"His drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. Maybe sometimes it made him warm and expansive, but I never saw that side of it. What I saw was that drinking made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league—elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns). Drinking didn’t make him a better writer either—that’s another myth. Christopher was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when [...]
Martin Amis, whose impending arrival in Brooklyn will change the face of Cobble Hill forever, wrote a long thing about his friend Christopher Hitchens in this past Sunday's Observer. Hitchens has a piece on Philip Larkin—godfather to Amis' brother—in the current Atlantic. Wheels within wheels.
For the next three weeks, Christopher Hitchens will be on book tour. He leaves the east coast next week, and then travels from Seattle on south, ending by looping over to Denver and Texas in early July. He is not, however, taking questions from the audiences on any matters not pertaining directly to himself, as he is now promoting his memoir, Hitch-22. "Wrong book!" he says, and he says it often, and he says it in a sad, huffy way, each time people ask him questions about God or Iraq or anything not directly pertaining to his personal written history, which was published all of two weeks ago. (Parts of [...]
There is no way this is true. This year, says the New York Observer, Vanity Fair and Bloomberg News are actually co-hosting an afterparty for the White House Correspondent's Dinner. (In previous years, they've been "competing" parties. Which is to say, one was at an embassy, the other was at Chris Hitchen's not-so-big apartment.) According to Vanity Fair's publicist Beth Kseniak, "the entire guest list will be trimmed to just 200 people." Highly unlikely!
