Edith Pretty says this to the hilariously uppity archeologist, who disdains self-taught Basil Brown, in the film The Dig — and I gotta tell you, this film was MADE for UD. She has watched it three times already, and it’s clear she’s not done with it. A fictionalized account of the staggering Sutton Hoo discovery, it’s got everything UD: archeology, architecture, reading, philosophy, music, British accents (UD loves British accents), moody landscapes, true dark skies (Brown brings his telescope to Pretty’s rural firmament)… And UD ain’t alone! A just-released film she figured would attract an audience of a few dozen already ranks third on Netflix.
UD’s preferences here are exactly those of UD‘s mother – the trowel doesn’t fall far from the tree. A student of Wilhelmina Jashemski’s at the University of Maryland, UD‘s mother accompanied Jashemski on several digs at Pompeii … And UD‘s mother dragged wee UD herself, one hot summer, through all that site’s ins and outs (her mother’s association with Jashemski meant we got access to off-limits human casts and villas), which was wonderful but exhausting.
All those moment-of-death human bodies, all that vast charred living landscape – it was a morbid treat, in the way powerful unburied ruinous settings tend to be; and The Dig is exactly the sort of extended memento mori one would like, with Pretty’s impending death – and the possible death of Europe itself in the impending war – haunting the narrative. “What’s left of us?” “We die. We rot.” The film’s characters, gazing into the faint outline of a submerged sixth-century ship in the Sussex dirt, fall into this grubby nihilism all the time in the film; but they are always lifted out by friends and lovers, who voice a soulful faith in the human story of which we are imperishably a part.
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But snobbery, now. What got me going on that?
Easy. The letter Christopher Hitchens’ widow and agent just sent to his friends and associates commanding them not to cooperate with a biography of him that’s in the works. So at odds, rhetorically, with Hitchens’ own relaxed and democratic voice, the letter was jarring to UD, a huge Hitchens fan.
We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton. In solidarity…
I found the “in solidarity” particularly jarring, drawing as it does on a political tradition dear to Hitchens – that of the social justice left, as in his oft-expressed solidarity with democratic forces like the Kurds. It seems cheap of these authors to assume that mantle when the rest of the note locates them clearly in the trivial and off-putting realm (“dismayed,” “one,” “self-appointed”) of the literary mandarin.
They make no effort, for instance, to explain what in the manuscript is likely to be coarse and reductive; they simply high-handedly invoke these terms and let it go at that. Coarse is particularly problematic, since anyone who has read gobs of Hitchens and watched virtually all of the Hitch YouTubes knows he had no problem with coarseness – he exhibited it often, and made its relative absence in women one of the main bases of their inability (most of them) to be funny. Was it coarse for Hitch and Martin Amis to go trolling whores in New York City? I guess so. I mean, Hitch thought it was. Is his biographer supposed to overlook it, or somehow snob it up?
As David Nasaw writes:
Blue-Hitchens and [Steve] Wasserman are well within their rights to refuse to cooperate with this particular biographer, but by reaching out, as they have done, to so wide a universe of individuals who might have something to say on the subject, they are engaging in a sort of preemptive censorship, intended to frighten away not just this one writer but any others who might not, for one reason or another, pass muster with them.
A British/Iranian woman writes the most sensible of the millions of words already written about Boris Johnson having compared women in burqas to letter boxes and bank robbers. UD made the same point she’s making – about the greater wisdom of ignoring his words – in this post.
Shappi Khorsandi writes:
Every part of the burqa/letterbox furore is about political warfare. Johnson knew exactly how to rattle the left and it’s working. Now we are calling Rowan Atkinson a “racist”…
The comedian is now denounced as racist because he pointed out that Johnson was attempting to be funny. And, yes, attempting to be offensive. Atkinson: “All jokes about religion cause offence, so it’s pointless apologising for them.” And remember: All of this was in the context of Johnson agreeing with people on the left that there should be no burqa ban.
As the denunciations and investigations and apology-demands escalate, sensible and humane people, like Khorsandi, will direct us to what we should be thinking about:
Today, in Iran, women are risking their liberty by publicly taking off their hijabs in protests against the forced covering. Shaparak Shajarizadeh was handed a two-year sentence for protesting in Iran against the hijab. She was released on bail in April and has now apparently left the country as exile is preferable to living in a country where speaking your mind leads to arrest.
I wish those who are now calling Rowan Atkinson a “racist” left and right on social media would show more solidarity and generate more publicity for women like Shaparak.
Let the ridiculous Boris Johnson dustup have the effect of directing our attention where it belongs: To the millions of women in countries all over the world suffocating under the veil.
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In other words: These are the words that deserve our attention — written by the late great Christopher Hitchens.
[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate.
It’s the 200th anniversary of the notorious death of the great story writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), precursor of Kafka and assorted absurdists.
Like Kafka, Kleist (who early in life sat down on the shore of Wannsee Lake, shot a suicidal friend, and then shot himself) has this weird combination of clear, calm, confident, very expository-feeling prose, and brutally meaningless content. The stories are typically told from an extremely detached, affectlessly rational point of view – the narrator is simply a set of lucid eyes setting down what they see. Indeed sometimes the Kleist narrator, with his long paragraphs of diligent, painstaking description, is tiresome… Yet what these eyes see, as in Kleist’s greatest short story (if you ask me), “Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music,” is pointless sadistic hatred, sudden communal psychosis, obsessive demented ritual unto death…
Four viciously anti-Catholic brothers, outfitted with weapons to destroy a church, hear, as they prepare to attack, the music of its mass – music so beautiful that it bears the congregants’ “souls, as if upon wings, through all the heaven of harmony” – and instantly the brothers throw down their weapons and become hysterical religious fanatics for life.
[T]he young men had led [a] ghost-like life [in the local insane aslyum] for six years… [T]hey slept little and tasted little, …no sound usually passed their lips, and …it was only at the hour of midnight that they rose from their seats, when, with voices loud enough to shatter the windows of the house, [in the most hideous and horrible voice] they sang the Gloria in excelsis.
Their mother finds them years later in the madhouse, where, overwhelmed by despair and confusion, she examines the score of the music played and sung that day:
She looked at the magical unknown signs, with which, as it seemed, some fearful spirit had mysteriously marked out its circle, and was ready to sink into the ground, when she found the “Gloria in excelsis” open. It seemed to her as if the whole terrors of music, which had proved the destruction of her sons, were whirling over her head; at the mere sight of the score her senses seemed to be leaving her, and with an infinitely strong feeling of humility and submission to the divine power, she heartily pressed the leaf to her lips, and then again seated herself in her chair.
Inside of a story whose authoritative narrator renders the world as a setting of utterly known signs sits a woman collapsing under a whirling, utterly unknown language. Her disharmonic sons’ first encounter with harmony (“beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure”) has undone them…
See, I think writers like Kleist and Kafka want to evoke what happens when our quotidian efforts to make sense of earthly meaninglessness and suffering are interrupted by epiphany — by entries into a fully meaningful world. Only our epiphanies aren’t beautiful and transcendent; they’re nightmarish. Like all epiphanies, they suddenly disclose to us what is really there; we see that there is a hand creating and directing our lives. But it is a hand whose absolute power is matched by its absolute, and seemingly malign, mystery. We can only agree to subjugate ourselves to that crushing enigma.
Or not. We can go on living the way we always have, suspecting now, however, that life is a crushing, sick joke. This is a guy option, as Christopher Hitchens makes clear in his essay about why women aren’t funny:
Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough… Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.
I mean, what’s all that Bach doing on the soundtrack of Shame, a film about sexual addiction? Aren’t Bach’s surpassing clarities, his you-could-weep harmonies, there as a counterpoint to the main character’s embroilment in ugliness, arbitrariness, and futility?
Always, Kleist and Kafka seem to say, we are at play between these two forces – the force of ugly visceral embroilment in a world that hurts and confuses us, and the counterforce of heavenly harmony whose voice is the voice of music, beauty. Their brilliance as writers is to retain narrators who dwell in the heavenly-harmonic even as the events they tell come from hell.
The absolutely contrary principle to the work and philosophy of Kleist, Kafka, and Hitchens is that of absolute confidence that the world has meaning, and transcendent meaning at that:
The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.