week 3 homeworks
The Revenge of Karl Marx - Christopher Hitchens
Quickhoney Marx’s “Das Kapital”: A Biography By Francis Wheen Grove The late Huw Wheldon of the BBC once described to me a series, made in the early days of radio, about celebrated exiles who had lived in London. At one stage, this had involved tracking down an ancient retiree who had toiled in the British Museum’s reading room during the Victorian epoch. Asked if he could remember a certain Karl Marx, the wheezing old pensioner at first came up empty. But when primed with different prompts about the once-diligent attendee (monopolizing the same seat number, always there between opening and closing time, heavily bearded, suffering from carbuncles, tending to lunch in the Museum Tavern, very much interested in works on political economy), he let the fount of memory be unsealed. Not all of these ironies are at capitalism’s expense, or at least not in a way that can bring any smirk, however wintry, to the grizzled features of the old leftist.
week 2 homework
Christopher Hitchens on the Bourgeois Blues
Of course it makes sense that the critical eye cast on death in the book The American Way of Death should one day take on the business of birth. It just didn’t occur to the author. “I never had any intention of writing about childbirth, though one knew of course that the American Medical Association was rather hellish,” muses Jessica Mitford upon the publication of The American Way of Birth (Dutton). One advantage of Birth over Death is that it’s easier to write from experience. From this passage, even if that’s not the word I’m looking for, old loyalists will readily see that the Mitford style is undimmed. If many of those loyalists have the notion that Mitford still lives in England, it may be because so many Mitfords do. Iconoclast in every other respect, Mitford may be the only transplanted Brit to live in Oakland, California.
week 1 homework
Chrisopher Hitchens: From Abbottabad to Worse
Salman Rushdie’s upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan, in his 1983 novel, Shame, rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic. And that was before the Talibanization of Afghanistan, and of much of Pakistan, too. Let me try to summarize and update the situation like this: Here is a society where rape is not a crime. If the most elemental of human instincts becomes warped in this bizarre manner, other morbid symptoms will disclose themselves as well. There’s absolutely no mystery to the “Why do they hate us?” Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike:Alike reserved to blame, or to commend,A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend …So well-bred Spaniels civilly delightIn mumbling of the game they dare not bite. I find, however, that I can’t quite share in the sense of jubilation. Well, what fucking sovereignty? SKETCHBOOK: HELL’S CAFETERIA “. . . This is well beyond humiliation.
vanityfair
Prime Minister Nehru had of course been at the same English public school, Harrow, as Winston Churchill, and in the preamble to that same independence constitution—to which all Indian political parties still swear allegiance to this moment—the new nation was proclaimed to be “democratic, secular and socialist.” That was a tribute not to the Britain of the Raj and the regimental colors but to the England of the Fabian Society and “Old Labour” and the London School of Economics—India’s native allies in the long struggle for freedom. The “democratic” we know about, because every few years we read stories telling us India is “the world’s largest democracy.” Truer to say, perhaps, that it holds the world’s biggest elections. The country is still profoundly centralized, bureaucratic, and corrupt, and many of those votes are on open sale. As for “socialist”—forget it. India, in fact, is the ripest example in practice of the “Jihad vs. Indians, too, have their diaspora.
vanityfair
Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. This endurance need not necessarily be one's own: indeed, the experience of watching over a sibling or mate in extremis can be even more acute. But nothing, according to the experts, compares to the clutching, choking nightmare that engulfs the one who is slowly bereft of a child. It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Joan Didion, here slightly syncopating in the Bob Dylan manner, has striven with intense dignity and courage in Blue Nights to deepen and extend the effect of The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 narrative of the near-simultaneous sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the onset of the fatal illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael. And what kind of music could this have been, except the Blues? The long day wanes along a spectrum of blue. Vanish.
Christopher Hitchens: Charles Dickens’s Inner Child | Vanity Fair - Nightly
Those who study Charles Dickens, or who keep up the great cult of his admiration, had been leading a fairly quiet life until a few years ago. The occasional letter bobs to the surface, or a bit of reminiscence is discovered, or perhaps some fragment of a souvenir from his first or second American tour. The pages of that agreeable little journal The Dickensian remained easy to turn, with little possibility of any great shock. At least since The Invisible Woman, Claire Tomalin’s definitive, 1991 exposure of the other woman in Dickens’s life—the once enigmatic Nelly Ternan—there hasn’t been any scandal or revelation. And then, in late 2002, The Dickensian carried a little bombshell of a tale: it seemed that in 1862, during Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s visit to London, he had met Dickens. So it was sweet while it lasted, the rumor of a meeting between two great literary titans: an encounter that one of them didn’t even find interesting enough to put in a letter.
