Submitted For Your Perusal

I’ve hinted at my interest in Christopher Hitchens’s life and work before. Part of why I find him so interesting has to do with his prolificness. That is to say, how does he write as much as he does as quickly as he does? A recent New York Review of Magazines article sheds some more light on his work habits. Part of the secret, it seems, is not to watch TV:

The apartment where Hitchens lives with his wife, writer Carol Blue, and his daughter, Antonia, is cavernous but lacks much décor. Besides a grand piano in the living room, the only furnishings Hitchens seems to have acquired in two decades at this address are hundreds of books, many piles of which rest unshelved against the walls. His office in the apartment next door is equally spartan but for a pile of promotional books on the kitchen isle (the anti-liberal firebrand David Horowitz, among others, seeks a blurb from Hitchens for the back cover of his latest offering). A framed National Magazine Award rests on the back of the gas range, next to a refrigerator that houses a few bottles of water, a jar of mustard and little else.

Hitchens’ only television set is in the master bedroom. It’s a recent acquisition, Blue said, and she watches it more than he does. He hardly has time, he said, now that he’s working on a memoir.

From an article entitled “Sex and the University”:

For Jane Gallop, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the US, tough policies on relationships are affecting tutors’ ability to teach.

In her book Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, she says: “At its most intense - and, I would argue, its most productive - the pedagogical relation between teacher and student is, in fact, a ‘consensual amorous relation.’”

Gallop is candid about her relationships with both male and female students, and her exploits as a graduate student herself, when she slept with two men on her dissertation committee. She is more than aware of the power relationship that existed between them.

When it comes to professors who sleep with their students, “pathetic” is usually my first thought. But when it comes to students who sleep with their professors, especially professors on their dissertation committees, the phrase “conflict of interest” comes to mind, among other things.

On a related note, part of me admires Gallop’s honesty here, and I’d love to attend one of the sexual harassment workshops I’m required to go to every year with her, if only to watch her lock horns with the person who runs it.

Related Reading: “The Higher Yearning: Bringing Eros Back to Academe”

Johann Hari on the brain-enhancing drug Provigil:

A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

Normally, like Tom Cruise, I’m pretty anti prescription drugs, but this sounds nice. 

Related Reading: “Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?” 

Ben Mathis-Lilley asks, “Why do rappers whose work I hold in such high regard have such terrible taste in rock?” His answer, that middlebrow rock artists “are seen by their hip-hop collaborators … as living samples, picked out of the musical spectrum because their voices have some distinctive quality,” is a good one.

“I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism – of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

“In my own case, I have written a few books built to a great extent on other writers’ books. Where the blurry line between a paraphrase and a lift is drawn–not always so clear when composing such books – has always been worrisome to me. True, I’ve never said directly that man is a political animal, or that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Still, I worry that I may somewhere have crossed that blurry line.” —Joseph Epstein

There’s a rather lengthy profile of Christopher Hitchens in the May 2008 Prospect which contains some fascinating insights into his personal life and work habits, as well as his protean political views. Of course, it’s not really cool to like Hitchens – he is someone, after all, who isn’t afraid to savagely attack his friends in print – but as a polemicist he’s second to none, and I admire him for that. That and his thick skin.  The following two quotes, in particular, stood out to me:

• “Christopher Hitchens’s apartment is curiously unchanged in the 13 years since I first visited him in Washington. A portrait of him and his wife, screenwriter Carol Blue, is still unframed. There is little art on the walls, few travel mementos; just bookshelves, a spacious living room, a modest kitchen and an annex for the alcohol. The aesthetic is not so much utilitarian as uncluttered of anything that would distract from the essentials of his life: reading, meeting people, drinking, laughing, arguing, writing.”
• “The appearance he gives of living improvisationally must obscure a ferocious interior organisation. Articles get written at any time of day or night, with extraordinary speed and fluency—however much he has drunk. He turns out a couple of pieces in the intervals while I’m taking a breather from merely talking.”

A number of graphic designers weigh in on John McCain’s campaign’s choice of typeface. The consensus seems to be that a better choice might have been made.

A report that Heath Ledger “was told to seek professional help for his personal problems while filming The Dark Knight” surfaced earlier this week.

Money Quote: “Heath refused to talk to anyone out of character. If you tried to communicate with him normally instead of The Joker, he would just ignore you.”

This statement seems to support some of the things I’ve been saying for weeks now.

(Related post: “Did the Joker Kill Heath Ledger?”)

From The Chronicle of Higher Education comes an interview with M.H. Abrams. This bit stood out to me: 

The Mirror and the Lamp had been Abrams’s dissertation, and he also reminds us of a different era of academic production, when the tenure gun was not quite so impatiently pressed to a junior professor’s head. Abrams says he took “10 years of hard work revising the text,” rewriting the first chapter “at least six times.”

I love stories like this because they remind me that things, despite the rampant amnesia, were once quite different, and thus needn’t be the way they are presently.

(Related post: “Fewer Books, Better Thinking.”)

“When a colleague of mine returned from an MLA convention in Toronto around that time, he told a story that nicely illustrated the trend. One afternoon he hopped on a shuttle bus and sat down next to a young scholar who told him she’d just returned from a panel. He replied that he’d just returned from France, where he’d been studying for a semester.

“What are they talking about?” she asked.
“Hmm?”
“Is there any new theory?”
“Yeah, in a way,” he answered. “It’s called ‘erudition.’”
“What’s that?” she wondered.
“Well, you read and read, and you get your languages, and you go into politics, religion, law, contemporary events, and just about everything else.” (He’s a 16th-century French literature scholar who comes alive in archives.)
She was puzzled. “But what’s the theory?”
“To be honest, there isn’t any theory,” he said.
“That’s impossible.” He shrugged. “Okay, then, give me the names, the people heading it.”
“There aren’t any names. Nobody’s heading it.”

—Mark Bauerlein