Arguably - Christopher Hitchens

a post from November 2011
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Writing is a craft and like all crafts it takes practice to become a master. Christopher Hitchens has been writing short form essays for 40 years now and he's gotten very good at it. So good that he may be the finest polemicist working in the English language today. In the crazy circus of contemporary letters it's nice to read someone whose prose uses the right word at the right time and whose cup foameth over with intellect.  Arguably, is his latest collection of book reviews and his longer pieces from Slate and Vanity Fair. Reading Hitch is like watching a skilled circus performer wow an audience with his derring do. Hitch often seems like a high wire walker who has no alternative but to keep going as turning back wd be fatal. The latter comes to mind when reading Hitch's attempt to square his advocacy for the invasion of Iraq with his acerbic and angry opposition to the first Gulf War in 1991. Hitch's logic is, at best, strained: 1991 had a clear casus belli, a clear UN mandate and a very clear mission and Hitch's pitch that the case for invasion was stronger under George W. Bush is bizarre. The Iraq essays are definitely the lowlight of the collection. Hitch argues with straw man pacifists and conspiracy theorists but he doesn't engage with someone like Tony Judt who is at least as well read as he is. I'm no pacifist but I don't see how any reasonable person can think the Iraq of 2011 is a better place than the Iraq of 2001 as Hitch repeatedly claims it is. 
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The finest parts of Arguably are the sections on literature where Hitchens shines a fresh light on some familiar texts. Hitch's enthusiasms are mostly infectious: WH Auden, George Orwell, PG Wodehouse, Gore Vidal's fictions, Philip Larkin's poetry. Hitchens is largely batting on his home field here and I wish he'd chanced his arm a bit by venturing into the rougher American terrain of Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy etc. But perhaps that's something that's just a bit beyond him. Although Hitchens took out American citizenship and knows the Constitution backwards no one will ever mistake the old chap for anything but an Englishman abroad. 
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Apart from the stuff on Iraq the weakest essays in Arguably are where Hitchens dips his toes into the world of science and mathematics, here he is especially credulous and even a little naive. Hitch seems to believe everything the Astronomer Royal or Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins has told him and hasn't the intellectual background to wonder whether these men are as significant as they think they are within their own fields. (Hawking and Dawkins for example have never come close to winning a Nobel Prize). Hitchens seems to think that science just exists "out there" without further need for interpretation and the work of Kurt Godel, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Feyerabend seems to have passed him by. Hitch is a little bit wide eyed when discussing people like Dawkins who aren't really scientists at all, merely science writers. Hitch's atheism is untroubled by Max Tegmark's work on infinity or Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis.  
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But ultimately these are minor quibbles which irritated me but might not irritate other people. Hitch has stage IV cancer of the oesophagus and has been fading recently. I hope he's around for a long time because I sure will miss him when he's gone. I'll miss his intelligence, his humour, his honesty, his insights and most of all the fact that even when you disagree with him you are usually too bowled over by his prose to complain very loudly.

Books Of The Year

Its been another great reading year for me: so far I've got through 54 books in a lot of different genres and categories and by luck (or good choices) very few of them have been terrible. The ones below are those which I gave an 'A' grade to in the little book journal that I've been keeping since 1994. As usual I'm going to do a separate list for crime fiction novels later in December and I think that this year I'm also going to do a separate list for science fiction because I read a surprising number of great sci-fi novels. If I had to say one bad thing about the year's reading it would be a lack of a decent history book; all the big history books that came out this year were disappointing (to me, anyway) and felt like a retread of earlier books and ideas. Anyway here are the books that got 'A' grades in my journal in the chronological order in which I finished them: 

Arguably - Christopher Hitchens He's still wrong about the invasion of Iraq and his bizarre hero worship of the less than saintly Thomas Jefferson but he's right about so many other topics and his writing style is masterful. Hitch we miss you. 

Post Office - Charles Bukowski For those of us who have worked in a post office this book will give you chills of recognition and maybe a laugh or two.

Platform - Michel Houellebecq The funniest book I read all year. Its about sex tourism in Thailand from a French misanthrope novelist who lives next door to Shannon airport because its so wet, dark and miserable there. 

The Collected Essays Of George Orwell 1400 pages of amazing stuff. A must read for the serious bibliophile.

The Art Of Fielding - Chad Harbach Best debut novel I read all year. A wonderful book about baseball, friendship, love and loss. 

Lassie Come Home - Eric Knight I read this to my daughter Sophie and I have to say that the book just knocked my socks off. This is an intelligent, gripping wonderful children's novel with terrific adventure and character development. And unlike that awful Black Beauty with its talking horses, Knight actually gets into the mind of Lassie in a very convincing manner. 

Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel I give up on this novel for 3 years but when I finally started it again I read the whole thing in three frenzied days. A masterpiece. 

Bring Up The Bodies - Hilary Mantel Mantel's Thomas Cromwell is one of the greatest characters in modern fiction. Smart, cunning, irreverent, compassionate, deft, ruthless. . .you run out of superlatives describing this sixteenth century badass. 

The Red Queen - Matt Ridley Sexual selection and evolution explained in a witty and erudite book.

HHhH - Laurent Binet The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague by the Czech underground as told in a very French dry, clever and postmodern manner. 

High Fidelty - Nick Hornby Took me a LONG time to come round to Nick Hornby but this book is a deserved modern classic that dares to suggest that - gasp - men have feelings too. If you're thinking of getting someone Telegraph Avenue as a Christmas present, don't do it, get them this instead.

Cooking With Fernat Branca - James Hamilton Paterson Did I say that Platform was the funniest book I read all year? Ok, thats only because I forgot about this. This is at least as funny as Platform and the "UFO" scene had me in tears...

Why Does the World Exist - Jim Holt A nice exploration of cosmogony and existentialism in a clear style without any footnotes. Nothing particularly new here but its good to see a popular book talking about these themes.

The Fortress Of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem I've had a while to think about this book now and my opinion hasn't changed. The best novel I read all year and a strong contender for the best American novel of the century so far.  

Is Christopher Hitchens In Hell?

The short answer is: of course not. Hell doesn't exist. Hell was invented in the first century AD to keep back-sliding Christian converts in line. Before then there were only vague concepts of an afterlife in the Hebrew Bible; and in the Greek and Roman mythologies Hades was a gloomy sort of half life. And how could hell actually work for humans? We evolved from arboreal lemur like creatures which in turn evolved from amphibians and if you want to go all the way back a billion years ago, our distant distant ancestors were bacteria floating in the primordial soup. Consider these bacteria. If you take penicillin to kill the bacteria in your lungs during a spot of flu do the dead bacteria go to a bacterial heaven? Do house flies and viruses go to heaven? At what point along our evolutionary journey did homo sapien heaven evolve? I hope that you can see that this is a reductio ad absurdum. 
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The reason I bring this up is because of the gleeful tone of some of the Hitchens obituaries and commentary. Of course it is to be expected from irony challenged, petty crypto Stalinists such as Alexander Cockburn but it's more surprising when you encounter triumphalist bile from theologians. Islamic and Catholic apologists seem to be the most ecstatic about Hitchens's death I suppose because they suffered the most under Hitch's withering attacks. Jewish rabbis who have debated Hitchens (and mostly lost badly) have had praise for Hitch's humanism and intellect. Even the fundamentalist Protesant pastor Douglas Wilson (one of Hitch's better adversaries) wrote a thoughtful commentary on his dealings and debates with Hitch over the years. So what is the religious argument that Hitchens deserves to be in hell? From the doctrinaire Christian theologians it seems to be this: Hitchens refused to believe in a God or an afterlife that his intellect told him was completely bogus. That's it. That is sufficient reason for him to go to hell. For using his brain and following the dictates of logic and for not keeping quiet about it. Personally I'd be ashamed to make an argument like this, but I suppose that this is what passes for philosophy these days in the mighty religion of St Francis, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre. 
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A more interesting assault on the non existence of the afterlife can be inferred from the work of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. Or in the lovely late Isaac Asimov short story The Last Answer which has been uploaded here.

In The Beginning Was The Word

Irish Presbyterianism must be one of the starkest religious faiths in the world. The pews are wood, there are no statues of saints or Madonnas, there is no incense, you don't kneel, there are no ecstatic visions, there are no earnest young people with guitars, you won't find a cross in any Irish Presbyterian church and there are certainly no moving/disturbing depictions of Jesus in the midst of his passion. Services can initially seem pretty dull. Psalms are sung (psalmody) followed by eighteenth century hymns and a solemn sermon, but then you get the Biblical exegesis and for me as a kid this is where things picked up. The Minister and sometimes the Elders read and analysed the King James Bible and the King James has some of most beautiful language and arresting imagery anywhere in English literature. I was thinking about this as I read Christopher Hitchens's latest piece in Vanity Fair which is a loving look at the KJB. No this isn't a deathbed conversion from the world's most famous atheist, it's an appreciation of what someone once called "the only worthwhile thing ever done by a committee." The prose of the KJB is so wonderful and rich and sturdy it has never been bettered. Even today novelists like Cormac McCarthy are largely in its thrall. I for one have no time at all for any of these modern translations and so called improvements. I mean can this be improved upon?

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;

Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over.

I have always liked what George Bernard Shaw puts in the ironic mouth of Henry Higgins: "Remember [Eliza] that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon."

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You can read the Hitchens piece in Vanity Fair, here.
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But you know, even the word has its limits...if you want to know how to really get people back into the churches take a look at this:

National Treasures

I was reading an nterview with Judy Dench in The Guardian over the weekend and Dame Judy said that the one thing that she couldn't stand was when people called her "a national treasure". Of course, with apologies to her, she is a national treasure. Anyway I thought I would compile my own list of 10 other, N.T.'s all from the UK (the concept of national treasure somehow doesnt really work elsewhere):
1. Patrick Moore: Still presenting the Sky At Night on the BBC, as he has been so doing for the last 53 years.
2. David Attenborough: Feisty, curious and energetic as ever.
3. Christopher Hitchens: smart, funny, mad, bad and dangerous to know and STILL kicking. Even when he's way off base he's entertainingly way off base.
4. Patrick Leigh Fermor: The travel writer's travel writer. He's now well into his nineties and apparently going strong. If you haven't read A Time Of Gifts then stop what you are doing right now and order the book from somewhere.
5. Helen Mirren: she can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. Yes, even Caligula.
6. Stephen Fry: the youngest national treasure on my list, but he is, isn't he? Bless him. He writes, he acts, he directs. My only problem with Fry is that QI programme which I find a bit obnoxious.
7. Robert Plant: utterly confounding expectations after all these years. He can't quite sing those high register Zep songs anymore so he's had to improvise, and more power to him for that. He likes what he likes and he does what he does and he's charming and funny as this little appearance on Letterman shows.

8. Michael Caine: always good even when he's bad if that makes any sense. Everybody in Britain can do a Michael Caine impersonation. Some better than others.

9. Stephen Hawking: Hawking still hasn't got a Nobel Prize, which makes me ask, what's the point of Nobel Prizes then?

10 (tied) Ruth Rendell and PD James ... the Queens of crime, par excellence.

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Are there any American National Treasures?  I dont know if the concept really works across the Atlantic but I suppose... Gore Vidal, Jacques Barzun, Camille Paglia, Bob Barker, Werner Herzog, Bob Uecker, John Daly, Clint Eastwood...???

Three Weeks In Cairo

Back in 1999 Leah and I spent three weeks in Cairo staying at our friend Jonathan's place on the west bank of the Nile. We weren't planning to spend that long crashing at his pad but the day we were supposed to leave on the bus back to Jerusalem the khamseen (the annual desert sandstorm) hit and we ended up spending another week there. I liked Cairo very much. The people were friendly, the sights were spectacular and we ate very very well. Pigeon stuffed with lamb I remember as well felafel, tabbouleh, hummus and my favourite dish of all: fuul medames. We mostly walked places but I do remember a few hair raising taxi rides that ended in - fortunately - minor collisions. Obviously as a tourist you have to take in the pyramids, which we did so early in the morning that there was no one else around at all. (There had been a fairly recent terrorist attack at Luxor which also deterred the crowds). We had been warned in advance that the taxi driver would tell us that "today was a holiday and that the pyramids were closed but his cousin could get us in the back way for a small fee" which he did indeed say or words to that effect. This well known, uhm, pyramid scheme, was a popular con at the time. Jonathan had written down something in Arabic to tell him and I said it and it did the trick because he then took us straight to the pyramids.

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The other highlight of our trip was the Egyptian Museum which contains a spectacular collection of Egyptiana. We ended up going there twice and still barely covered everything it had to offer. We mostly had the place to ourselves because another recent terrorist attack had been on German tourists at the museum and the resulting headlines were still keeping people away. I suppose even then there was a feeling in Cairo that violence was just under the surface and the city was ready to explode. Certainly the Egyptians we spoke to felt that and were completely disillusioned with the Mubarak regime. (One day we visited the tomb of the last Shah of Iran who is buried in a Cairo mosque and you'd think that his death in exile would be a useful momento mori for the current govt.)

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Come an evening we would eat out cheaply (and well) and then go down to the local tea shop and smoke sheesha pipes until late - which was a very pleasant way to unwind. Women weren't supposed to smoke in tea shops but no one seemed to mind Leah being there and no one ever hassled us. On one occasion after we had gone to see Sufi dancers we took a walk in a part of town we didn't know that well and I got a pipe that contained something a good bit stronger than apple tobacco. I'm not sure if it was hashish or opium but whatever it was I was baked out of my mind and barely made it home.

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Eventually it came time for us to leave town and we took the bus across the Sinai from Cairo to Jerusalem. I haven't been back to Egypt since but I would like to go again and I hope that the current drama being played out in the streets results in a government that satisfies the people and is stable enough to encourage visitors to return to this great city.
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Christopher Hitchens, who I'm happy to say is still alive and kicking, has an interesting piece on Egypt in Slate, here.