Hitch-22

Hitch-22, Read by Hitch

~ tomonhitch ~ Leave a comment

If you haven’t had a chance to read Christopher’s insightful and entertaining memoir, Hitch-22, you can listen to the audio, read by the author himself. These videos posted on YouTube (in two parts) may be taken down from time to time (but hopefully reposted), so you should check them out now. Hitch wrote this at the peak of his career, not knowing that it would also be toward the end of his life. We are fortunate that he didn’t wait until what he thought would be close to the end of his career to write this, as people typically do,

The time Margaret Thatcher butt slapped Christopher Hitchens

~ tomonhitch ~ 1 Comment

 

Ok, I suppose this headline is intentionally provocative (this is, after all, Provoking Hitchens). Now that we’ve established that, hear Hitchens describe the incident for Australian TV journalist Jennifer Byrne.  They were discussing his just then released   memoir, Hitch 22.

Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 7.21.18 PM

 

 

 

 

Something non-political (or I’ll drink to that)

~ tomonhitch ~ 1 Comment

 

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 5.06.38 PM

 

Hitch fans toast the man with glasses of Johnny Walker Black Label. It is well known that he had a large capacity to drink, and to still write brilliantly. Graydon Carter, the publisher of Vanity Fair, wrote in a tribute to Hitch, “I can recall a lunch in 1991, when I was editing The New York Observer, and he and Aimée Bell, his longtime editor, and I got together for a quick bite at a restaurant on Madison, no longer there. Christopher’s copy was due early that afternoon. Pre-lunch canisters of scotch were followed by a couple of glasses of wine during the meal and a similar quantity of post-meal cognac. That was just his intake. After stumbling back to the office, we set him up at a rickety table and with an old Olivetti, and in a symphony of clacking he produced a 1,000-word column of near perfection in under half an hour.”

If you want to read Hitchens’ own words about the consumption of alcohol, see these passages from Hitch 22:

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 5.03.31 PM

Screen Shot 2016-01-13 at 5.03.00 PM

What Makes Salman Rushdie Laugh?

~ tomonhitch ~ 2 Comments

Screen Shot 2015-09-17 at 10.17.23 PM

Hitchens and Rushdie shared a sense of humor, as Rushdie explains in this NYT interview. In Hitch-22, Christopher told about a game they played, [Book] Titles That Don’t Quite Make It, which is how the Hitch-22 title originated. Rushdie explains in this 2012 piece for Vanity Fair:

Hitch-22 was a title born of the silly word games we played, one of which was Titles That Don’t Quite Make It, among which were A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, Mr. Zhivago, and Toby-Dick, a.k.a. Moby-Cock. And, as the not-quite version of Joseph Heller’s comic masterpiece, Hitch-22. Christopher rescued this last title from the slush pile of our catechism of failures and redeemed it by giving it to the text which now stands as his best memorial.

Full Article 

Screen Shot 2015-09-18 at 11.29.12 AM
The Boys (source: Vanity Fair)