piece on Isaac Babel, which is shot through with small fragments of genius. It combines a finely judged assessment of Babel’s work, which makes you want to run out and read him (if, like me, you haven’t done so yet), with an exquisite and devastatingly funny deconstruction of the Babel industry in academia. I suspect that I’d get even more from it if I’d already read Babel’s stories. I especially liked this short passage on cultural identity and alienation (n.b. that Batuman’s point goes far beyond Jewish identity politics – the Irish have a more highly developed, if less historically justified, version of the same trope).
Tolstoy observed, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and he was right: surely everyone on this earth, vale of tears that it is, is entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering. But in the end, I am too deeply invested in the idea that literature can render comprehensible another family’s unhappiness. For this reason, I once became impatient with a colleague I met at a conference in New York, who was insisting that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s “specifically Jewish alienation.”
“Indeed,” I finally said, “as a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.”
He nodded. “So you see the problem.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t available on the WWW; you’ll have to go to your bookstore and buy yourself a copy of the magazine (or become a subscriber) if you want to read it – I’d recommend the latter if possible (it’s really a great little magazine).
there’s something a little Borgesian about this “mathematical anecdote”:http://mindofwinter.blogspot.com/2005/03/viva-la-revolucion.html from ‘Mind of Winter’ (found via “Chad Orzel”:http://www.steelypips.org/principles/2005_02_27_principlearchive.php#110977081518935637).
bq. … Zygmund posed Calderón a question and the puzzled Calderón replied that the answer was contained in Zygmund’s own book Trigonometric Series. Zygmund disagreed: what transpired was that Calderón only ever read the statements of the results, preferring to give his own reasoning and proofs… . One of these proofs gave a highly original answer to Zygmund’s question. This originality was to be the hallmark of Calderón’s work in the years to follow.
Via Matt Cheney at the “Mumpsimus”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/01/recent-deaths.html, I learn that Guy Davenport “has died”:http://www.uky.edu/PR/News/050104_guy_davenport.htm. By coincidence, I’ve mentioned Davenport three times on this blog in the last week; he was one of the finest cultural and literary critics of our time. His essays cumulate into a long allusive conversation; digressive, enlightening, quietly humorous. You could warm your hands at them. He had a gift for finding the detail, the miniature axis on which the world turned for Kafka, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, for Picasso, for Louis Agassiz. From his essay, “On Reading” (collected in _The Hunter Gracchus_):
bq. Students often tell me that an author was ruined for them by a high-school English class; we all know what they mean. Shakespeare was almost closed to me by the world’s dullest teacher, and there are many writers whom I would probably enjoy reading except that they were recommended to me by suspect enthusiasts. I wish I knew how to rectify these aversions. I tell bright students, in conference, how I had to find certain authors on my own who were ruined for me by bad teachers or inept critics. Scott, Kipling, Wells will do to illustrate that only an idiot will take a critic’s word without seeing for oneself. I think I learned quite early that the judgments of my teachers were probably a report of their ignorance. In truth, my education was a systematic misleading. Ruskin was dismissed as a dull, preacherly old fart who wrote purple prose. In a decent society the teacher who led me to believe this would be tried, found guilty, and hanged by the thumbs while being pelted with old eggs and cabbage stalks.
On this count, as on many others, Davenport was gloriously, radiantly, exuberantly innocent. He inspired you to read new books, and re-read old ones differently. He’ll be sorely missed.