Dickens

Charles Dickens’s Inner Child by Hitchens

The Dark Side of Dickens by Hitchens

Hitchens

Article on Hitchens. Came up in discussion about Bill Keller. I don't remember it being the best piece.

public intellectuals

Do public intellectuals exist anymore? by Noah Cruickshank

THE DISAPPEARED: How the fatwa changed a writer’s life. BY SALMAN RUSHDIE

Charlie Rose interviews:

Rushdie

Martin Amis

'Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,’ the Final Season by Mike Hale

Staying Power. review of ‘Mortality,’ by Christopher Hitchens by Christopher Buckley

Martin Amis interviewed by Jacob Weisberg

The Nervous Breakdown of the GOP

Still Talking to Hitch: Author Martin Amis on coping with the loss of his best friend Christopher Hitchens.

The Problem With Porn

Remembering Christopher Hitchens by David Remnick

The speaker that struck me most deeply was the first: James Fenton. A superior poet, and perhaps the greatest reader of poetry in the English-speaking world, Fenton opened the program by reciting verse of his own:

What would the dead want from us
Watching from their cave?
Would they have us forever howling?
Would they have us rave
Or disfigure ourselves, or be strangled
Like some ancient emperor’s slave?

None of my dead friends were emperors
With such exorbitant tastes
And none of them were so vengeful
As to have all their friends waste
Waste quite away in sorrow
Disfigured and defaced.

I think the dead would want us
To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.

And time would find them generous
As they used to be
And what else would they want from us
Than an honoured place in our memory,
favourite room, a hallowed chair,
Privilege and celebrity?

And so the dead might cease to grieve
And we might make amends
And there might be a pact between
Dead friends and living friends.
What our dead friends would want from us
Would be such living friends.

Birthday anniversary discussion on Charlie Rose show with Rose, James Fenton, Salman Rushie, Ian, McEwan, and Martin Amis.

Charlie Rose had a show on the anniversary of Hitchens's birthday yesterday which included Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.

They captured how generous and democratic he was socially with impeccable manners and had one of the best senses of humor around. He was also very tough and "honorable." Rushdie who is very funny, describes himself crying he was laughing so hard with Hitchens one night and McEwan said he'd get stomach cramps from all the laughter. Amis had some great anecdotes also. And Fenton was right to describe him as the spirit of '68.

Rushdie's memoir will drop Sept. 17. It's called Joseph Anton after the name he took when in hiding from Iran's supreme leader's fatwa. He derived it from the first names of two of his favorite authors, Conrad and Chekov.

HBO picked up Game of Thrones for a third season.

Rushdie on Hitchens

Charles Dickens's Inner Child by Hitchens

What a weird year 2011 was. The highlight was meeting Laetitia Sadier. Steely Dan at the Ravinia Theater was amazing. Also, Calexico covering Love was a great moment. Also, Archers of Loaf rocking out at the Onion Blockparty. The movie Drive was cool. Christina Romer wrote about NGP level targeting, Bernanke was annoyed when asked about it and a Time columnist wrote in support of it. Chicago Fed President Charles Evans stepping up and arguing that the Fed should do more.

The fall of Saddam led to Tahir square and Dan "Double D" Davies sparked Occupy Wall Street with a Crooked Timber post. The European Feedback Cycle of Doom kicks in after the ECB raised rates in April. Muammar Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden, Václav Havel, Kim Jong-il and Christopher Hitchens all die.

Pepper-spraying cop at UC Davis.

Hitchens on North Korea.

Christopher Hitchens, Consumate Writer, Brilliant Friend by Ian McEwan

Hitchens on the Daily Show

Victor Navasky on Hitchens

Andrew Sullivan on Hitchens

Timothy Garton Ash

David Corn

Fred Kaplan

Good Vanity Fair video montage on Hitchens. 

It was so funny to see him on CSPAN early on.

Graydon Carter remembers Hitchens

People Hitchens spoke highly of: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Jessica Mitford, Ian McEwan, Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer, Hunter Thompson among others he know. From history, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, George Eliot among many others.

Slate's Jacob Weisberg on Hitchens

I ran a Hitchens fansite and met him a few times and corresponded with him a few times more. He was very generous, kind, funny and cheeky.

Most memorable was having a drink with him at Café Loup in Greenwich Village and attending a party at his DC apartment with a Pakistani politician, Grover Norquist, and a hot female conservative commentator among others.

Benjamins Schwartz at the Atlantic

We shared a great admiration for his friend Gene Genovese--a fervent Catholic, a man who at different times in his life was dedicated to a vision of the left and of the right that Christopher equally opposed. And we shared a fondness for one of Genovese's rather martial and uncongenial passages:

In irreconcilable confrontations, as comrade Stalin...clearly understood, it is precisely the most admirable, manly, principled, and, by their own lights, moral opponents who have to be killed; the others can be frightened or bought.

Just as Orwell, when an adult, was drawn to his old Etonian classmate, the high Tory Anthony Powell, not because of Powell's literary promise, but because of his military bearing and position, so Hitchens most cherished what he called (quoting his father) "sand"--grit. Christopher was haunted by his father--whom he called "the commander," and in a piece I asked him to write on Churchill, he wrote a throwaway line that I've always found hugely illuminating:  

My father, a Royal Navy commander, was on board H.M.S. Jamaica when it helped to deal the coup de grâce to the Nazi warship Scharnhorst on December 26, 1943--a more solid day's work than any I have ever done.

 

What Christopher Hitchens Held Sacred by Jennie Rothenberg Gritz at the Atlantic

Ta-Nehisi Coates links this video: