Christopher Hitchens, brooding on “how much faster I’m dying than anyone else” is interviewed by Oliver Kamm in today’s Times (pay wall).
Read More (independent.co.uk)
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The Hitch on Death
December 18, 2010Christopher Hitchens, brooding on “how much faster I’m dying than anyone else” is interviewed by Oliver Kamm in today’s Times (pay wall).
Read More (independent.co.uk)
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17 comments:
Leave it to Oliver Kamm to seek out a deathbed interview and then, to make matters worse, publish it in a subscription-only newspaper to keep out the working class.
If that post was a Facebook status, I would've liked it.
I'd like to know what Hitchens means, exactly, by asserting that 'Vidal has shown an inability to stay off the Jewish question'.
Leave it to Oliver Kamm to seek out a deathbed interview ...
Wow! Moral indignation at the way a dying man is being treated. Not unusual unless you knew the dying man is Hitchens and the man professing concern is Mark G! Yes the one who writes for Hitchens Watch which watches Hitchens in the way that perhaps a vulture would watch Hitchens.
publish it in a subscription-only newspaper to keep out the working class.
I think you mean the "stalking classes". The Times was never really a working class paper and it never used to be considered unreasonable to ask people to pay for their newspapers.
I'd like to know what Hitchens means, exactly, by asserting that 'Vidal has shown an inability to stay off the Jewish question'.
Have you thought about asking him for an interview?
Maybe it would be nice for you too to let bygones be bygones.
Given that Kamm loves to accuse people of being Nazis, I wonder what he would say about Hitchens formerly being so chummy with noted historian David Irving.
"publish it in a subscription-only newspaper to keep out the working class"
The working-class I would hazard would, could, and are quite able to pay the 50p or whatever tiddling expense it is to read the text of whatever interview sprawls on their weekend paper. I don't quite know what image you have of the British class structure, but newspapers aren't exactly an exotic resource. You get them free with chips, don't you know.
"Given that Kamm loves to accuse people of being Nazis, I wonder what he would say about Hitchens formerly being so chummy with noted historian David Irving."
One word: Faurisson.
Is Chomsky a Nazi? Your argument is tediously trite. Oliver Kamm called you an antisemite. Fine. He said it because you write for and quote anitsemitic websites. David Irving is an antisemite. Hitchens clumsily defended his right to free speech. Faurisson is an antisemite. Chomsky clumsily defended his right to free speech. You can't quite seem to be able to see the distinction, to see what is at work here; Kamm can. How embarrassing!
You can't leverage the leaden weight of your misunderstanding as an argument. We all know you're confused and angry, friend, but you must argue your point. You just seem silly otherwise.
Once more, to clarify:
Saying "all Jews or people of Jewish heritage must be assumed to be working for the NWO and thus considered suspect" is flatly antisemitic.
Defending the right of Nazis to say their Nazi stuff, is unpleasant work, but not, necessarily, antisemitic.
We all know who said the former, of course. Buddy. Saul Bellow was a racist. Greywolf, is a beautiful writer. Irony, a distant friend.
I'd imagine Kamm is satisfied with the very many accounts Hitchens has given of his contacts with Irving. Anyone without an axe to grind shopuld know this story by now: Hitchens, like a lot of historians, was in the mid-1990's impressed by some of Irving's research about Nazi Germany. Hitchens, like a lot of other people, found Irving's consclusions and sympathies abhorrent. Hitchens had further grounds to dislike Irving b/c, out of respect for his research and interest in the controversy he had created, Hitchens invited him for a meal. Irving behaved abominably, and Hitchens couldn't help but think that the abominable behavior was linked to his abominable politics. Hitchens brought the evening to a swift end. Nevertheless, Hitchens defended, and defends, Irving's right to publish, and thinks criminalization of even the most offensive speech/ideas is itself abominable. Thick and/or dishonest types collapse all of this into "Hitchens had Irving over to his house, therefore Hitchens is an anti-semite". These types deserve a place to assemble and converse. That's why Allah created Hitchenswatch.
for all of us who don't have plastic and can't get through the pay wall, the text copied into this comment section would be welcome. or if that poses legal issues, maybe a kind benefactor would copy it to madamespite@gmail.com
didn't imagine anyone would actually take my line about the working-class that literally...
How come neither of you long-winded Hitchens experts tried to answer my question about Vidal? What the hell was Hitchens talking about by asserting that Vidal had disgraced himself by 'an inability to stay off the Jewish question'? I really really want to know what this is supposed to mean.
How come neither of you long-winded Hitchens experts tried to answer my question about Vidal? What the hell was Hitchens talking about by asserting that Vidal had disgraced himself by 'an inability to stay off the Jewish question'? I really really want to know what this is supposed to mean.
How the F&#@ should I know!!?
I did say you could ask him! Or ask for an interivew! Send him an email!
I haven't read the interview so I don't know. Didn't even know he said it! Hey did you read the intereview?
Yes, I hacked into the Times website and read it. Kamm and Hitchens share Brie cheese and a couple bot. of Malbec one afternoon together. The two of them spent some pretty foul evenings together, bloating and sating themselves while consigning the poor and defenseless to yet more misery.
Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to smear people as Nazis.
Oliver Kamm's Methodology - The "Nazi" Attack: A Case Study in Deception
So, from top to bottom, Oliver's entire "Nazi" thing in reference to me is
nothing but a string of bald-faced lies all of Oliver's own invention, based
on still more of his own lies, based on his own misrepresentations and wild
extrapolations..........based on a "kernel of truth".
At the end of this web, and purely of his own invention, Oliver claims that
it's "on record" that "Dougherty in another thread expresses his belief that
Nazism is a perfectly benign creed."
This "belief" of mine (sic), as well as all those other "pro-Nazi" sypathies
of mine (sic) expressed above by, and invented by, Oliver Kamm and
attributed to me are to be found in this sentence of mine:
-----"In what sense was anything that he posted "pro-Nazi" Oliver?"-----
Bingo! There it is! My rabid pro-Nazism is exposed for all to see!
Total and complete lie, top to bottom. Hopefully this post will help those
who attempt to engage Kamm in the future to understand what's going on when
they are suddenly confronted with the "fact" that they are some kind of
Nazi, and that they hold beliefs that they do not hold, and have said things
that they have never said.
Welcome to the land of Oliver Kamm's methodology my fellow participants of
a.f.n.c.
"Saul Bellow was a racist."
Indeed. But don't just take my word for it. How about Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle's?
http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2009/1/27/alderman-preckwinkle-running-for-cook-county-board-president
In the University community, Preckwinkle gained attention in 2007 when she denied a proposal to name a Hyde Park street or other monument for Pulitzer Prize winner and former University professor Saul Bellow. Her denial of the plan cited Bellow’s controversial remarks on race.
Can someone say how to get this article without having to pay for it? I'm poor. Thanks.
Yes, I hacked into the Times website and read it. Kamm and Hitchens share Brie cheese and a couple bot. of Malbec one afternoon together. The two of them spent some pretty foul evenings together, bloating and sating themselves while consigning the poor and defenseless to yet more misery
Presumably this is another of your uproarious gags, right?
Oh, and just because Julian Assange is all the rage you don't have to try piggybacking his fame by pretending to have "hacked into" the Times website.
*eyerolls*
After starting treatment for cancer in the summer, Christopher Hitchens wrote that he felt “upsettingly denatured”. When I approached his Washington apartment on Sunday evening, Hitchens was returning from the pharmacist, and I walked past without recognising him. He had to call to me twice before I realised how chemotherapy had altered him.
Hitchens had been apologetic that he couldn’t guarantee from day to day how he would be feeling. We had planned to meet that afternoon but, feeling “ropey” and wanting to be on form, he invited me for dinner instead.
Wrapped in a black leather jacket against persistent rain and piercing cold, Hitchens is gaunt and stooping. He is not quite totally bald: under his cap, there is a light fuzz of hair. His skin is sallow and his clothes hang from him. But the richness of his voice and unfeigned warmth of his greeting are undiminished.
It understates it to describe the apartment that Hitchens shares with his wife, Carol Blue, and their daughter, Antonia, as book-lined. The wall of the long hallway is completely covered in books. The dining room has towering piles of them. These turn out to be less haphazard than they appear, as the volumes are held in place by discreet metal shelves. Hitchens can remove books from the middle and observe his guests’ bemusement that the rest remain in place.
Hitchens pours me a drink, takes whisky for himself and leads me to the next flat, whose wall is being knocked through to make an extension. He sits in the kitchen and I ask a question whose banality leaves him unfazed: how has the daily round of his life altered?
“When I go to parties,” he says, “my dread is that everyone will be equally polite. You have no idea how draining this is. I should have a line added to the invitation: ‘Christopher Hitchens quite forgives you if you show no interest in his condition,’ ” But people are interested in him. That’s why I’m here. Hitchens, now 61, has powerfully affected political and cultural debate, and attained more influence within the Washington beltway than any other expatriate, purely through the power of words. In recent essays he describes living with cancer and his intimations of mortality. So what is the state of his illness?
“I have cancer of the oesophagus,” he replies briskly. “It’s metastasised to the lymph nodes and possibly the lungs. In bureaucratic medical classification, I have reached the so-called stage 4 of the disease, and there is no stage 5. Most people who get it are dead within five years.
“If 1,000 people of exactly my age and condition get this, then you can expect 500 of them to be gone within a year. Of the remaining 500, quite a number live for years. The question is what those years would be like.”
It’s one of the few times in our conversation that Hitchens pauses. “It doesn’t affect my voice. That, or being unable to write, would be the anteroom to despair.”
The volatility of Hitchens’s physical state is mirrored in his mood. “Every week,” he says, “new treatments are becoming thinkable. I keep thinking, if I can just hang on with the chemo and keep the growth at bay, genome-based surgery could make thinkable what was previously unthinkable. It’s within range. So this is an inspiring time, but also, if I’m in the wrong mood, a melancholy one, because these things are just out of reach.”
Hitchens is an experimental subject in a pioneering area of cancer research, which is to have his genome sequenced and that of the tumour. He knows the work will avail him little, but he has emphatic reasons for wanting to do it.
I offer up the full interview to anyone who wants to email me for it. I can't post it here as it's way too long: markgrueter@gmail.com
I did not make the Brie and Malbec bit, by the way.
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