Improving Christopher Hitchens

It is difficult to write about Christopher Hitchens without the piece becoming ad hominem. His bloated frame weighs on every word, his sneering personality is infused in every thought, and his drink-soaked belligerence adds sparkle to every column he writes.

Yesterday I stumbled across this series of articles by Hitchens describing the lengths his Vantiy Fair colleagues have gone to in order to keep him alive. Celebrated for his capacity to drink whilst staying productive, Hitchens has become a caricature drunkard in a country full of people obsessed with living forever. He has found his niche in opposition to such Americans and seems very happy there … well, except for the wheezing, the burst capillaries, and the obesity.

Hitchens has set his stall out as a contrarian and won’t be moved. Whatever it is, he’s against it. Think invading Iraq was a mistake, he doesn’t. Think smoking is bad for you, he thinks it’s great. Think going for a run gives you a burst of serotonin, well fuck you Hitchens is getting a taxi to the bar and is ordering pre-dinner cocktails. It must be pretty unsustainable in the long run, which is why, bankrolled by Condé Nast, he has quietly submitted to the full Hollywood rejuvenation treatment.

The actual treatments he undergoes are quite banal — detoxing in a Santa Barbara spa, near-death yoga, stopping smoking, lazy exercise on some new contraption, lots of manicures and facials — yet despite his contrarian instincts he comes to enjoy feeling healthy. This brings on all manner of anxieties about his own mortality, as he mourns for his cigarettes and realizes that he is no longer young.

Throughout all this Hitchens writes very well indeed. His prose is clear but venerable; it has punch and elegance. There is a beauty to his reflections on his porpoise-like body that elevates it above most magazine fodder. I wonder to what extent a lived life is reflected in prose. How much do you need to experience before you can write like that? Or would Hitchens have been as good if he had spent his life eating quinoa and drinking spinach juice? (The answer to that question by the way is no, the proof being his clean living brother and right-wing fanatic Peter Hitchens).

As someone who is intrigued by the subject of self-improvement, I think there is a lot you can learn from Christopher Hitchens. He shows that if you want to write about it, you are far better off in the first person than the third. Can you imagine what the article would be like if he had taken all the stuff out about his resistance to change? It would have been a small list of platitudes: eat well, don’t smoke, exercise etc. He demonstrates that being a full-time contrarian is very limiting and that, long term, it isn’t advisable to be imprisoned inside a caricature of yourself.

04 Jan 2009

Cynical Blogging

I noticed a lot of dogs when I was out on my New Year walk, they were chasing sticks and barking — just doing normal doggy things. I got the impression that they don’t pay much attention to the calendar. It’s admirable, encouraging them to live in the present rather than work like a dog human in return for a couple of days holiday. They live within their means. Now, you might argue that dogs haven’t achieved much recently, but then neither have most humans.

Of course, it is from the Greek word for Dog — kyon — that we derive the word Cynic. The prototypical cynic was Diogenes of Sinope who was reported to have been seen barking in public, urinating on the leg of a table, and masturbating on the street. I mention this because apparently my Mum has started reading this blog. (Hi Mum!). In the past I was slightly self-conscious about certain people inspecting my casual thoughts, but not anymore. Come one, come all, as long as you don’t mind reading the blogging equivalent of Diogenes of Sinope.

I told her that my blog is like a letter, but a letter addressed to everyone. She said that was fine but that because it was public you couldn’t write what you really think about people. I said that I try not to think anything bad about people so that didn’t matter. Of course, neither are true: it isn’t anything like a letter and I think bad about lots of people, but it sounded good at the time.

One of the things that I have been looking recently is this list of teetotalers, which is full of interesting and/or admirable characters, such as David Bowie, Don Bradman, Russell Brand, Warren E. Buffett, Tom Cruise, A. A. Gill, Franz Kafka, H.P. Lovecraft, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Will Self to name just ten. I had assumed that most of the people on the list would be terrible ex-alcoholics who had to stop drinking or die, but it seems that this is not always the case. Some simply prefer to not drink.

03 Jan 2009

Foto Walk

As well as wanting to write here every day, I have also decided to resurrect my daily photo blog, which is now pretentiously called Foto. There is a new RSS feed for it as well, which you should add. Oh, and since I am housekeeping, would you mind spending two minutes acquiring a Gravatar? Once you set it up, it will work with all wordpress blogs and will, hopefully, become some kind of standard — as well as prettifying my comments section. Anyhow ….

Since coming to Glasgow three and a half years ago, my interest in photography has been rather erratic. I always felt let down by the light and the spindly tree branches that seem to get into every shot. Now, I am much more at ease with the light, my camera, and the fact that I can only take photos on weekends. I am determined to explore the city and, yesterday, went to Queen’s Park for a New Year’s Day constitutional walk.

As well as taking photos I decided that I would do a little experiment say hello or happy new year to everyone I met. At first, this was met with scepticism: I was wearing glasses, my trampy jacket, and hadn’t shaved.

Nevertheless, one man welcomed me with a pat on the shoulder. He reeked of booze but seemed friendly enough. I asked him if I could take a photo of him and he happily complied. I love it when real photographers get those great shots of vagrants and drunks, but have never dared to ask before. This chap was drunk from New Year’s Eve and seemed happy to have his photo taken.

At Queen’s Park, I discovered that the pond had frozen over, though not enough to skate. I did precariously walk across a little bit of ice as shown in this video (around 17 secs):

Later on, I nodded hello to a man walking his small child. He scowled at me: “I’m no fucking thingyme ya faggy bastard.” The idea that a friendly nod was an attempted seduction made me laugh, but he seemed genuinely riled. I can’t imagine that gays often proposition men walking toddlers, how jaded would you have to be to do that! But it did remind me why I rarely visit the South Side of Glasgow.

02 Jan 2009

Smugness

My first NYE without alcohol in seventeen years was very good, thanks. We stayed in, ate well, and nattered about the last twelve months and the next. Laura, fuelled by three potent Moscow Mules, was rather worse for wear by midnight, her conversation lurching up and down in volume and emotionality. It was interesting to observe and not as alienating as I thought it might be.

I am looking forward to the next month of sobriety. I feel like a scientist on the cusp of a ground breaking discovery. John Moore is also going dry for January. When he was asked what else he would have to live for he replied “smugness”.

This made me gasp. Was I smug? It’s true that I do like to congratulate myself when I have been especially good, but I like to think that I have enough self-awareness to recognize when people are rolling their eyes with disdain.

The trouble with smugness is that it makes all your virtue worthless. People think that if all you are going to do with your extra energy and your clearness of vision is to spout on about how good you feel then what is the point. I suspect that to be a really successful temperance campaigner, you have to forget about it.

What was I talking about again?

01 Jan 2009

Juiced

My best Christmas present this year was a juicer. Easy to set-up, quick to produce juice, and seemingly very efficient; I have also never felt better (drinking juice) than I did after my first experiment with orange, carrot, and red pepper.

This morning I had orange, clementine, tomato, carrot and celery, which was just okay. Tonight, instead of drinking myself into a stupor, I will be drinking watermelon, kiwi, blackberries, and apple juice. Laura thinks that the health benefit I feel might be psychosomatic, but it feels pretty somatic to me.

A part of me wants to take it all too far and go on a raw juice f(e)ast, like Steve Pavlina did a couple of months ago. In his case the effects were not very benign at all and he seemed to be quite unhappy by the end of it. The thinking is that by consuming nutrients in juice form your body doesn’t have to spend as much energy digesting heavy loads of fibre and cellulose. Just think what you could do with all that energy. Well, if you’re Steve Pavlina, you might want to write lengthy articles about self-development. Hmmm.

Tonight I am going to be eating caviar, writing poetry, and watching Die Hard. Hope you have a similarly fantastic start to 2009!

31 Dec 2008

Embarrassment

Imagine the situation. It’s Boxing Day and my Dad’s side of the family are sitting around the table for dinner. I am getting a glass when I hear my sister’s voice beckoning my nephew. In front of me I see my sister’s exact hairstyle — colour, length, texture — and assume that auditory and visual inputs correlate. And so, just as any normal brother would do, I decide to muss up her hair. This is just one of the tactics I could have employed. On other occasions I might have tickled her or put her into a headlock, but she is pregnant so I thought I should just leave it at that.

She turned around and, instead of my sister, I found myself confronted by my Dad’s new girlfriend (who I had met for the first time the previous day). She had been standing in front of my sister and I hadn’t realized that they had similar hair. She looked slightly unnerved by my over-familiar hair mussing, but accepted my explanation and apology.

For me, it was embarrassment at its purest. It was the feeling you get when your social ego is pricked by its inability to accord to social expectations. People don’t get embarrassed with their families because they know each other well enough not to care about social expectations. A new addition to the family circle reintroduces the possibility of embarrassment and, like a fool, I pounced on it.

In non-family situations, a person’s susceptibility to embarrassment depends greatly they are wrapped in their own ego, a construct that only exists in relation to others. At first this seems counter-intuitive: the people we know who are most often embarrassed are those mousy, tentative people not brash egoists, but I would argue that the reason they are mousy is because they worry too much about how they appear to others.

Regarding confidence, we could say that there is two types of: the kind which is based on the world’s opinion of you and the kind which is based on not caring what anyone thinks. But which kind of confidence is better? The former is more fragile and liable to send you spinning into insecurity, but it is also more self-aware. The latter is more robust, but alienating.

Finally, how can we get rid of embarrassment? Devotees of NLP will tell you to imagine watching yourself in a cinema with the embarrassing moment playing out on the screen. You should drain the scene of colour, slow it down, reduce the volume and then shrink it until it disappears. This does seem to work, but often the embarrassment will catch before you get to the box office. In these cases, I find it best to get out of yourself — try to get into somebody else’s mind and forget about your own.

30 Dec 2008