Hitch: I was a member of the antitotalitarian left, a member so extreme in my anti-authoritarianism that I would endure the hardships of war to obliterate the hardships of peace.
Evan: I’m not even going to begin to unpack that.
Hitch: You don’t have to. Fuck the ones who can’t understand it.
Evan: I’m not sure I can.
Hitch: You can, you just don’t want to.
Evan: I can’t afford to have standards that high.
Hitch: Are we talking about sex now?
Evan: Maybe.
Hitch: Not my problem.
Evan: Indeed. So you believe that there are things more odious about peace than about war?
Hitch: If it’s forged from the blood of innocents, it is a spurious peace.
Evan: Well what if there’s demonstrable proof that less innocent people are killed through one option than another?
Hitch: Tell that to the slaughtered innocents.
Evan: Can’t we all forget about the blood of innocents a for just a minute or two a day?
Hitch: Their families haven’t forgotten.
Evan: I’m pretty sure their families would be very grateful for your devotion and then be incredibly glad to close the door when you leave.
Hitch: How could you tell such a mendacious lie? I’m beloved by those I champion.
Evan: You also love everything until the minute you decide you hate it.
Hitch: This from the guy who’d never heard of Ween until he hated Ween before he loved them before he hated them more than ever?
Evan: I can’t even remember a song by Ween right now.
Hitch: A sure sign you cared.
Evan: And you remember everything you ever fulminated about?
Hitch: I always operated on drunk memory.
Evan: Oh yeah. That really does work. I barely remember a word of any foreign language until I have a few drinks.
Hitch: Some would argue you still can’t when you have a few drinks.
Evan: They’re probably right.
Hitch: I’m not so sure about that. Alcohol’s a memory juice.
Evan: Except when it isn’t.
Hitch: I wouldn’t know.
Evan: But you romanticized drinking. Most of us get drunk because we want to fit in at a party or we wanted to forget about the ex we just saw out with our worst enemy.
Hitch: I went to Balliol College, Oxford in the late 60’s, a place and era when being a well-travelled man of letters and mystery was a simple career option. You got a 3.4 GPA at a third-rate university and have no particularly useful family or school connections. The only people of your station who will attain my level of eminence are those who do exactly as more fortunate people tell them every day until they reach senility.
Evan: How cheerful.
Hitch: You sound as though you’re not enthused by that.
Evan: Should I be?
Hitch: We’re the only chance you have. It’s people like me that are fighting for a better life for you.
Evan: So encouraging....When should we see the results?
Hitch: When people start listening to us.
Evan: That’s less encouraging.
Hitch: So why did you stop listening?
Evan: I didn’t stop listening. I just got exhausted and decided I needed some brakes.
Hitch: Tyranny allows no breaks.
Evan: Neither do you.
Hitch: This is getting unpleasant.
Evan: Indeed.
Hitch: Well, let’s get back to the original point. I was a member of the antitotalitarian left, a member so extreme in my anti-authoritarianism that I would endure the hardships of war to obliterate the hardships of peace.
Evan: It’s almost like you rehearse all these quotes in the mirror.
Hitch: Every day for five hours.
Evan: So what hardships are there in peace?
Hitch: The fact that all peace is, in some sense, a false peace so long as war exists somewhere else.
Evan: So...I’m going to cut two more hours of noodling to say that the end of all this is that you would wage perpetual war until peace is won for all time?
Hitch: More or less...
Evan: More or less??? That’s a pretty big point to be inexact about.
Hitch: So long as people are suffering, others have an obbligation to help in any way they can.
Evan: So after all this drumbanging about freedom, you’re still the same militant who rages against woolly liberals the way all socialists and conservatives do. And you'd wage all the hard-won instruments of peace and freedom to make war against tyranny with all the same manicheanism that any fascist or communist would employ, simply because not everybody is free?....
Hitch: Sounds like a fair bargain to me.
Evan: You realize that that’s insane. Right?
Hitch: I don’t aspire to sanity. I aspire to end suffering.
Evan: That’s insane.
Hitch: It’s a lifestyle. I’m dead so I can admit that now.
Evan: Well, lifestyle or not, you’ve annoyed a lot of people for no good reason.
Hitch: There was a good reason. It might have been a lifestyle, but I mostly fought for the right causes and I think I helped them.
Evan: Well, I certainly think they were almost all the right causes so I can’t argue there.
Hitch: For better or worse, my name is secure for posterity. I was the great non-fiction writer of the last generation of an exclusively British civilisation. My comrades and I proposed that Britain and therefore the world had sustained a civilisation open to a precious few and built on the blood and toil of less fortunate men. The time has arrived to tear it down like indolent flesh so the privileges open only to people like me for so long may be enjoyed by many more.
Evan: Well, I can’t help agreeing with most of that, but in the process you threw out quite a bit more in some areas and not enough in others.
Hitchens: Would you care to give some examples?
Evan: Hell no. I still have to go to sleep.
Hitchens: Suit yourself. Until next time comrade.
Evan: ..Wait!...it’s coming over the wire that Kim Jong-Il just died.
Hitch: I should know. Havel and I called in a few favors.
Evan: Wait, so there is a God and you got him to kill Kim Jong-Il?
Hitch: Not as such. Existence is in fact an parliamentary semi-republic in which the venal heavenly ministers make bargains with corrupt olympian businessmen and thuggish celestial soldiers of fortune. The new Prime Minister is a particularly criminal sort. He’s a giant aviary being whose every nerve is visible through his exoskeleton.
Evan: So God’s a flying spaghetti monster after all?
Hitch: I suppose he is. On that note however I have to go. I have a meeting in an hour with the managing editor of Kingdom of Chaos magazine. I think he’s going to make an offer.
Evan: Well it’s good to know that eternity has room for the Hitch.
Hitch: See you in fifty-two years, five months, thirteen days.
Evan: My death date?
Hitch: No, just the date you’re diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Evan: Oh.
Hitch: I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other more often after that. But I’ll see you well before then. We still have many more of these to do. Cheers.
Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts
Monday, December 19, 2011
Sunday, December 18, 2011
800 Words: Hitch and Me Part 3
Hitch: Well Evan, prepare for lots and lots of namedropping.
Evan: It’s a specialty of us both. And how else will people remember all those names. With you gone, a whole era’s beginning to pass now.
Hitch: Yes it has. I’m just the first.
Evan: Weren’t you predeceased by Tony Judt and Peter Porter?
Hitch: Judt’s an academic. Porter’s an Aussie.
Evan: What about Pinter?
Hitch: (waves hand dismissively) Pinter’s not a writer.
Evan: Oh.
Hitch: But soon it’ll be Naipaul and Frayn, thereafter Clive James and Derek Walcott, and soon enough it’ll be Salman and Fenton. Eventually even Martin will go.
Evan: And those are just the English ones. But some of those guys: like McEwan, Barnes, Stoppard, they look like they could go on forever:
Hitch: Indeed, they could last as long as Robert Conquest.
Evan: And even Robert Conquest outlasted you.
Hitch: Don’t forget Eric Hobsbawm.
Evan: And Robert Service. I always thought Robert Conquest and Robert Service were the same person.
Hitch: They are. Don’t tell anyone.
Evan: But except for the occasional Naipaul, it’s probable that no American of my generation knows any of those names.
Hitch: They know Salman’s.
Evan: Not for his books.
Hitch: You’re right, they know him for the death sentence and marrying that chick on Top Chef.
Evan: I haven’t even read anything by half of them.
Hitch: Well then if you want to understand what they meant to a certain part of the world, please imagine something for me. Let’s say for the moment, there is a long tradition of English letters that begins with Tyndale and the King James Bible. It begins as a tradition appreciated mostly through oral recitation with Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. Meanwhile Shakespeare and Donne begin to create with the sonnets begin to create a written tradition that takes spiritual sources from the Bible and erotic sources from antiquity. It’s developed by Herbert, Marvell, Traherne, Crashaw and Cowley. And it reaches its apex in Milton, who assimilated all of his predecessors’ work and the writers who influenced them to create a metaphysical, erotic work that challenges no less than the Bible itself - aesthetically and morally.
Evan: I never cared for Paradise Lost.
Hitch: Shut up.
Evan: Yessir.
Hitch: This tradition is now so strong that it begins to dawn on them that they are responsible for seeking a greater freedom - a freedom from the inevitable requirements of tyranny that accounts for matters both aesthetic and moral. With Pope its poetry moves away from the stiff poses of heroic verse, and he brings with him poets as diverse as Oliver Goldsmith, Ambrose Phillips, John Gay, Henry Carey, the Thomases Grey, Wharton, and Percy, James Thomson, and Edward Young. With Locke, philosophy begins to postulate that men need not be ruled like cattle, which leads to the speculations of Bishop Berkeley, Hume and Bentham in a line that culminates with John Stuart Mill. With Swift, we realized that people can and should make fun of authority. With the good Dr. Johnson, the art of criticizing other becomes an art in itself. With Edward Gibbon, we see that historical writing can catalog an entire civilisation. And finally, with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne a new, entire, imaginative universe is revealed to us, parallel to ours, alike and utterly different from it. It is the novel in fetal state: less verifiable to reality, narratively less secure. But it is at very least the modern novel’s official birth.
Evan: I’m pretty sure I had to read the last three of them for an English lit class.
Hitch: What did you think of them?
Evan: I never did the reading.
Hitch: Skip Richardson, read the other two. You should see the Albert Finney movie of Tom Jones.
Evan: I have, it’s awesome....So would it be fair to say that this your favorite period of the tradition.
Hitch: Not entirely unfair.
Evan: And you are today’s Swift or Samuel Johnson?
Hitch: I could never write fiction, so that precludes being Swift. But if I’m not the good Doctor, at least I’m somebody’s Boswell.
Evan: Better than being somebody’s Andrew Sullivan.
Hitch: And so by the 19th century, this tradition accumulated so much to learn along the way that the artists within it must begin to question its value. People are able to read poets like Keats, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge - each of whom throws off the conventions of the Enlightment in completely different ways and forges new paths for poetry utterly unlike one another.
Evan: Weren’t Keats, Byron and Shelley all champions for all the Enlightenment causes?
Hitch: Keats didn’t love anything that wasn’t at least two millenia old, Shelley was a pagan, and Byron fooled around with his sister.
Evan: Ah.
Hitch: A generation later, the imaginative universe of the novel becomes a battleground to elucidate truths about the world of our own. It starts when Austen critiques the world of love and the Bronte sisters the treatment of women. It then metastasizes to the searing critiques of a larger society which one finds in Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, George Elliot, Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy. If one could view this development as a river, then they are the main banks, with many tributaries for genres that are populated with later writers like Lewis Carrol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G Wells, and Beatrix Potter. In addition, there is a resurrection of the English stage centered upon Wilde and Shaw. And meanwhile, there is a second flowering of romantic poetry, this one meant to be full of grandeur and portent, an imperial poetry for an imperious age in which we read the new verse of Tennyson, Swinburne, the Rosettis, the Brownings, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Macaulay, A. E. Houseman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. And with it comes a school of brutally hard-hitting critical essays that flow from Dr. Johnson into the Walters Pater and Bagheot, the Thomases De Quincey and Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Butler, John Ruskin, and William Hazlitt.
Evan: Y’know...this is beginning to sound an awful lot like simple namedropping.
Hitch: Where else would people need to go for intellectual namedropping on the internet if they simply read my articles and your blog?
Evan: Point taken. But what does portent mean?
Hitch: I’ve never given it much thought.
Evan: I see why people called you intellectually honest.
Hitch: Speaking of intellectually honest, how many of these 19th century writers have you read in a serious manner?
Evan: Um...I’m tempted to say none. But the truth is...let me think...certainly many of these poets, some Dickens, I love Middlemarch but I still can’t finish it...
Hitch: That’s George Elliot.
Evan: I know that. Also, a good amount of Sherlock Holmes, Treasure Island when I was MUCH younger, The Time Machine...and a lot of kids’ books versions of every novelist you mentioned. I also loved Jude the Obscure, (shoots Hitch a look), that’s Hardy I know. I also love Hardy’s poetry, particularly The Darkling Thrush. I really liked a Trollope novella I had to read in college, but with a name like his...
Hitch: Insert obvious university freshman joke here.
Evan: You asked.
Hitch: Indeed, which brings me to my next question, what did all of these writers have in common?
Evan: They’ve never been in my kitchen?
Hitch: Quite true. But they too are English to the marrow. With so few exceptions, every name dropped in our conversation thus far is native rooted to English soil. It is only with the arrival of Joseph Conrad, a Pole for whom English was a third language, that England reads an author of a truly international English tongue. He was one of the two first and last documenters of England at Empire - him and Rudyard Kipling alone were the imperial authors. Together, the weary cosmopolitanism of Conrad along with the innocent exuberance of Kipling’s adventurism. How much of Conrad and Kipling have you read Evan?
Evan: Not enough. I’ve read a number of Conrad novels and can barely remember a single thing about them. As for Kipling, some poetry a number of years ago....I remember thinking it was pretty good.
Hitch: A good thing this lesson in English literature is given by me and not you.
Evan: Indeed.
Hitch: But the grand adventures stopped very quickly after World War I. And afterward, English writers began to paint on canvasses far smaller that almost completely ignored that which they did not wish to see. By this time true breath of imaginative English writing was to be found in America. And because these canvasses were smaller, there were more of them than ever before. There was Wodehouse, Waugh, Powell, Forster, and Kingsley Amis who focused almost exclusively on upper class gentry. There was Virginia Woolf using the upper class as a pin upon which to hang her formal experimentation. There was the science-based fiction of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Doris Lessing, Alasdair Gray, and J.G. Ballard. And the Christian based fantasy of Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, and Robert Graves. There was the children’s fiction of Roald Dahl and Philippa Pearce. And the historical fictions of Georgette Heyer, and Penelope Fitzgerald. One can't forget the political fictions of Orwell, Graham Greene, and John leCarre, and no less important the genre fiction of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Patricia Highsmith, and Ian Fleming. And then there is the more considered high philosophical novel you find in Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, A.S. Byatt, and William Golding, and the travel writing of Naipaul and Jan Morris. But one simply can't forget to mention a new theatrical tradition that begins with Beckett and goes through our near contemporaries like Pinter, Stoppard, John Osborne, both Ayckbourns, both Shaffers, Ronald Harwood, Michael Frayn, and Alan Bennett. And it's particularly important that one can't forget the poets: War poets like Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon. Modernist poets such as D.H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Ford Maddox Ford and T.S. Eliot. Or the MacSpAuDay group of the 30's: W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Lewis MacNiece. Or the poets from The Movement which spurned modernism like Phillip Larkin, Peter Porter, and Seamus Heaney. Not to forget poets as important as Ted Hughes, Alan Sillitoe, and Geoffrey Hill who fit no movement neatly. And last but not least an entire philosophical, historical, and critical tradition of commentary, the names from which it would be impossible to recite without doubling this list.
Evan: At this point can’t we count Joyce, and Yeats too? You've already counted a bunch of other Irish.
Hitch: What’s another two Irishmen in this company?
Evan: Even I can’t believe how incredibly pretentious this got.
Hitch: And rather boring, but there is a larger point of all of those names, and that is to say that in order to inherit all of this tradition, we had to swallow the whole thing; read everything from the Bible to John Fowles’s beard and be able to recite days worth of the stuff from memory. The tradition of English letters is one of the longest and fullest flowerings of civilisation in the world's history. Through an our body of literature, we have reached the limits of what humanity has yet thought. And in our particular corner of human thought, our generation reached the absolute limits of human erudition. No generation has ever nor will ever again know it nor be required to know these writers as intimately the as English writers and readers of my generation did. For our generation is the last for whom the English language is not the property of the entire world. We shall be the last Dead White Males. After us, Englishness shall no longer matter to the English language. And with that irrelevance, many of the great English writers will disappear completely.
Evan: That’s a lot of literature to learn about.
Hitch: Well, wikipedia helps.
Evan: So in a sense, your literary generation was the one which buried English literature.
Hitch: We didn’t just bury English literature. We blew up the corpse. English literature is over. And it will never be rebuilt.
Evan: How did you do that?
Hitch: Politics. But we can discuss that in part 4.
Evan: At some point we have to end this conversation. I still have 13 more in my favorite cultural stuffs of the year.
Hitch: Well, whenever you like. I have nothing but time now.
Evan: It’s a specialty of us both. And how else will people remember all those names. With you gone, a whole era’s beginning to pass now.
Hitch: Yes it has. I’m just the first.
Evan: Weren’t you predeceased by Tony Judt and Peter Porter?
Hitch: Judt’s an academic. Porter’s an Aussie.
Evan: What about Pinter?
Hitch: (waves hand dismissively) Pinter’s not a writer.
Evan: Oh.
Hitch: But soon it’ll be Naipaul and Frayn, thereafter Clive James and Derek Walcott, and soon enough it’ll be Salman and Fenton. Eventually even Martin will go.
Evan: And those are just the English ones. But some of those guys: like McEwan, Barnes, Stoppard, they look like they could go on forever:
Hitch: Indeed, they could last as long as Robert Conquest.
Evan: And even Robert Conquest outlasted you.
Hitch: Don’t forget Eric Hobsbawm.
Evan: And Robert Service. I always thought Robert Conquest and Robert Service were the same person.
Hitch: They are. Don’t tell anyone.
Evan: But except for the occasional Naipaul, it’s probable that no American of my generation knows any of those names.
Hitch: They know Salman’s.
Evan: Not for his books.
Hitch: You’re right, they know him for the death sentence and marrying that chick on Top Chef.
Evan: I haven’t even read anything by half of them.
Hitch: Well then if you want to understand what they meant to a certain part of the world, please imagine something for me. Let’s say for the moment, there is a long tradition of English letters that begins with Tyndale and the King James Bible. It begins as a tradition appreciated mostly through oral recitation with Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. Meanwhile Shakespeare and Donne begin to create with the sonnets begin to create a written tradition that takes spiritual sources from the Bible and erotic sources from antiquity. It’s developed by Herbert, Marvell, Traherne, Crashaw and Cowley. And it reaches its apex in Milton, who assimilated all of his predecessors’ work and the writers who influenced them to create a metaphysical, erotic work that challenges no less than the Bible itself - aesthetically and morally.
Evan: I never cared for Paradise Lost.
Hitch: Shut up.
Evan: Yessir.
Hitch: This tradition is now so strong that it begins to dawn on them that they are responsible for seeking a greater freedom - a freedom from the inevitable requirements of tyranny that accounts for matters both aesthetic and moral. With Pope its poetry moves away from the stiff poses of heroic verse, and he brings with him poets as diverse as Oliver Goldsmith, Ambrose Phillips, John Gay, Henry Carey, the Thomases Grey, Wharton, and Percy, James Thomson, and Edward Young. With Locke, philosophy begins to postulate that men need not be ruled like cattle, which leads to the speculations of Bishop Berkeley, Hume and Bentham in a line that culminates with John Stuart Mill. With Swift, we realized that people can and should make fun of authority. With the good Dr. Johnson, the art of criticizing other becomes an art in itself. With Edward Gibbon, we see that historical writing can catalog an entire civilisation. And finally, with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne a new, entire, imaginative universe is revealed to us, parallel to ours, alike and utterly different from it. It is the novel in fetal state: less verifiable to reality, narratively less secure. But it is at very least the modern novel’s official birth.
Evan: I’m pretty sure I had to read the last three of them for an English lit class.
Hitch: What did you think of them?
Evan: I never did the reading.
Hitch: Skip Richardson, read the other two. You should see the Albert Finney movie of Tom Jones.
Evan: I have, it’s awesome....So would it be fair to say that this your favorite period of the tradition.
Hitch: Not entirely unfair.
Evan: And you are today’s Swift or Samuel Johnson?
Hitch: I could never write fiction, so that precludes being Swift. But if I’m not the good Doctor, at least I’m somebody’s Boswell.
Evan: Better than being somebody’s Andrew Sullivan.
Hitch: And so by the 19th century, this tradition accumulated so much to learn along the way that the artists within it must begin to question its value. People are able to read poets like Keats, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge - each of whom throws off the conventions of the Enlightment in completely different ways and forges new paths for poetry utterly unlike one another.
Evan: Weren’t Keats, Byron and Shelley all champions for all the Enlightenment causes?
Hitch: Keats didn’t love anything that wasn’t at least two millenia old, Shelley was a pagan, and Byron fooled around with his sister.
Evan: Ah.
Hitch: A generation later, the imaginative universe of the novel becomes a battleground to elucidate truths about the world of our own. It starts when Austen critiques the world of love and the Bronte sisters the treatment of women. It then metastasizes to the searing critiques of a larger society which one finds in Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, George Elliot, Wilkie Collins and Thomas Hardy. If one could view this development as a river, then they are the main banks, with many tributaries for genres that are populated with later writers like Lewis Carrol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G Wells, and Beatrix Potter. In addition, there is a resurrection of the English stage centered upon Wilde and Shaw. And meanwhile, there is a second flowering of romantic poetry, this one meant to be full of grandeur and portent, an imperial poetry for an imperious age in which we read the new verse of Tennyson, Swinburne, the Rosettis, the Brownings, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Macaulay, A. E. Houseman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. And with it comes a school of brutally hard-hitting critical essays that flow from Dr. Johnson into the Walters Pater and Bagheot, the Thomases De Quincey and Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Samuel Butler, John Ruskin, and William Hazlitt.
Evan: Y’know...this is beginning to sound an awful lot like simple namedropping.
Hitch: Where else would people need to go for intellectual namedropping on the internet if they simply read my articles and your blog?
Evan: Point taken. But what does portent mean?
Hitch: I’ve never given it much thought.
Evan: I see why people called you intellectually honest.
Hitch: Speaking of intellectually honest, how many of these 19th century writers have you read in a serious manner?
Evan: Um...I’m tempted to say none. But the truth is...let me think...certainly many of these poets, some Dickens, I love Middlemarch but I still can’t finish it...
Hitch: That’s George Elliot.
Evan: I know that. Also, a good amount of Sherlock Holmes, Treasure Island when I was MUCH younger, The Time Machine...and a lot of kids’ books versions of every novelist you mentioned. I also loved Jude the Obscure, (shoots Hitch a look), that’s Hardy I know. I also love Hardy’s poetry, particularly The Darkling Thrush. I really liked a Trollope novella I had to read in college, but with a name like his...
Hitch: Insert obvious university freshman joke here.
Evan: You asked.
Hitch: Indeed, which brings me to my next question, what did all of these writers have in common?
Evan: They’ve never been in my kitchen?
Hitch: Quite true. But they too are English to the marrow. With so few exceptions, every name dropped in our conversation thus far is native rooted to English soil. It is only with the arrival of Joseph Conrad, a Pole for whom English was a third language, that England reads an author of a truly international English tongue. He was one of the two first and last documenters of England at Empire - him and Rudyard Kipling alone were the imperial authors. Together, the weary cosmopolitanism of Conrad along with the innocent exuberance of Kipling’s adventurism. How much of Conrad and Kipling have you read Evan?
Evan: Not enough. I’ve read a number of Conrad novels and can barely remember a single thing about them. As for Kipling, some poetry a number of years ago....I remember thinking it was pretty good.
Hitch: A good thing this lesson in English literature is given by me and not you.
Evan: Indeed.
Hitch: But the grand adventures stopped very quickly after World War I. And afterward, English writers began to paint on canvasses far smaller that almost completely ignored that which they did not wish to see. By this time true breath of imaginative English writing was to be found in America. And because these canvasses were smaller, there were more of them than ever before. There was Wodehouse, Waugh, Powell, Forster, and Kingsley Amis who focused almost exclusively on upper class gentry. There was Virginia Woolf using the upper class as a pin upon which to hang her formal experimentation. There was the science-based fiction of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Doris Lessing, Alasdair Gray, and J.G. Ballard. And the Christian based fantasy of Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, and Robert Graves. There was the children’s fiction of Roald Dahl and Philippa Pearce. And the historical fictions of Georgette Heyer, and Penelope Fitzgerald. One can't forget the political fictions of Orwell, Graham Greene, and John leCarre, and no less important the genre fiction of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Patricia Highsmith, and Ian Fleming. And then there is the more considered high philosophical novel you find in Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, A.S. Byatt, and William Golding, and the travel writing of Naipaul and Jan Morris. But one simply can't forget to mention a new theatrical tradition that begins with Beckett and goes through our near contemporaries like Pinter, Stoppard, John Osborne, both Ayckbourns, both Shaffers, Ronald Harwood, Michael Frayn, and Alan Bennett. And it's particularly important that one can't forget the poets: War poets like Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon. Modernist poets such as D.H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, Ford Maddox Ford and T.S. Eliot. Or the MacSpAuDay group of the 30's: W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Lewis MacNiece. Or the poets from The Movement which spurned modernism like Phillip Larkin, Peter Porter, and Seamus Heaney. Not to forget poets as important as Ted Hughes, Alan Sillitoe, and Geoffrey Hill who fit no movement neatly. And last but not least an entire philosophical, historical, and critical tradition of commentary, the names from which it would be impossible to recite without doubling this list.
Evan: At this point can’t we count Joyce, and Yeats too? You've already counted a bunch of other Irish.
Hitch: What’s another two Irishmen in this company?
Evan: Even I can’t believe how incredibly pretentious this got.
Hitch: And rather boring, but there is a larger point of all of those names, and that is to say that in order to inherit all of this tradition, we had to swallow the whole thing; read everything from the Bible to John Fowles’s beard and be able to recite days worth of the stuff from memory. The tradition of English letters is one of the longest and fullest flowerings of civilisation in the world's history. Through an our body of literature, we have reached the limits of what humanity has yet thought. And in our particular corner of human thought, our generation reached the absolute limits of human erudition. No generation has ever nor will ever again know it nor be required to know these writers as intimately the as English writers and readers of my generation did. For our generation is the last for whom the English language is not the property of the entire world. We shall be the last Dead White Males. After us, Englishness shall no longer matter to the English language. And with that irrelevance, many of the great English writers will disappear completely.
Evan: That’s a lot of literature to learn about.
Hitch: Well, wikipedia helps.
Evan: So in a sense, your literary generation was the one which buried English literature.
Hitch: We didn’t just bury English literature. We blew up the corpse. English literature is over. And it will never be rebuilt.
Evan: How did you do that?
Hitch: Politics. But we can discuss that in part 4.
Evan: At some point we have to end this conversation. I still have 13 more in my favorite cultural stuffs of the year.
Hitch: Well, whenever you like. I have nothing but time now.
Friday, December 16, 2011
800 Words: Hitch and Me Part 2
Evan: Y’know, you died on the very day the Iraq War ended.
Hitch: I am the Iraq War.
Evan: What?
Hitch: I am the very reason it happened.
Evan: What the fuck does that mean?
Hitch: It means that I was raised from the cradle to believe that democracy and freedom were things worth preserving at all costs. And if liberty’s caretakers were inadequate to the task of freedom, then they would have to be replaced. If it meant supporting George W. Bush, I stay with George W. Bush through all. If it meant supporting the Sandistas and Arafat, then one does not waver or falter in the pursuit of liberty’s tree.
Evan: But isn’t that precisely the sort of liberal tradeoff you abhor?
Hitch: Of course. But nobody needs to acknowledge the flaws of reality when moral absolutes are at stake.
Evan: But shouldn’t you care about how these things work in reality?
Hitch: Why should I? If my life meant anything to people, it means that it’s possible to feel enormous moral indignation without actually being affected by it.
Evan: Does this mean that your rage at the moral failings of political figures was manufactured?
Hitch: No. But rage is an overrated emotion to begin with. I could summon it at will to whatever target I wished.
Evan: That’s a talent I should like to have.
Hitch: There are those who would argue...
Evan: Let’s stop that right there, shall we?
Hitch: Suit yourself.
Evan: In any event, you were telling me about how you are the Iraq War itself?
Hitch: Indeed, I am.
Evan: And how is that possible?
Hitch: Because there is no cause in my lifetime in which I did not take the most extreme possible position on the side of liberty’s defense. Extremism in the pursuit of virtue is my great contribution to modern society.
Evan: Shouldn’t you be a little worried about where that could lead you if you took the wrong position?
Hitch: That’s nothing a few shots of Maker’s Mark can’t fix.
Evan: And that’s ultimately why you were such a terrible fit in the Obama era.
Hitch: Indeed. At a time when America is thoroughly gripped by a plague of thoughtful uncertainty, my rhetorical bromides are far too strong stuff.
Evan: The last five years of your life, you were for all intents and purposes a political irrelevance.
Hitch: I was lucky that I found a larger target.
Evan: So...is there a God?
Hitch: Does it matter? If He exists, He’s very thankful that I paid Him the ultimate tribute?
Evan: You died for His sins?
Hitch: I like the ironies there, but no. A lifetime spent grappling with increasingly large questions of the world’s upside down morality finally centered on our one enormous explanation that allows us to commit every evil.
Evan: But even if religion is as bad as you say. Isn’t it just a symptom of human nature’s badness? Not the root?
Hitch: If you eliminate religion, you eliminate the sanction for people to commit evil disguised as good.
Evan: Couldn’t humans simply find another way to bless evil acts?
Hitch: We’ll never know until we get rid of the existing system.
Evan: Didn’t they do that in Russia?
Hitch: Yes. And religion made Bolshevism possible.
Evan: This is going in circles.
Hitch: You eliminate the circle if you get rid of religion.
Evan: No you don’t.
Hitch: When I was a student at Oxford, I began to realize something important that has never left me.
Evan: And what was that?
Hitch: That ever so gradually, we are getting better.
Evan: As a society?
Hitch: As a species.
Evan: How do you figure?
Hitch: Once again, I’m my own best evidence.
Evan: It’s amazing that some fan of yours didn’t kill you before cancer did.
Hitch: Gradually, mankind is getting better. And it’s up to the better specimen of mankind like myself to ensure that progress continues to be made.
Evan: And what sort of progress is that?
Hitch: Freedom, openness, tolerance.
Evan: And aren’t you afraid of what might be found out in comparison to mankind’s worse specimens?
Hitch: Not in the slightest. It’s by openly showing how much more attractive my view of the world is than theirs that we will make them understand how much better their lives can be.
Evan: Aren’t you afraid it might not work out the way you’d hoped?
Hitch: I’ll take that risk.
Evan: So in spite of all this romanticizing conflict and the forces of good vs. evil, you really do consider yourself an enlightenment guy.
Hitch: Oh yes. I believe that writing like mine will lead to the betterment of mankind.
Evan: You see, I could never really get behind that.
Hitch: Why not?
Evan: Maybe I’m just not political enough, maybe I just don’t have that high an opinion of myself.
Hitch: I highly doubt that.
Evan: Me too. But even so, the thought that anything I ever did could contribute much one way or the other to the betterment of mankind seems kind of ridiculous. And even if I could I’m not sure I’d want to.
Hitch: Well, then I feel a bit of contempt for you Mr. Tucker.
Evan: Suit yourself.
Hitch: Don’t you think that it’s important to have oneself recognized as being on the right side in the great march of conflict between the forces of good and evil?
Evan: Not really. I find these questions interesting, and of course I’d rather people do well and be happy. But most of us adults have to give up on the idea of always being able to do the right thing.
Hitch: That’s simple laziness.
Evan: Perhaps. It’s also maturity.
Hitch: If that’s maturity, then I’m glad I tried to stay immature for the whole of my life.
Evan: And you succeeded at that quite well.
Hitch: I am the Iraq War.
Evan: What?
Hitch: I am the very reason it happened.
Evan: What the fuck does that mean?
Hitch: It means that I was raised from the cradle to believe that democracy and freedom were things worth preserving at all costs. And if liberty’s caretakers were inadequate to the task of freedom, then they would have to be replaced. If it meant supporting George W. Bush, I stay with George W. Bush through all. If it meant supporting the Sandistas and Arafat, then one does not waver or falter in the pursuit of liberty’s tree.
Evan: But isn’t that precisely the sort of liberal tradeoff you abhor?
Hitch: Of course. But nobody needs to acknowledge the flaws of reality when moral absolutes are at stake.
Evan: But shouldn’t you care about how these things work in reality?
Hitch: Why should I? If my life meant anything to people, it means that it’s possible to feel enormous moral indignation without actually being affected by it.
Evan: Does this mean that your rage at the moral failings of political figures was manufactured?
Hitch: No. But rage is an overrated emotion to begin with. I could summon it at will to whatever target I wished.
Evan: That’s a talent I should like to have.
Hitch: There are those who would argue...
Evan: Let’s stop that right there, shall we?
Hitch: Suit yourself.
Evan: In any event, you were telling me about how you are the Iraq War itself?
Hitch: Indeed, I am.
Evan: And how is that possible?
Hitch: Because there is no cause in my lifetime in which I did not take the most extreme possible position on the side of liberty’s defense. Extremism in the pursuit of virtue is my great contribution to modern society.
Evan: Shouldn’t you be a little worried about where that could lead you if you took the wrong position?
Hitch: That’s nothing a few shots of Maker’s Mark can’t fix.
Evan: And that’s ultimately why you were such a terrible fit in the Obama era.
Hitch: Indeed. At a time when America is thoroughly gripped by a plague of thoughtful uncertainty, my rhetorical bromides are far too strong stuff.
Evan: The last five years of your life, you were for all intents and purposes a political irrelevance.
Hitch: I was lucky that I found a larger target.
Evan: So...is there a God?
Hitch: Does it matter? If He exists, He’s very thankful that I paid Him the ultimate tribute?
Evan: You died for His sins?
Hitch: I like the ironies there, but no. A lifetime spent grappling with increasingly large questions of the world’s upside down morality finally centered on our one enormous explanation that allows us to commit every evil.
Evan: But even if religion is as bad as you say. Isn’t it just a symptom of human nature’s badness? Not the root?
Hitch: If you eliminate religion, you eliminate the sanction for people to commit evil disguised as good.
Evan: Couldn’t humans simply find another way to bless evil acts?
Hitch: We’ll never know until we get rid of the existing system.
Evan: Didn’t they do that in Russia?
Hitch: Yes. And religion made Bolshevism possible.
Evan: This is going in circles.
Hitch: You eliminate the circle if you get rid of religion.
Evan: No you don’t.
Hitch: When I was a student at Oxford, I began to realize something important that has never left me.
Evan: And what was that?
Hitch: That ever so gradually, we are getting better.
Evan: As a society?
Hitch: As a species.
Evan: How do you figure?
Hitch: Once again, I’m my own best evidence.
Evan: It’s amazing that some fan of yours didn’t kill you before cancer did.
Hitch: Gradually, mankind is getting better. And it’s up to the better specimen of mankind like myself to ensure that progress continues to be made.
Evan: And what sort of progress is that?
Hitch: Freedom, openness, tolerance.
Evan: And aren’t you afraid of what might be found out in comparison to mankind’s worse specimens?
Hitch: Not in the slightest. It’s by openly showing how much more attractive my view of the world is than theirs that we will make them understand how much better their lives can be.
Evan: Aren’t you afraid it might not work out the way you’d hoped?
Hitch: I’ll take that risk.
Evan: So in spite of all this romanticizing conflict and the forces of good vs. evil, you really do consider yourself an enlightenment guy.
Hitch: Oh yes. I believe that writing like mine will lead to the betterment of mankind.
Evan: You see, I could never really get behind that.
Hitch: Why not?
Evan: Maybe I’m just not political enough, maybe I just don’t have that high an opinion of myself.
Hitch: I highly doubt that.
Evan: Me too. But even so, the thought that anything I ever did could contribute much one way or the other to the betterment of mankind seems kind of ridiculous. And even if I could I’m not sure I’d want to.
Hitch: Well, then I feel a bit of contempt for you Mr. Tucker.
Evan: Suit yourself.
Hitch: Don’t you think that it’s important to have oneself recognized as being on the right side in the great march of conflict between the forces of good and evil?
Evan: Not really. I find these questions interesting, and of course I’d rather people do well and be happy. But most of us adults have to give up on the idea of always being able to do the right thing.
Hitch: That’s simple laziness.
Evan: Perhaps. It’s also maturity.
Hitch: If that’s maturity, then I’m glad I tried to stay immature for the whole of my life.
Evan: And you succeeded at that quite well.
800 Words: Hitch and Me Part 1
(It is nearly three in the morning. Christopher Hitchens, Evan’s college hero, is dead. Evan has been on the phone with Le Malon for two hours: summoning up remembrances of things past, drinking three honorary scotches, and as he occasionally does - celebrating the best of what life has to offer. Just when life can’t get any better, in walks a ghostly, see-through image of The Hitch in better times: a full head of hair, paunch intact, bedecked in a rumpled blue button-down, rolled up sleeves and a too small pair of khakis.)
Evan: So...is there a God?
Hitch: Who cares? Where’s that Laphraoig bottle?
Evan: In the dining room.
(the bottle magically appears in Hitchens hand, he immediately takes a swig)
Hitch: Well, you’ve been reading me regularly for nine years. What have you learned?
Evan: That I should get drunk more often.
Hitch: Good man.
Evan: Seriously, after I heard you died I got on the phone with my best friend from college and we drank together for two hours.
Hitch: Oh dear. That sounds strangely like you care that I’m dead.
Evan: I suppose I do.
Hitch: How does it feel to no longer be the guy who makes fun of people who mourn celebrities publicly?
Evan: Pretty awkward actually. I feel like a hypocrite.
Hitch: (holds up the Laphroaig) Drink more, it’ll dull the feeling.
Evan: My feelings are pretty numb already.
Hitch: I’d have never refused another drink when I was your age.
Evan: I also plan to make it past seventy.
Hitch: Your biblical three-score and ten? Isn’t that a bit presumptuous?
Evan: Only to the idea that life is worth sticking around for.
Hitch: I’d have checked out long ago without the happy sauce.
Evan: All good things in moderation.
Hitch: Does anyone actually believe that?
Evan: I don’t know... You’re dead now.
Hitch: And the world seems to have noticed.
Evan: Why has no other writer's death in my lifetime gotten this kind of mass outpouring?
Hitch: How many writers do you know who can can drink, smoke, and fuck every day, and still have their ideas taken seriously?
Evan: Personally?
Hitch: You don’t know any writers personally.
Evan: Well, there’s you....there’s Albert Camus,...there’s Byron,....there’s Mailer...
Hitch: Don’t forget Truman Capote.
Evan: Indeed. But where exactly are you going with this?
Hitch: That I’m the ultimate fourth-estate playboy every aspiring political writer wants to be.
Evan: Is that all?
Hitch: Why don’t you listen to one of my typical days (pulls out black notebook): this is October 20th, 2006.
I get up at ten in the morning and write 1000 words about the plight of the oppressed and downtrodden in the still unrecognized Kurdistan. I wrap it all up in an hour and a half, and leave for a twelve-o’clock lunch with James Fenton and Grover Norquist at La Tomate in Dupont Circle. The lunch goes until 4:30 in the afternoon during which we spend three hours discussing the finer points of Rosa Luxembourg’s influence on Hannah Arendt’s writings while clearing two bottles of grappa. At four-thirty I go back to my apartment because at five I’m due to host a gathering of Libyan freedom fighters who show me an official intelligence brief about Qaddafi’s sadomasochistic proclivities. In the midst of this gathering walks Salman Rushdie and Olivia Wilde, and we all spend an hour playing the literary Vagina game (in which you substitute any word in a literary title with the word ‘Vagina’. Dickens novels work particularly well in this regard...). Rushdie is here early for a meet and greet which also includes Christopher Buckley, Antonin Scalia, Rashid Khalidi and Richard Dawkins. Tony Blair was supposed to be there as well, but he backed out at the last minute. The soiree begins at seven, but around eight-fifteen Khalidi misquotes Wodehouse and that begins a debate about the influence of Martin Chuzzlewit in the poetry of Thomas Hardy that lasts until three in the morning. At which point Salman begs off to fuck his latest toy and people begin to trickle out. Scalia is the last to leave at four-thirty, at which point I polish off an essay about Connor Cruise O’Brien for Vanity Fair.
Now, let me ask you, Evan. What part of this experience does not appeal to you?
Evan: Meh.
Hitch: Really?
Evan: Oh my god I'd have killed to even experience an hour of a life like this one!!!!
Hitch: And there you have it sir. The artist as hero, that old 19th century phenomenom that was supposed to have died out when Celine did a radio ad on behalf of Vichy Water. The desire for a life like this is exactly why you drank and chainsmoked yourself into an extra seventy pounds in college.
Evan: It was fun while it lasted. To say nothing of using a university column to take potshots at other students I resented. It made me a writer for life, it also probably ruined any chance I had at becoming a writer professionally.
Hitch: You had to admit though, it was fun.
Evan: It’s still the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer. Particularly because nothing I wrote mattered. And that was the difference between me and you. I wrote that stuff because I was interested in it but didn’t care, you wrote because you cared...
Hitch: ...and wasn’t interested. Scruitiny is not part of my makeup. I don’t like reality, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid it. And some of us are lucky enough that we never face reality until we’re stone dead.
Evan: I did.
Hitch: A shame you had to.
Evan: Indeed it was. But it was a good time while it lasted, you were the perfect model of everything I wanted to be when I was twenty-two.
Hitch: I managed to stay twenty-two for another forty years.
Evan: I’d certainly trade old age for that ability.
Hitch: You may yet have the chance...
Evan: Doubtful...
Evan: So...is there a God?
Hitch: Who cares? Where’s that Laphraoig bottle?
Evan: In the dining room.
(the bottle magically appears in Hitchens hand, he immediately takes a swig)
Hitch: Well, you’ve been reading me regularly for nine years. What have you learned?
Evan: That I should get drunk more often.
Hitch: Good man.
Evan: Seriously, after I heard you died I got on the phone with my best friend from college and we drank together for two hours.
Hitch: Oh dear. That sounds strangely like you care that I’m dead.
Evan: I suppose I do.
Hitch: How does it feel to no longer be the guy who makes fun of people who mourn celebrities publicly?
Evan: Pretty awkward actually. I feel like a hypocrite.
Hitch: (holds up the Laphroaig) Drink more, it’ll dull the feeling.
Evan: My feelings are pretty numb already.
Hitch: I’d have never refused another drink when I was your age.
Evan: I also plan to make it past seventy.
Hitch: Your biblical three-score and ten? Isn’t that a bit presumptuous?
Evan: Only to the idea that life is worth sticking around for.
Hitch: I’d have checked out long ago without the happy sauce.
Evan: All good things in moderation.
Hitch: Does anyone actually believe that?
Evan: I don’t know... You’re dead now.
Hitch: And the world seems to have noticed.
Evan: Why has no other writer's death in my lifetime gotten this kind of mass outpouring?
Hitch: How many writers do you know who can can drink, smoke, and fuck every day, and still have their ideas taken seriously?
Evan: Personally?
Hitch: You don’t know any writers personally.
Evan: Well, there’s you....there’s Albert Camus,...there’s Byron,....there’s Mailer...
Hitch: Don’t forget Truman Capote.
Evan: Indeed. But where exactly are you going with this?
Hitch: That I’m the ultimate fourth-estate playboy every aspiring political writer wants to be.
Evan: Is that all?
Hitch: Why don’t you listen to one of my typical days (pulls out black notebook): this is October 20th, 2006.
I get up at ten in the morning and write 1000 words about the plight of the oppressed and downtrodden in the still unrecognized Kurdistan. I wrap it all up in an hour and a half, and leave for a twelve-o’clock lunch with James Fenton and Grover Norquist at La Tomate in Dupont Circle. The lunch goes until 4:30 in the afternoon during which we spend three hours discussing the finer points of Rosa Luxembourg’s influence on Hannah Arendt’s writings while clearing two bottles of grappa. At four-thirty I go back to my apartment because at five I’m due to host a gathering of Libyan freedom fighters who show me an official intelligence brief about Qaddafi’s sadomasochistic proclivities. In the midst of this gathering walks Salman Rushdie and Olivia Wilde, and we all spend an hour playing the literary Vagina game (in which you substitute any word in a literary title with the word ‘Vagina’. Dickens novels work particularly well in this regard...). Rushdie is here early for a meet and greet which also includes Christopher Buckley, Antonin Scalia, Rashid Khalidi and Richard Dawkins. Tony Blair was supposed to be there as well, but he backed out at the last minute. The soiree begins at seven, but around eight-fifteen Khalidi misquotes Wodehouse and that begins a debate about the influence of Martin Chuzzlewit in the poetry of Thomas Hardy that lasts until three in the morning. At which point Salman begs off to fuck his latest toy and people begin to trickle out. Scalia is the last to leave at four-thirty, at which point I polish off an essay about Connor Cruise O’Brien for Vanity Fair.
Now, let me ask you, Evan. What part of this experience does not appeal to you?
Evan: Meh.
Hitch: Really?
Evan: Oh my god I'd have killed to even experience an hour of a life like this one!!!!
Hitch: And there you have it sir. The artist as hero, that old 19th century phenomenom that was supposed to have died out when Celine did a radio ad on behalf of Vichy Water. The desire for a life like this is exactly why you drank and chainsmoked yourself into an extra seventy pounds in college.
Evan: It was fun while it lasted. To say nothing of using a university column to take potshots at other students I resented. It made me a writer for life, it also probably ruined any chance I had at becoming a writer professionally.
Hitch: You had to admit though, it was fun.
Evan: It’s still the most fun I’ve ever had as a writer. Particularly because nothing I wrote mattered. And that was the difference between me and you. I wrote that stuff because I was interested in it but didn’t care, you wrote because you cared...
Hitch: ...and wasn’t interested. Scruitiny is not part of my makeup. I don’t like reality, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid it. And some of us are lucky enough that we never face reality until we’re stone dead.
Evan: I did.
Hitch: A shame you had to.
Evan: Indeed it was. But it was a good time while it lasted, you were the perfect model of everything I wanted to be when I was twenty-two.
Hitch: I managed to stay twenty-two for another forty years.
Evan: I’d certainly trade old age for that ability.
Hitch: You may yet have the chance...
Evan: Doubtful...
Thursday, December 8, 2011
800 Words: 35 Favorite 'Cultural Stuffs' in 2011. #'s 25 & 24
25. Treme
(I think this is one of the great finales I’ve ever seen on TV. Nothing happens and yet...)
I like the The Wire. I just don’t think it was the greatest TV show ever made. It’s a Washingtonian’s view of Baltimore - if it can’t show up on a police blotter or in the Sun’s front page, it’s not interesting to the writers. Two of the the show’s three main writers (David Simon and George Pellecanos) grew up in Washington, and it’s at least clear to me that there are certain views of Baltimore that they’ve missed. In The Wire, Baltimore is not Baltimore, Baltimore is a metaphor for the dysfunction of American cities. Granted, I have not seen the whole show (probably I’ve seen about 18 episodes), but it’s clear that there are views of Baltimore which The Wire is plainly not interested in seeing - particularly the history of White Flight and how it contributed to creating today’s Baltimore. The Wire is interested in showing the inner workings of today’s city, but not particularly interested in how the city became what it is. It is interested in the types of people who populate the city, but not particularly interested in what makes the people individual and three-dimensional. And it’s certainly interested in decrying people whose morals are lax, but less interested in portraying the inner conflicts within them.
I can certainly concede that The Wire, in its way, is a great TV show. But it’s great TV in the same way that Emile Zola is great literature - both are examples of kind of naturalism that strives to capture the realities of people’s lives without feeling the need to portray the reality of people. The huge acclaim given The Wire was in part due to people rightly celebrating a show that gives much-needed attention to life in the projects, and partially due to prurient interest and liberal self-congratulation. There is certainly an important place for shows like The Wire, but my inner monologue tends to go apoplectic when people suggest The Wire is the best thing to come out of television. Nobody mistakes Germinal for War and Peace, yet in so many people’s estimation The Wire is a greater show than The Sopranos.
And so I’m going to make a controversial claim (or a claim that would be controversial if anybody important said it): David Simon’s next show, Treme, is better than The Wire. The reception of Treme has been decidedly mixed, and there are lots of people view the show as a terrible letdown after the The Wire’s gritty naturalism. But I personally think it’s a step forward. David Simon knows what works on television better than he did before, and the result is in many ways more interesting.
It’s not like Treme is at all missing The Wire’s grit, but the grit is no longer omnipresent. After a while, the unremitting drabness of Baltimore lives as The Wire depicts them becomes exhausting. But the bright colors of New Orleans come to us screaming with life. Yes, there is still all the murder, and loss, and depravity that you’d expect from New Orleans. But not for a moment are we allowed to forget about the New Orleans of the living. The show gives us a sense of New Orleans through its music, its art, its fashion, its cuisine - you turn the TV off craving Jambalaya. This being a show about New Orleans, it was obvious that Treme would have to delve far more deeply into local history, culture, and customs than The Wire ever did. And so we watch characters whose personalities are far more illuminated than The Wire’s characters ever got the chance to be.
Treme is far from a perfect show. It still retains all of the The Wire’s preachiness, and all its melodramatic caricatures of evil businessmen, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, etc. Even so, the very fact that TV now has a showrunner like Simon, so willing to talk about the problems of the underclass is a great start - but it’s only a start. And now he’s making a show in large part about what makes the lives of poor people worth still living. But why couldn’t the poor of Baltimore get this kind of treatment?
24. Hitchens and Ebert - Lions in Winter
I wrote this up last year for a similar list that I never finished. All I can say is that I agree with everything I wrote last year, and I’m glad they’re still around.
It amazes me how often we hear this same story: so many people of our generation didn’t come to reading Roger Ebert through developing a passion for movies. They developed a passion for movies through reading Roger Ebert. There was a period in the early-to-mid-90’s when every middle-class household seemed to have an Ebert movie guide. Soon thereafter, every one of his movie reviews and articles got posted on CompuServe, and soon after that he started his own website. For all those decades when Ebert was so omnipresent, it has been fashionable to rag on him for being too generous to mediocre movies and dumbing down criticism with the TV show "Siskel and Ebert" (would that most of today's TV critics could discuss movies on their level...). But what they (at times ‘we’) all missed was that Ebert’s zealous passion for all aspects of his job was clearly just a facet of his larger zeal for life: for food and drink (obviously), for books, for art, for women (and apparently they loved him right back..), for friends, for family, and anything else that enriched. But it was not until Ebert was so debilitated that he found a metier through which we could perceive his life for everything it is.
And with his Pulitzer for Criticism now thirty-five years in the past, Ebert may have only reached the peak of his influence in the past year. Horribly disfigured by thyroid cancer and left without the ability to eat, drink or speak, Ebert has taken to the age of blogging and twitter with a naturalness stunning for anyone in their late 60’s. But there’s simply no adjective to describe the stunning ease with which a person in his condition took to an entirely new technology. Perhaps he understands things about how to use the internet that younger, more fit people never could. Roger Ebert’s blog is simply like nothing else on the internet. Like clockwork, a fully formed essay arrives every week on topics ranging from loneliness to alcoholism to politics to illness. Ebert delves into the most personal crevasses of his experience, and perhaps for the first time in my experience of the blogosphere, the result is wisdom instead of TMI. Self revelation rarely results in deeper appreciation, but Ebert has a humanity that few people are capable of allowing themselves, and through his emotional generosity he’s created a community of ‘the neglected.’ The comments section is filled with posts from all sorts of people who for the first time in their lives feel confident that there is a place where they can share the most personal parts of their lives, openly and without judgement or prejudice. Go to any Ebert blogpost and you find hundreds of extraordinarily well-written essays in of themselves which seem to be written by a confluence of hundreds of articulate, lonely teenagers looking to find a place where people like them belong, unwell people who are desperate to remember how they functioned in their illness’s remission, unhappy people who never got the chance they should have for life to hear their voices. These are all people who thought the world was divided into those who are broken and those who are not, but through each other they all seem to have realize that there is no such division....Or at least there should never be..
It is through Ebert’s example that so many of them found the courage to tell stories of their own: lives torn apart by tragedy, by mental illness, by the unfairness of circumstance. And yet through Roger Ebert each of them has discovered that they have a story to tell and a public who will listen. Only a man of very deep good will could have created something so consoling, so unique and so unforseen that (I don’t use this word lightly) it has enriched the lives of so many whose lives desperately needed enrichment. Had Roger Ebert died on the operating table, life would have been far the poorer for what all these people would have lost.
Christopher Hitchens is, in so many ways, Ebert’s polar opposite: A professional quarreller who derives relish from mutual hatred, a stubbornly analog bibliophile in the Age of the Internet; a thinker with revulsion for doubt, and a contrarian who asks no corner in public debate because he gives none. And yet through all that bombast, he carries in tandem an elemental force of personality capable of convincing anyone of his beliefs simply by the gusto with which he argues. Abrasive as he is, his whole career as a political commentator is marked by an eagerness to face all challenges, stand by the tenets of his beliefs, and blithe unconcern with whom he alienates. Even if Hitch is wrong much of the time, his wrongness feels right. In France it used to be said "better right with Sartre than wrong with Raymond Aron." Sartre may have been a terribly sloppy thinker and a pernicious influence on all sorts of people (no doubt Hitchens agrees), but he defined 'engagement' in an era when so much of the world wanted to turn its back on all but the most narrow self-interests. When I was a wee college lad, I'm a little embarrassed to say that Hitchens became a personal role model - and thanks to him I styled myself a corduroy-jacket wearing, chain smoking booze hound. I had a column about various campus goings on at American University, and I put whatever gift for writing I have to writing about all sorts of people around the AU campus with the kind of hatchet job execution-style which I learned from reading the Hitch (it made at least a little more sense at the time). It was the most fun I've ever had writing, it also ruined whatever little career as a writer I could have had after college.
Political policy, in reality, should always be an extremely boring thing: full of endless meetings, charts and bar graphs. But most people come to politics through romantic notions and dreams of standing the world on its head. Even if people who believe so fervently are dangerous, they are absolutely necessary. Without developing a youthful passion for engagement and causes, there would be no one willing to carry on the endless, boring hurdles of affecting change.
I remember seeing Hitch earlier this year on Jon Stewart and thinking that he looked terrible. As it turned out, that was the very same day on which he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Within a matter of weeks, Hitch had written multiple essays on the experience of receiving the news, its development, and its metastasis. And all these were written in addition to the regular political columns and book reviews which he continued to provide. Hitch was never the loose canon everyone thought him to be, but in what may be his final illness, the world is finally discovering his human side. The barbs are still there, but for the first time in his writing life, Hitch seems to have some curiosity about and compassion for his opponents. His rage is no more temperate, but the illness seems to have given him more compassion about the people at which he rages.
If anyone doubts that in illness, Hitch is a more compassionate man. Read this essay. For the first time that I've read, he has nice things to say about his opponents. And maybe it's simply because they have nicer things to say about him than he thought were possible, but they've endowed him with the one literary gift Hitch always seemed to lack: empathy. But even as he softens, none of his other literary talents have weakened along with his body. Hitch may well be dying, but he seems determined to chronicle to chronicle his physical breakdown with all the foolhardy courage that he brought to every other endeavor. In the words of Andrew Sullivan, ‘cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against.’
(I think this is one of the great finales I’ve ever seen on TV. Nothing happens and yet...)
I like the The Wire. I just don’t think it was the greatest TV show ever made. It’s a Washingtonian’s view of Baltimore - if it can’t show up on a police blotter or in the Sun’s front page, it’s not interesting to the writers. Two of the the show’s three main writers (David Simon and George Pellecanos) grew up in Washington, and it’s at least clear to me that there are certain views of Baltimore that they’ve missed. In The Wire, Baltimore is not Baltimore, Baltimore is a metaphor for the dysfunction of American cities. Granted, I have not seen the whole show (probably I’ve seen about 18 episodes), but it’s clear that there are views of Baltimore which The Wire is plainly not interested in seeing - particularly the history of White Flight and how it contributed to creating today’s Baltimore. The Wire is interested in showing the inner workings of today’s city, but not particularly interested in how the city became what it is. It is interested in the types of people who populate the city, but not particularly interested in what makes the people individual and three-dimensional. And it’s certainly interested in decrying people whose morals are lax, but less interested in portraying the inner conflicts within them.
I can certainly concede that The Wire, in its way, is a great TV show. But it’s great TV in the same way that Emile Zola is great literature - both are examples of kind of naturalism that strives to capture the realities of people’s lives without feeling the need to portray the reality of people. The huge acclaim given The Wire was in part due to people rightly celebrating a show that gives much-needed attention to life in the projects, and partially due to prurient interest and liberal self-congratulation. There is certainly an important place for shows like The Wire, but my inner monologue tends to go apoplectic when people suggest The Wire is the best thing to come out of television. Nobody mistakes Germinal for War and Peace, yet in so many people’s estimation The Wire is a greater show than The Sopranos.
And so I’m going to make a controversial claim (or a claim that would be controversial if anybody important said it): David Simon’s next show, Treme, is better than The Wire. The reception of Treme has been decidedly mixed, and there are lots of people view the show as a terrible letdown after the The Wire’s gritty naturalism. But I personally think it’s a step forward. David Simon knows what works on television better than he did before, and the result is in many ways more interesting.
It’s not like Treme is at all missing The Wire’s grit, but the grit is no longer omnipresent. After a while, the unremitting drabness of Baltimore lives as The Wire depicts them becomes exhausting. But the bright colors of New Orleans come to us screaming with life. Yes, there is still all the murder, and loss, and depravity that you’d expect from New Orleans. But not for a moment are we allowed to forget about the New Orleans of the living. The show gives us a sense of New Orleans through its music, its art, its fashion, its cuisine - you turn the TV off craving Jambalaya. This being a show about New Orleans, it was obvious that Treme would have to delve far more deeply into local history, culture, and customs than The Wire ever did. And so we watch characters whose personalities are far more illuminated than The Wire’s characters ever got the chance to be.
Treme is far from a perfect show. It still retains all of the The Wire’s preachiness, and all its melodramatic caricatures of evil businessmen, power-mad bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, etc. Even so, the very fact that TV now has a showrunner like Simon, so willing to talk about the problems of the underclass is a great start - but it’s only a start. And now he’s making a show in large part about what makes the lives of poor people worth still living. But why couldn’t the poor of Baltimore get this kind of treatment?
24. Hitchens and Ebert - Lions in Winter
I wrote this up last year for a similar list that I never finished. All I can say is that I agree with everything I wrote last year, and I’m glad they’re still around.
It amazes me how often we hear this same story: so many people of our generation didn’t come to reading Roger Ebert through developing a passion for movies. They developed a passion for movies through reading Roger Ebert. There was a period in the early-to-mid-90’s when every middle-class household seemed to have an Ebert movie guide. Soon thereafter, every one of his movie reviews and articles got posted on CompuServe, and soon after that he started his own website. For all those decades when Ebert was so omnipresent, it has been fashionable to rag on him for being too generous to mediocre movies and dumbing down criticism with the TV show "Siskel and Ebert" (would that most of today's TV critics could discuss movies on their level...). But what they (at times ‘we’) all missed was that Ebert’s zealous passion for all aspects of his job was clearly just a facet of his larger zeal for life: for food and drink (obviously), for books, for art, for women (and apparently they loved him right back..), for friends, for family, and anything else that enriched. But it was not until Ebert was so debilitated that he found a metier through which we could perceive his life for everything it is.
And with his Pulitzer for Criticism now thirty-five years in the past, Ebert may have only reached the peak of his influence in the past year. Horribly disfigured by thyroid cancer and left without the ability to eat, drink or speak, Ebert has taken to the age of blogging and twitter with a naturalness stunning for anyone in their late 60’s. But there’s simply no adjective to describe the stunning ease with which a person in his condition took to an entirely new technology. Perhaps he understands things about how to use the internet that younger, more fit people never could. Roger Ebert’s blog is simply like nothing else on the internet. Like clockwork, a fully formed essay arrives every week on topics ranging from loneliness to alcoholism to politics to illness. Ebert delves into the most personal crevasses of his experience, and perhaps for the first time in my experience of the blogosphere, the result is wisdom instead of TMI. Self revelation rarely results in deeper appreciation, but Ebert has a humanity that few people are capable of allowing themselves, and through his emotional generosity he’s created a community of ‘the neglected.’ The comments section is filled with posts from all sorts of people who for the first time in their lives feel confident that there is a place where they can share the most personal parts of their lives, openly and without judgement or prejudice. Go to any Ebert blogpost and you find hundreds of extraordinarily well-written essays in of themselves which seem to be written by a confluence of hundreds of articulate, lonely teenagers looking to find a place where people like them belong, unwell people who are desperate to remember how they functioned in their illness’s remission, unhappy people who never got the chance they should have for life to hear their voices. These are all people who thought the world was divided into those who are broken and those who are not, but through each other they all seem to have realize that there is no such division....Or at least there should never be..
It is through Ebert’s example that so many of them found the courage to tell stories of their own: lives torn apart by tragedy, by mental illness, by the unfairness of circumstance. And yet through Roger Ebert each of them has discovered that they have a story to tell and a public who will listen. Only a man of very deep good will could have created something so consoling, so unique and so unforseen that (I don’t use this word lightly) it has enriched the lives of so many whose lives desperately needed enrichment. Had Roger Ebert died on the operating table, life would have been far the poorer for what all these people would have lost.
Christopher Hitchens is, in so many ways, Ebert’s polar opposite: A professional quarreller who derives relish from mutual hatred, a stubbornly analog bibliophile in the Age of the Internet; a thinker with revulsion for doubt, and a contrarian who asks no corner in public debate because he gives none. And yet through all that bombast, he carries in tandem an elemental force of personality capable of convincing anyone of his beliefs simply by the gusto with which he argues. Abrasive as he is, his whole career as a political commentator is marked by an eagerness to face all challenges, stand by the tenets of his beliefs, and blithe unconcern with whom he alienates. Even if Hitch is wrong much of the time, his wrongness feels right. In France it used to be said "better right with Sartre than wrong with Raymond Aron." Sartre may have been a terribly sloppy thinker and a pernicious influence on all sorts of people (no doubt Hitchens agrees), but he defined 'engagement' in an era when so much of the world wanted to turn its back on all but the most narrow self-interests. When I was a wee college lad, I'm a little embarrassed to say that Hitchens became a personal role model - and thanks to him I styled myself a corduroy-jacket wearing, chain smoking booze hound. I had a column about various campus goings on at American University, and I put whatever gift for writing I have to writing about all sorts of people around the AU campus with the kind of hatchet job execution-style which I learned from reading the Hitch (it made at least a little more sense at the time). It was the most fun I've ever had writing, it also ruined whatever little career as a writer I could have had after college.
Political policy, in reality, should always be an extremely boring thing: full of endless meetings, charts and bar graphs. But most people come to politics through romantic notions and dreams of standing the world on its head. Even if people who believe so fervently are dangerous, they are absolutely necessary. Without developing a youthful passion for engagement and causes, there would be no one willing to carry on the endless, boring hurdles of affecting change.
I remember seeing Hitch earlier this year on Jon Stewart and thinking that he looked terrible. As it turned out, that was the very same day on which he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Within a matter of weeks, Hitch had written multiple essays on the experience of receiving the news, its development, and its metastasis. And all these were written in addition to the regular political columns and book reviews which he continued to provide. Hitch was never the loose canon everyone thought him to be, but in what may be his final illness, the world is finally discovering his human side. The barbs are still there, but for the first time in his writing life, Hitch seems to have some curiosity about and compassion for his opponents. His rage is no more temperate, but the illness seems to have given him more compassion about the people at which he rages.
If anyone doubts that in illness, Hitch is a more compassionate man. Read this essay. For the first time that I've read, he has nice things to say about his opponents. And maybe it's simply because they have nicer things to say about him than he thought were possible, but they've endowed him with the one literary gift Hitch always seemed to lack: empathy. But even as he softens, none of his other literary talents have weakened along with his body. Hitch may well be dying, but he seems determined to chronicle to chronicle his physical breakdown with all the foolhardy courage that he brought to every other endeavor. In the words of Andrew Sullivan, ‘cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against.’
Saturday, October 8, 2011
800 Words: An Ambition for Culture - Part 4
IVa.
Hyde School. Winter term. I’m about to turn nineteen. Through some miracle of mercy, I’m granted an independent study to write the most abstract and absurd possible theater piece to be performed at the term’s end. As usual throughout my life, I had a grandiose idea for creating a world-changing piece of art that had no hope of materializing. My head was filled with concepts from Beckett, Boulez, Brecht and Artaud - and I’m sure I didn’t understand the first thing about any of them. True to the grandiose ambitions that have followed me at every stage in my life, I wanted to ‘create’ a ‘new’ kind of ‘theater’ that was so spare and ‘primal’ that all our basic assumptions of what constituted theater, art and life itself would be challenged. In truth, the idea was nothing deeper than Andy Kauffman, only much, much more pretentious.
So I came up with a title for the piece called ‘The Purgatory Machine,’ and finding a way to perform it had obsessed me for a whole year previously. So obsessed was I by it that I used my free hours to take naps while the rest of the school played sports. In my defense, I’d long since given up on making The Purgatory Machine a reality and simply prayed that nobody would remember that I’d basically ditched sports for a term. Nobody seemed particularly interested in what The Purgatory Machine was, which is just as well considering that I couldn’t explain it to them, particularly to my advisor, Mr. Edwards. I had spent the entire year trying to get students, teachers, even janitorial staff interested in this so that somebody might volunteer to be a part of its performance. Finally, we get to two weeks before performance time and my advisor needs to see an outline. I knew exactly what it was in my head, but I could not explain it to anyone. So I just write up an outline of the whole piece in two hours - the whole thing is a page and a half long. To my utter shock, my advisor sends me back an email saying in all-caps “THIS IS SUPERB!”. I can only surmise that he was just happy that the piece was a real thing and that I wouldn’t have to be held accountable for doing nothing, because superb it certainly was not.
And so I corral my advisor and three underclassmen to be the other actors in the piece. For two weeks, we rehearse in our spare time. The action includes lots of time in which the audience looks at a bare stage, sequences conducted in pitch dark with non-verbal grunting noises and fights choreographed between us so as to confuse the audience into thinking the performance was completely breaking down. Three days before the performance, one of the performers drops out, “it’s just too weird” he tells me. They had no idea what we were doing and I got all sorts of protests from the actors. They were right to protest, I also had barely an idea what I was doing. I wanted to tell a myth that explained the capabilities of human endeavor, language, science and philosophy. When it came time for curtain, I simply told the performers ‘if we do not get half the audience clapping and half booing, we have failed completely.’ Mr. Edwards introduced it to the audience by saying ‘We can promise you this, it will be something!’
The audience was clearly confused. A third of the audience was laughing (with or at us....did it matter?), a third was shushing the laughers, and another third sat in utter silence. To my disappointment, I did not get half the audience to boo. And to my terrible dismay, the audience gives it an ovation. More intellectual students came up to me afterwards to offer their own interpretation of it, that it was about ‘evolution’ or ‘creation’ or ‘concsiousness’ or whatever else. Some less intellectual ones came up and said ‘I didn’t understand it, but that was really funny. I didn’t think I would like it, but I really did.’
IVb.
I am named for my great-grandfather, Avraham Katz. Since Jewish genealogy is a very difficult pursuit, there isn’t all that much about him that’s verifiable. I do know that he was born around 1892 in a town near the Belarus-Lithuania border called Maladzyechna. Around the time of the Russian Revolution he married a local girl named Tirtza Gordon. By 1920 they were married and Tirtza became pregnant with my Bubbie, Malkeh Katz. Would Malkeh grow up in a war-torn country or would she grow up in a place that gave her a chance to know peace and prosperity? And so for the entire year of 1920, my great-grandparents waited in the Free City of Danzig to find a ship that would take them to America.
Like almost all my immigrant relatives, Avraham (now Abe) Katz was a Baltimore shopkeeper. Like all my immigrant relatives, he worked his way up from nothing. He made sure that my Bubbie had a full education put her through both college and graduate school.
Though he had no formal education outside of the Cheder, Abe himself was a well-rounded man. Bubbie once described to me how her father would send her around Baltimore to comb the libraries for every Yiddish and Russian book she could find - and apparently he had a particular fondness for Tolstoy. When I first read The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, I could not escape the thought that my great-grandfather must have been very much like Grandma Lausch. Abe Katz was barely a lower-middle-class resident of the tenements, but he believed in culture and believed in the importance of imparting its power to his daughter. In the late 30’s when the Metropolitan Opera used to come through Baltimore, he used every spare penny he had to make sure that my Bubbie could go to every one of its performances. He was also a huge fan of wrestling. He would go to as many matches as he could find in Baltimore. My mother tells stories of watching him shout at the TV whenever a wrestling match was on.
Aside from my Hebrew name, his great legacy is Mollie Witow, my Bubbie. Now 90 years young, last month was the first Baltimore election in sixty-two years in which she was not a judge. She has spent her life in pursuit of the culture to which her father gifted her. No concert in Baltimore is left unheard, no movie unseen, no book unread, no gallery unviewed, no country untravelled, no academic lecture unlistened, no community college course untaken. But no girl from Patterson Park could be as highbrow a snob as a description like that could make you think. Over the years, she and I have gone together to baseball games, to see Lewis Black at the Baltimore Improv, to eat tuna sandwiches at every diner in Baltimore. She once even asked me to go to a Matisyahu concert with her (there are some things you won’t even do for your grandmother...). The most enthusiastic I have ever seen her after a movie was when she came to our house after seeing Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. When her parents came to America, it was so my Bubbie could live a life exactly like the one she has.
IVc.
Fourth or fifth grade. I’m sitting in the Krieger Auditorium at Solomon Schechter Day School with a room full of kids no older than eleven or twelve. An actor comes onto the stage. He tells us that he is a nearly blind old man named Claude Monet who cannot see any of our faces. He proceeds to tell us his life story - his joys, his sorrows (mostly sorrows) and his passions. With every new story comes a new painting which he places upon the easel. Every new painting provokes a massive gasp through the audience - as though every student in that auditorium seems overwhelmed that something like a Monet painting can exist. Monet will never overwhelm many of us again.
IVd.
Hyde School. I’ve just turned seventeen. It’s taken me six months at my new school to meet my best friend of those years, Chris Wyton. At that point, I still have no idea whom Alec Wyton is. I only know is that I’m hanging out with a kid I’ve barely said a word to for six months, in spite of the fact that we’re known as our grade’s ‘music guys.’ As music guys, the conversation is mostly about music and I pretend, as I often do, to have any idea what rock people are talking about. He tells me to get my violin, he leaves to get his guitar. Five minutes later, we’re outside of Hyde’s Cultural Center with the 1,100 seat theater which the school barely uses. He starts playing. I have no idea what the song is. But after thirty seconds I get the harmonies and I improvise around it. No sheet music, no preparation. 1 Corinthians 15:52
IVe.
January 2001: I and a few other Hyde students risk expulsion (I come closest) to compel the school to let a group of 16 students go down to Washington DC and protest George W. Bush’s inauguration.
Nine months later: I'm at AU. And as we used to say, “9/11 changed everything.”
June 2002: I go back up to Hyde to see the graduation of my friends in the next class. I’m talking to a radical friend from Hyde and an even more radical teacher. The teacher storms out of our conversation when I say that I could see why the Afghan Invasion might be a good idea.
February 2003: I’m an active supporter of the Iraq War on the most political campus in America (by a few million miles). Shouting matches are a thrice daily occurrence for all of us. Friendships between all sorts of people both pro and anti grow strained. One or two break apart.
September 2004: My friend KW and I are being interviewed on AU radio for being the only liberals on campus who support the Iraq War.
November 2005: I arrive in Israel a full-fledged liberal hawk who constantly rails at my political friends for opposing our wars, therefore betraying the liberalism of FDR, Truman and Kennedy. I can quote Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, Michael Ignatieff and Kenneth Pollack to them in my sleep (and probably did). I’m about as close to neo-conservatism as you could get while still claiming to hate neocons. But when you’re in a seven-month sojourn into the desert with weeks spent camping, fiddling with guitarists every day,drinking at the bars until 5 every morning, even your most tactfully worded support for war can sound like support for General Franco.
July 2006: I return from two-thirds of a year in Israel on the very day the Lebanon War begins. For eight months, I dithered over whether to become an Israeli resident in a manner that would impress Hamlet. Finally, I make up my mind to come home and rebuild my life from the place where it started. Even with a war raging, it’s a decision I instantly regret. Some of my best friends in the world are still in Israel. I have no job, no prospect for a job, and no desire to look for a job. Instead, I obsessively update a blog on the Israel/Lebanon War which I’m fairly certain was never read by anybody. I have twenty or more posts a day, often just cutting and pasting the texts of articles into posts (properly attributed of course). Most days I have a post of my own which goes upwards of 3-5000 words. I didn’t even know that I had 3-5000 words to say about Israel, but I certainly thought I did at the time.
Everything written on that blog is long since lost to that graveyard where deleted blogs go when you’re in too embarrassed by your writing to save it to a flash drive. But at the time, it all seemed terribly important. I’ve become a dyed-in-the-wool Israel ambassador gleefully seizing any opportunity to debate a tangentially Israel related topic. Back in Washington, I get plenty of chances - particularly when the alcohol is flowing. It usually starts with an innocent comment, my retort ‘whatd’ya mean....’, the entire room except the offending person leaving and one of them poking their head into the room once every half-hour to check if I’m done yet.
On July 29th, 2006, I receive this letter.
Dear Mr. Tucker,
My name is Mal’ak (a pseudonym), I'm a 18- year old university student (well actually I still did not start studying but hopefully I will at La Sorbonne).
First of all, I would like you to know that I found your writing great. It displays great knowledge about the Middle East. But I think you were bit biased. I'm not saying this because of anything, (I actually hate what Hezbollah did), I just think that writing should never be biased if it is meant to intensify the truth. Well, I know I'm still young and un-experienced but I think you missed a very important issue which is childrren.
Mr. Tucker, don't you think that innocent civilians and especially children, on both sides(whether in Lebanon or Isreal) are the ones who are paying the price? I actually think Hezbollah are making a very big mistake by creating mini-hidden bases between houses in Lebanon.
I trully believe that this war has been planned for, like most wars now. Besides, where is Iran from all this? Isn't it the main catalyst in this crisis?
I'm sorry if I disturbed you, I just wish we could exchnage opinions because I'm really very intrested in discussing this event with you.
Thank you for reading my email.
With high hopes you will reply to me,
Thus begins one of the most fascinating friendships of my life. Mal’ak is a Palestinian business student living in Amman. She never did get to La Sorbonne, but that made her all the more remarkable. She parades her commitments publicly in a country where public commitment means much, much more than it does in the United States. She’s an extraordinarily talented artist whose work could astonish the world if somebody were smart enough to notice her talent. For five years we’ve been sending letters to each other, the only day we’ve even so much as g-chatted is the day Mubarak falls.
January 2007: I’m back in the States, taking poli-sci grad classes at Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore campus. How the fuck could I have supported the Iraq War?
Hyde School. Winter term. I’m about to turn nineteen. Through some miracle of mercy, I’m granted an independent study to write the most abstract and absurd possible theater piece to be performed at the term’s end. As usual throughout my life, I had a grandiose idea for creating a world-changing piece of art that had no hope of materializing. My head was filled with concepts from Beckett, Boulez, Brecht and Artaud - and I’m sure I didn’t understand the first thing about any of them. True to the grandiose ambitions that have followed me at every stage in my life, I wanted to ‘create’ a ‘new’ kind of ‘theater’ that was so spare and ‘primal’ that all our basic assumptions of what constituted theater, art and life itself would be challenged. In truth, the idea was nothing deeper than Andy Kauffman, only much, much more pretentious.
So I came up with a title for the piece called ‘The Purgatory Machine,’ and finding a way to perform it had obsessed me for a whole year previously. So obsessed was I by it that I used my free hours to take naps while the rest of the school played sports. In my defense, I’d long since given up on making The Purgatory Machine a reality and simply prayed that nobody would remember that I’d basically ditched sports for a term. Nobody seemed particularly interested in what The Purgatory Machine was, which is just as well considering that I couldn’t explain it to them, particularly to my advisor, Mr. Edwards. I had spent the entire year trying to get students, teachers, even janitorial staff interested in this so that somebody might volunteer to be a part of its performance. Finally, we get to two weeks before performance time and my advisor needs to see an outline. I knew exactly what it was in my head, but I could not explain it to anyone. So I just write up an outline of the whole piece in two hours - the whole thing is a page and a half long. To my utter shock, my advisor sends me back an email saying in all-caps “THIS IS SUPERB!”. I can only surmise that he was just happy that the piece was a real thing and that I wouldn’t have to be held accountable for doing nothing, because superb it certainly was not.
And so I corral my advisor and three underclassmen to be the other actors in the piece. For two weeks, we rehearse in our spare time. The action includes lots of time in which the audience looks at a bare stage, sequences conducted in pitch dark with non-verbal grunting noises and fights choreographed between us so as to confuse the audience into thinking the performance was completely breaking down. Three days before the performance, one of the performers drops out, “it’s just too weird” he tells me. They had no idea what we were doing and I got all sorts of protests from the actors. They were right to protest, I also had barely an idea what I was doing. I wanted to tell a myth that explained the capabilities of human endeavor, language, science and philosophy. When it came time for curtain, I simply told the performers ‘if we do not get half the audience clapping and half booing, we have failed completely.’ Mr. Edwards introduced it to the audience by saying ‘We can promise you this, it will be something!’
The audience was clearly confused. A third of the audience was laughing (with or at us....did it matter?), a third was shushing the laughers, and another third sat in utter silence. To my disappointment, I did not get half the audience to boo. And to my terrible dismay, the audience gives it an ovation. More intellectual students came up to me afterwards to offer their own interpretation of it, that it was about ‘evolution’ or ‘creation’ or ‘concsiousness’ or whatever else. Some less intellectual ones came up and said ‘I didn’t understand it, but that was really funny. I didn’t think I would like it, but I really did.’
IVb.
I am named for my great-grandfather, Avraham Katz. Since Jewish genealogy is a very difficult pursuit, there isn’t all that much about him that’s verifiable. I do know that he was born around 1892 in a town near the Belarus-Lithuania border called Maladzyechna. Around the time of the Russian Revolution he married a local girl named Tirtza Gordon. By 1920 they were married and Tirtza became pregnant with my Bubbie, Malkeh Katz. Would Malkeh grow up in a war-torn country or would she grow up in a place that gave her a chance to know peace and prosperity? And so for the entire year of 1920, my great-grandparents waited in the Free City of Danzig to find a ship that would take them to America.
Like almost all my immigrant relatives, Avraham (now Abe) Katz was a Baltimore shopkeeper. Like all my immigrant relatives, he worked his way up from nothing. He made sure that my Bubbie had a full education put her through both college and graduate school.
Though he had no formal education outside of the Cheder, Abe himself was a well-rounded man. Bubbie once described to me how her father would send her around Baltimore to comb the libraries for every Yiddish and Russian book she could find - and apparently he had a particular fondness for Tolstoy. When I first read The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, I could not escape the thought that my great-grandfather must have been very much like Grandma Lausch. Abe Katz was barely a lower-middle-class resident of the tenements, but he believed in culture and believed in the importance of imparting its power to his daughter. In the late 30’s when the Metropolitan Opera used to come through Baltimore, he used every spare penny he had to make sure that my Bubbie could go to every one of its performances. He was also a huge fan of wrestling. He would go to as many matches as he could find in Baltimore. My mother tells stories of watching him shout at the TV whenever a wrestling match was on.
Aside from my Hebrew name, his great legacy is Mollie Witow, my Bubbie. Now 90 years young, last month was the first Baltimore election in sixty-two years in which she was not a judge. She has spent her life in pursuit of the culture to which her father gifted her. No concert in Baltimore is left unheard, no movie unseen, no book unread, no gallery unviewed, no country untravelled, no academic lecture unlistened, no community college course untaken. But no girl from Patterson Park could be as highbrow a snob as a description like that could make you think. Over the years, she and I have gone together to baseball games, to see Lewis Black at the Baltimore Improv, to eat tuna sandwiches at every diner in Baltimore. She once even asked me to go to a Matisyahu concert with her (there are some things you won’t even do for your grandmother...). The most enthusiastic I have ever seen her after a movie was when she came to our house after seeing Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. When her parents came to America, it was so my Bubbie could live a life exactly like the one she has.
IVc.
Fourth or fifth grade. I’m sitting in the Krieger Auditorium at Solomon Schechter Day School with a room full of kids no older than eleven or twelve. An actor comes onto the stage. He tells us that he is a nearly blind old man named Claude Monet who cannot see any of our faces. He proceeds to tell us his life story - his joys, his sorrows (mostly sorrows) and his passions. With every new story comes a new painting which he places upon the easel. Every new painting provokes a massive gasp through the audience - as though every student in that auditorium seems overwhelmed that something like a Monet painting can exist. Monet will never overwhelm many of us again.
IVd.
Hyde School. I’ve just turned seventeen. It’s taken me six months at my new school to meet my best friend of those years, Chris Wyton. At that point, I still have no idea whom Alec Wyton is. I only know is that I’m hanging out with a kid I’ve barely said a word to for six months, in spite of the fact that we’re known as our grade’s ‘music guys.’ As music guys, the conversation is mostly about music and I pretend, as I often do, to have any idea what rock people are talking about. He tells me to get my violin, he leaves to get his guitar. Five minutes later, we’re outside of Hyde’s Cultural Center with the 1,100 seat theater which the school barely uses. He starts playing. I have no idea what the song is. But after thirty seconds I get the harmonies and I improvise around it. No sheet music, no preparation. 1 Corinthians 15:52
IVe.
January 2001: I and a few other Hyde students risk expulsion (I come closest) to compel the school to let a group of 16 students go down to Washington DC and protest George W. Bush’s inauguration.
Nine months later: I'm at AU. And as we used to say, “9/11 changed everything.”
June 2002: I go back up to Hyde to see the graduation of my friends in the next class. I’m talking to a radical friend from Hyde and an even more radical teacher. The teacher storms out of our conversation when I say that I could see why the Afghan Invasion might be a good idea.
February 2003: I’m an active supporter of the Iraq War on the most political campus in America (by a few million miles). Shouting matches are a thrice daily occurrence for all of us. Friendships between all sorts of people both pro and anti grow strained. One or two break apart.
September 2004: My friend KW and I are being interviewed on AU radio for being the only liberals on campus who support the Iraq War.
November 2005: I arrive in Israel a full-fledged liberal hawk who constantly rails at my political friends for opposing our wars, therefore betraying the liberalism of FDR, Truman and Kennedy. I can quote Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, Michael Ignatieff and Kenneth Pollack to them in my sleep (and probably did). I’m about as close to neo-conservatism as you could get while still claiming to hate neocons. But when you’re in a seven-month sojourn into the desert with weeks spent camping, fiddling with guitarists every day,drinking at the bars until 5 every morning, even your most tactfully worded support for war can sound like support for General Franco.
July 2006: I return from two-thirds of a year in Israel on the very day the Lebanon War begins. For eight months, I dithered over whether to become an Israeli resident in a manner that would impress Hamlet. Finally, I make up my mind to come home and rebuild my life from the place where it started. Even with a war raging, it’s a decision I instantly regret. Some of my best friends in the world are still in Israel. I have no job, no prospect for a job, and no desire to look for a job. Instead, I obsessively update a blog on the Israel/Lebanon War which I’m fairly certain was never read by anybody. I have twenty or more posts a day, often just cutting and pasting the texts of articles into posts (properly attributed of course). Most days I have a post of my own which goes upwards of 3-5000 words. I didn’t even know that I had 3-5000 words to say about Israel, but I certainly thought I did at the time.
Everything written on that blog is long since lost to that graveyard where deleted blogs go when you’re in too embarrassed by your writing to save it to a flash drive. But at the time, it all seemed terribly important. I’ve become a dyed-in-the-wool Israel ambassador gleefully seizing any opportunity to debate a tangentially Israel related topic. Back in Washington, I get plenty of chances - particularly when the alcohol is flowing. It usually starts with an innocent comment, my retort ‘whatd’ya mean....’, the entire room except the offending person leaving and one of them poking their head into the room once every half-hour to check if I’m done yet.
On July 29th, 2006, I receive this letter.
Dear Mr. Tucker,
My name is Mal’ak (a pseudonym), I'm a 18- year old university student (well actually I still did not start studying but hopefully I will at La Sorbonne).
First of all, I would like you to know that I found your writing great. It displays great knowledge about the Middle East. But I think you were bit biased. I'm not saying this because of anything, (I actually hate what Hezbollah did), I just think that writing should never be biased if it is meant to intensify the truth. Well, I know I'm still young and un-experienced but I think you missed a very important issue which is childrren.
Mr. Tucker, don't you think that innocent civilians and especially children, on both sides(whether in Lebanon or Isreal) are the ones who are paying the price? I actually think Hezbollah are making a very big mistake by creating mini-hidden bases between houses in Lebanon.
I trully believe that this war has been planned for, like most wars now. Besides, where is Iran from all this? Isn't it the main catalyst in this crisis?
I'm sorry if I disturbed you, I just wish we could exchnage opinions because I'm really very intrested in discussing this event with you.
Thank you for reading my email.
With high hopes you will reply to me,
Thus begins one of the most fascinating friendships of my life. Mal’ak is a Palestinian business student living in Amman. She never did get to La Sorbonne, but that made her all the more remarkable. She parades her commitments publicly in a country where public commitment means much, much more than it does in the United States. She’s an extraordinarily talented artist whose work could astonish the world if somebody were smart enough to notice her talent. For five years we’ve been sending letters to each other, the only day we’ve even so much as g-chatted is the day Mubarak falls.
January 2007: I’m back in the States, taking poli-sci grad classes at Johns Hopkins’ Baltimore campus. How the fuck could I have supported the Iraq War?
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