The British political class may stop asking the one question that has obsessed it for decades.
By Christopher Hitchens
"It was about two decades ago, but I can still remember how long it took and how much atmosphere it sucked out of the room. In a sort of dress rehearsal for more recent events, a pair of Guardian reporters had produced a book about the inner workings of the lurid Murdoch tabloid style, and of its targets and beneficiaries."
Read More (Slate)
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20 comments:
Hitchens' prose and incisiveness seem a little off in this column. It's worrisome.
Agree. The overall construct, the sentence structure, the thread and -- dare I say it -- the gammar are all oddly handled. i read this twice. felt a bit like i was willing on a tired fighter to land some blows. Well,one 'off' column.I'm sure he'll rally with the next one.
@Anon
I thought the same thing :| Bad news.
No. He's spot on. That's too complex an inference to draw. Chill with the negativity. It's like a mini-tabloid on here...
Could you specify what you're referring to within the column? I'm not sure if I agree.
Unfortunately, I expected that when I clicked the link to read more, I saw the same thing happen during my fathers descent from cancer 8 years ago. It one fuck of a disease.
I'm as upset as anyone that Hitch is sick. But really, save the amateur pathology. I'm leafing through two of his books from the mid-late 90s and there are examples of this tone throughout. He might die tomorrow, he might never die — but his word is his word, not a window to his tumors.
...maybe he was writing under pressure.
Please stop the morbid speculation. The column was fine
I have to say, I'm inclined to say the column is a good one.
Agreed. It would not have been published if such a decline were evident. Do you really think Hitchens would not be able to understand the quality of his own work? Many are seeing what they want/expect to see here. There is very little in this column that could objectively lead one to draw those conclusions, so ask yourselves whether you're using intuition and emotion or evidence in your evaluations.
He often uses this style in his book reviews.
Have to agree - there's an 82-word sentence in there, some odd phrasing and some very strange grammar. This is not like Hitch at all.
I have noticed a change in Hitchens over the last few months.
He's become less angry and less scathing.
Not a bad thing to happen and I treat it as him reflecting on life and deciding that not being quite so harsh when it's not required isn't neccesarily a bad idea.
Did it occur to anyone here that these columns are run through an editor before publication? They're not blog posts.
One comment here, through the power of persuasion, has got everyone forgetting that we wouldn't be able to detect a cancer-brained piece once it was cleaned up by an copy editor.
Let's leave it to others to track Hitch's health developments — you know, doctors, family — rather than overbearing fanboys.
I've been reading Christopher for two decades. There's not a damn thing wrong with this column. Why such negativity?
It's the quantity of his writing that has lessened more than any quality.
I won't pretend to know why Hitchens' column wasn't up to his usual standard, but I won't deny that it wasn't.
And please don't tell me I'm imagining things because it made it past a copy editor so therefore it must be good.
I'm telling you you're imagining things. Deal.
It's as good as anything Hitch has written. wordy as ever :)
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