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… my visits chez Hitch were never quite as rollicking as they might have been - because his addiction kept us apart. But what struck me about alcohol and Hitch was that it was a kind of rocket fuel. What killed him was not the alcohol as such or the many years of smoking, but the force of will that simply didn’t rest, and seemed to punish his body with ludicrously brutal days and nights of sleepless drive.

- Andrew Sullivan

The post, which is strong for several reasons, is essential for writers or aspiring writers who found themselves thirsty after reading this passage by Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter:

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.

Sullivan quotes and links to Nation columnist Katha Pollitt, who wrote:

… those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking. … It makes me sad to see young writers cherishing their drinking bouts with him, and even his alcohol-fuelled displays of contempt for them (see Dave Zirin’s fond reminiscence of having Christopher spit at him) as if drink is what makes a great writer, and what makes a great writer a real man.

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Notice that Reagan was not quibbling about the precise meaning of “torture”. He signed a Convention against anything that could even faintly be considered torture - any “inhuman treatment” of prisoners. This current incarnation of Republicanism is so crude, so un-American, so fascistic in its disdain for the rule of law and its relish for violence that it should have no place in a Western polity. To have leading Republican candidates embrace torture in this way renders it the only political party in the entire Western world to embrace the abuse and torture of prisoners. It is unique in the West in embracing the tactics of totalitarian states throughout the world.
- Andrew Sullivan today in a post called “Why Huntsman and Paul Matter.”

finding Mary Gaitskill

If you’ve seen this post, this post and this post, then you know I’m reading Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill’s 1988 short-story collection.  My path to Gaitskill and her writing gives me a fresh chance to poke at Nicholas Carr’s idea that the Internet “is turning us into shallower thinkers.”

I’m not going to do that — partly because I want to get back to reading Gaitskill, partly because my original 5/30/2010 critique remains right here for anyone who wants to find it.

I’m reading Gaitskill’s stories because Andrew Sullivan wrote a post about an anti-masturbation, anti-porn group called Dirty Girls Ministries. Sullivan’s post didn’t mention Mary Gaitskill. Nor did the Blaire Briody article that triggered Sullivan’s post. But I decided to blog about Briody’s article myself. While writing my post, I tried to build up an idea by referring to a scene from “Secretary.” I Googled the movie. Google led me to the movie’s Wikipedia page, where I learned that the movie is based on a Mary Gaitskill story. I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry for Mary Gaitskill, where I learned that Gaitskill “characterized the film as ‘the Pretty Woman version, heavy on the charm (and a little too nice).’” More Googling led me to a nerve.com interview and this quote from Gaitskill:

My reaction to (the movie), when I saw the rough cut, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. But I just thought, well, whatever. I felt sorry for Shainberg [the director]. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I thought, the poor son of a bitch went through so much trouble, he’s never going to find a distributor, that’s really sad. But then there became this whole thing with money. I didn’t get paid when I was supposed to, and I was concerned that they were going to cheat me, and a lawyer told me they very well could. That was what upset me. I didn’t give a fuck about anything else. I just thought, if I don’t get my money, I’m going to have to kill somebody.

So I didn’t see it for a long time. I got paid, and as far as I was concerned that was the end of the story. Then my sister came to visit, and she wanted to see it. It had been out for some months at that point, and we went to the theatre, and I enjoyed it! It’s not what I would have done but it’s kind of sweet. My actual character in the story, Debby, she would have loved it. It was too cute and ham-fisted, too “wanting to create a positive image.” It wanted to make people feel good about themselves. It was so odd, because I read an interview with the screenwriter, who was sort of blathering about political correctness and how awful it was — well, the movie is the epitome of political correctness! It was a positive statement about people who are into S&M, and those who don’t understand. Which I find icky.

I decided to find and read Gaitskill’s version of “Secretary.” I’ve done that. Now I’m reading more of her stories and getting all caught up in details of why, for example, it was so crucial that she used the word “roughly” in a particular sentence. This experience, like so many others, cements my sense that this part of my original critique of Carr was especially right:

If Carr’s piece causes people to rethink the choices they make online, I’m all for that. But I’ll be upset if Carr’s piece causes people to flee the Internet or to resign themselves to an online reading experience that, to use those words of yours, is “more like watching the landscape from a train.” It’s not just that we can drive our own train. It’s that we’re free to jump the track, to go where we want at the speed we want with as many or as few distractions, digressions, and deep-thinking dives as we choose.

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If I had to wave a magic wand and make either the Associated Press or the entire blogosphere disappear, I would certainly keep the A.P. No contest.

- someone named Jonathan Rauch, who is entitled to hold the A.P. in higher esteem than the A.P.’s own mother does.

For the record, the A.P. has won Pulitzers going back to 1922. I don’t know why its mom isn’t more doting.

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It sounds childish to say, but one thing I like about poems is that you are allowed to stare at them, and think about them, for as long as you like. In this sense, they resemble slow movies, or portraits, or nudes, or most of what we think of as art: poems give you permission to pay attention to a degree that would be rude or embarrassing face to face with, for example, a person.

- Lorin Stein

This really got to me. If I can figure out why, I’ll come back and explain.

(via Andrew Sullivan’s latest A Poem For Sunday post, which featured “Church Going” by Philip Larkin)

work with The Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan is looking for interns. The yearlong internships in D.C. come with pay and benefits.

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One of my favorite places on earth is Venice Beach’s relatively new skatepark. What I love is not just the sheer physical grace of the structure, but the spontaneous, unspoken, human order it upholds. Somehow, no one ever pushes in line, everyone is welcome, there is no hierarchy among the grizzled boomer skate-rats and the ten-year-olds. And much of it happens in silence. It’s a Hayekian’s dream (yep, nerd/poseur alert).

- Andrew Sullivan

I will now cover for knowing only slightly what a Hayekian is by quoting from Jon Stewart’s closing speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear:

And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile-long, 30-foot-wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river.  Carved by people, by the way, who I’m sure had their differences.  And they do it.  Concession by concession.  You go, then I’ll go.  You go, then I’ll go.  You go, then I’ll go, “Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car?” “Is that an Obama sticker on your car?”   Well, that’s okay. You go and then I’ll go.

There must be fifty ways to end a post involving both Venice Beach skateboarders and commuters passing underneath the Hudson River. Here’s the way I’m picking: noticing that I already have a “skateboard” hashtag, checking to see what “skateboard” posts I’ve done, and finding a forgotten photo I shot last fall. It’s a guy on a skateboard right by a sign directing bike traffic toward the Hudson. I really really really loved shooting in New York.

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Citizen journalists witness and broadcast. Men and women like Hetherington and Hondros do that but with professional skill, the eye of an outsider, and the capacity to edit. And they exhibit in some ways more courage than those in the midst of their own lives and conflicts because they do not have to be there. They choose to be there, and to bear witness to the struggles of others. A human being is a human being and journalists’ live are not more worthy than anyone else’s. But when men like these perish, there is a special darkness in our hearts. Because we know less, can care less, and can turn away from less because these men are gone.

- Andrew Sullivan in “When Reporters Die,” reflecting on the deaths of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros in Libya.

Sullivan also wrote:

Hetherington’s Restrepo is easily the finest film on the US intervention in Afghanistan. If you haven’t seen it, stream it, rent it, Netflix it. It was far too good to win an Oscar. And its magnificence comes from its directorial restraint. Somehow, Hetherington and Sebastian Junger managed to take themselves out of the picture altogether, and allowed the events, the faces, the human beings to tell their own story with the cumulative power that actual reality television or film-making requires.

I absolutely agree.

Full disclosure: Before seeing the film, I tweeted something harsh about Hetherington telling an interviewer that “we live in a post-photographic world.” It’s tacky to bring that up. It’s tackier, I think, to pretend now that I never criticized Hetherington. Even so, I’m going to link to the interview itself instead of my stale tweet about a single sentence from the interview. In the rest of the interview, Hetherington fleshed his idea out in various ways, including this:

… if the event is visually interesting enough, I will take a picture. If the event isn’t visually interesting enough on its own, then it’s probably significant for video, because it is contextualized with sound. So, usually, my default is video. I can be approaching something photographically, then know I’ve made the picture and pick up the video camera. It’s gotten pretty crazy; kind of like John Wayne. I used to attach the two cameras with carabiners to my jacket because then you can drop the camera and it won’t fall. So I would be hooked up and shooting. It’s pretty ridiculous.

just a piece of paper

My favorite blogger finally got his green card approved today:

It has been a journey of 18 years - the promise of a new life and a new start for a jejune, precocious kid from England somehow always coming with an asterisk, the shame of my illness conflated with this crushing fear that I still did not belong and would probably never belong to the country I had fallen in love with.

Nothing scared me as much; nothing was able to get into my heart and soul with this level of anxiety and fear. Not HIV. This was deeper than HIV. It was a threat to the home from where I could fight the HIV.

Full post here. Really quite stirring.

Good for him. Good for us.

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Have we really sunk to the idea that verdicts in terror suspect trials need to be fixed in advance? And what does that logic say about the fairness of military tribunals? Once more, the 9/11 massacre leads to our suspension of ancient traditions - like habeas corpus, the absolute ban on torture, the Fourth Amendment and an open trial by jury. Al Qaeda could never destroy our values alone. We did it for them.
- Andrew Sullivan, getting it exactly right, in “The Dreadful Uncertainties Of A Fair Trial”
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When America finds itself in wars where it can accidentally kill nine children gathering firewood, it seems somewhat abstract to talk uncritically of America’s moral superiority. And when America has also crossed the line into legalized torture, and refuses to acknowledge or account for it, let alone hold the war criminals responsible, it has lost the moral standing to dictate human rights to the rest of the world.

Obama had a chance to turn this around.

- Andrew Sullivan in “Exceptional And Unexceptional America”
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I listened to his sermons (he was born to preach!) and read his books (which are as profound as they are effortless to read). But you had to be with Peter to get him. It was an endless series of anecdotes and jokes and more sherry and references to the Queen Mother and more sherry. I thought I had left Oxford behind only to find it thriving in Peter’s cheerful Anglophile chatter. When you saw him coming, you knew that you too had to perform, joust, joke, pun, if you wanted even to hope to keep up with him. There were times when I contemplated going to his weekly socials at Sparks House and realized I wasn’t quite up to the repartee that day.

He was always in some version of drag - clerical, academic, leather - and at the same time so deeply learned and, yes, holy in such an idiosyncratic and entertaining fashion that I’m amazed God didn’t call him earlier - if only for the conversation.

- Andrew Sullivan, remembering the Rev. Peter J. Gomes (1942-2011)

Sullivan’s post links to the NYT obituary, which describes Gomes as “a Harvard minister, theologian and author who announced that he was gay a generation ago and became one of America’s most prominent spiritual voices against intolerance.”