Forum / Christopher Hitchens

• 
  MaryAnne Kolton

  Dec 16, 05:31am

  Hard to believe one of my great heroes is gone. I felt as if I knew him . . .

• 
  Bobbi Lurie

  Dec 16, 05:45am

  “I devoutly believe that words ought to be weapons. That is why I got into this business in the first place. I don’t seek the title of ‘inoffensive,’ which I think is one of the nastiest things that could be said about an individual writer.”

  Christopher Hitchens

• 
  Bobbi Lurie

  Dec 16, 05:55am

  “The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”
  ― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Dec 16, 07:20pm

  I went to hear Alexander Cockburn (and Molly Ivins) speak at a gathering for The Nation in Houston and ended up knocked over by Christopher Hitchens. What a speaker and how sad he lost the ability, not to write, fortunately, but to speak due to cancer. He wrote in the tradition of Thomas Paine and George Orwell. I admire it greatly, and if I could, I would write in the tradition of George Orwell. There was a really dumb TV movie about Thomas Jefferson's slave mistress, and the TV actor who played Thomas Paine appears in it briefly, as if it had been his role in history, to show his approval of her physically. Cris Cheek, a poet I met in New York, refers to Hitchens as "a public intellectual with guts." R.I.P.

• 
  Marcus Speh

  Dec 16, 08:00pm

  though i don't agree with hitchens on many things (he wouldn't have liked it otherwise), <a href="http://kaffeinkatmandu.tumblr.com/post/14314401235/christopher-hitchens-also-threw-himself-into">here's a tribute</a> (with a link to an excellent obituary). one has to appreciate those who don't back down to either the left, or to the right, or to the well-behaved centre, at their own peril.

• 
  Darryl Price

  Dec 16, 08:15pm

  There are always too few brave enough to stand their ground against the onslaught, so when one does find someone like that in the world you have to take a deep breath and blow out a thankful prayer to whatever the universe is, and greet the fact of that person with your own now inspired courage to hopefully be just as real.

• 
  sean m. poole

  Dec 16, 09:44pm

  Well. Christopher's in Heaven now.

• 
  MaryAnne Kolton

  Dec 17, 03:43am

  He was an extremely honest, forthcoming and brilliant man. The kind of man you could trust to say exactly what he meant. Those kind of people are becoming more and more rare as time goes on. There's an empty space in the universe that no one else can ever fill.

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Dec 17, 04:47pm

  "I do think people need ritual, and probably particularly funerals. Because no one wants to be told, 'Okay, you have a dead relative. Go bury him someplace.' They want to know that something will kick in now. It will be taken out of my hands, and everyone will know what to do. There's a routine. Just like in Antigone -- you don't want people just lying unburied in the streets. It was very clever of the churches to take control of moments of this kind."

  --Christopher Hitchens

  [I found this quotation via Christa Forster who found it via Ari Gonzalez at Facebook yesterday, and it stayed with me all day. I think I related it to my cats' dying ("Animals in Reverse") and how that is not a religious story.]

  This article provides a good roundup of Hitchens' career:

  http://blog.chron.com/celebritybuzz/2011/12/vanity-fair-editor-dies-in-houston/

• 
  Alex M. Pruteanu

  Dec 18, 06:37pm

  He was a friend. I wrote about it at The Lit Pub: http://thelitpub.com/why-hitchens-matters-to-me/

• 
  Ann Bogle

  Dec 18, 07:25pm

  Alex, I read your piece there a couple days ago and liked it so linked it at my wall. Thanks for writing it!

• 
  Alex M. Pruteanu

  Dec 19, 01:36pm

  Thanks Ann. I should say he was a "friend" really...but the piece explains that strange relationship. Thanks again. His loss, coupled with Havel's 72 hours later...makes for a shit weekend. Good think Kim Jong-Il livened it up a bit with his passing.

• 
  Alex M. Pruteanu

  Dec 19, 01:37pm

  It's ironic to me to see things written about him like: "he's in Heaven now." It's just...weird and, at the risk of offending those who say it, kind of wrong.

• 
  James Lloyd Davis

  Dec 19, 02:49pm

  I think whoever said it.... 'he's in heaven now,' might have done so with a tone of Hitchens-like irony. I read no offense in it and I doubt it was intended thus.

• You must log in to reply to this thread.