"The door that I pushed open, on the advice of an elevator boy, was marked 'The Swastika Holding Company,' and at first there didn’t seem to be any one inside."

What? Why is there a Swastika Holding Company in "The Great Gatsby" — which takes place in 1922 and was published in 1925? It's simply bizarre. What did a swastika mean then? Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald put that name on a door that was pushed open on the advice of an elevator boy only to reveal the seeming absence of anyone?

That's our "Gatsby" sentence today in the "Gatsby" project where each day we look at one sentence in isolation. Here, we are left to wonder. Or check Wikipedia. Swastikas go way back:

The earliest swastika known has been found from Mezine, Ukraine. It is carved on late paleolithic figurine of mammoth ivory, being dated as early as about 10,000 BC....

In India, Bronze Age swastika symbols were found at Lothal and Harappa, Pakistan on Indus Valley seals. In England, neolithic or Bronze Age stone carvings of the symbol have been found on Ilkley Moor....

Etc. etc. etc. Spin forward. What was up with the soon-to-be-abjured symbol in the early 20th century?



Caption: "The aviatrix Matilde Moisant (1878-1964) wearing a swastika medallion in 1912; the symbol was popular as a good luck charm with early aviators."

Googling around, I found this year 2000 Vanity Fair article about "The Great Gatsby" written by Christopher Hitchens:

References to Jews and the upwardly mobile are consistently disobliging in the book... but it gives one quite a turn to find Meyer Wolfshiem, he with molars for cuff links, hidden Shylock-like behind the address of “The Swastika Holding Company.” Pure coincidence: the symbol meant nothing sinister at the time. Still, you can get the sensation, from The Great Gatsby, that the 20th century is not going to be a feast of reason and a flow of soul.

A feast of reason and a flow of soul. Oh! But I want this blog to be a feast of reason and a flow of soul. And I'm drifting away from my purpose: the sentence, in glorious isolation. How can we beat that swastika back into the stark confines of the sentence? The elevator arrives, we step out, we find a door, the door is marked, and there doesn't seem to be anyone — any one — inside.

At first!

"The ten most overrated things in the world [SLIDESHOW]."

Let me guess. Is one of the things internet slideshows? Top 10 lists?

Noted author and essayist Christopher Hitchens once said that the four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobsters, anal sex and picnics.

First sentence at the link. So much better than anything in the slide show that you've got to click through. I miss Christopher Hitchens. He wasn't overrated.

ADDED: After reading the comments (and writing some), I've gotten to the point where I can give the first 3 of my top 10 most overrated things in the world:

1. Sitting in an audience, listening/watching something on a stage/screen.
2. Working at some fucking job.
3. Bruce Springsteen.

Christopher Hitchens on shouting fire in a crowded theater.

I arrived at this video, via Wikipedia, after writing this post (and participating in the comments):



Text here.

(What if everyone had 5 "keep alive" cards, that could be played over the course of a lifetime to save human beings — only those you don't personally know? Millions would have played a card to keep Hitchens with us. I would have.)

"John Lewis tells you something about voting rights and you say, yes, sir, and you shut the fk up."

Charles Pierce pithily dictates the sole method of showing respect. 

But actually, ironically, that kind of respect entails massive disrespect. You say yes and you shut the fuck up in his presence, and that means the only way people can have a serious back-and-forth debate on the subject is if they exclude John Lewis.

***

Pierce has a nice sidebar at his blog under the heading "About this blog." I read it for the first time, by chance, just now. The penultimate sentence is:

It will be the belief of this blog that, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the only correct answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is "No."

"Important fact: This letter was to his first wife."

Key comment in a comments thread about a contract Kurt Vonnegut made with his pregnant wife in January 1947.

The contract comes from this collection of Vonnegut's letters, which will be released in October.

If you're looking for something to read now, here's that book "Mortality," which Christopher Hitchens wrote as he was dying.

And here's a biography of David Foster Wallace — "Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story" — which just came out today.

"At home at one of the raucous, joyous, impromptu eight-hour dinners we often found ourselves hosting..."

"... where the table was so crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents, college students and children that elbows were colliding and it was hard to find the space to put down a glass of wine, my husband would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny 20 minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause, and jokes. 'How good it is to be us,' he would say in his perfect voice."

Writes Carol Blue, the widow of Christopher Hitchens.

"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"

That's the fifth most "liked" quote on the topic of "sin" at goodreads. It's from Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (which is a novel, not a diary). The forth most liked also involves poor old Adam. It's by Mark Twain:

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

But I've heard snake is tough, tougher than dog (and less crunchy than grasshopper).

Sorry for the gratuitous Obama-eats-dog/snake punchline. It was not my motivation to look up quotes. I was actually searching for a quote about boredom, something like the only sin is being boring. Interestingly, the most-liked goodreads quotes on the topic of "boredom" are boring. Seriously, how many ways are there to say If you're bored, it's because you are boring? And now I've lost track of what somebody said that made me what that sin-of-boringness quote, which might not even exist.

“Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.”
― Elizabeth I

Am I boring you? You must be boring.

IN THE COMMENTS: Sweetbriar and Jody both point me to the answer: Christopher Hitchens, in his memoir, "Hitch-22." Page 13. His mother used to say:  "The one unforgivable sin is to be boring."

And I think what got me looking in the first place was a comment by Patrick over in the "Predictable Althouse Is Predictable" post:

Honestly, when I first came to this blog, back in the day, I assumed that you, a law professor especially at Madison, would be a typical lefty law professor. In fact, I likely put off reading the blog for awhile because I assumed it would be the same old boring lefty stuff. This is a very interesting blog, and your political opinions or votes are part of that, but really, there's a lot more to it. Vote for Ron Paul for all I care, or Dennis Kucinich. Just don't be boring about it!

"You're disarming yourself in an important struggle if you can't produce a fucking sonnet."

Asserted Christopher Hitchens in an interview in 2010, which I'm reading a propos of a discussion we're having about the value of the childish humor that comes in the form of substituting one word for another. Hitchens and his friends — intelligent adults — cracked each other up over the years by redoing book titles, changing "man" to "cunt" or "love" to "fuck," which is endlessly productive of laughter if you give yourself permission to do it. But I drifted into the part of the interview that's about the importance — the sexual importance — of reciting poetry. Hitchens continues:

"What if I had to try on my own merits? You've got to have some sort of reserve arsenal." He looks incredulous when the photographer, a very beautiful young woman, expresses doubt about the efficacy of this seduction technique.

"Oh no, not if it's done right," he says knowingly. Go on then, I say. Give us a demonstration. "Maybe at lunch?" he suggests, cheering up immediately. "Let's have lunch, and make a day of it." And so, inevitably, we adjourn to the pub....



[D]rink certainly makes him livelier company than the 10am sober version, and we pass a highly enjoyable few hours in a pub garden, during which he tries out successive renditions of a Shakespearean sonnet, Being Your Slave, What Should I Do But Tend, on the photographer.

"Well?", I ask her.

"Give her time to let it sink in!" he objects.

"Um," she ventures. "I'm feeling something like blind panic."

"Really? No!" And he's off again. "Being your slave what should I do but tend/Upon the hours and times of your desire?"

"My feeling," she reports kindly after he finishes, "is that I would be more seduced by argument."

"Well, I've got arguments!" he exclaims, laughing. "You want arguments? I've got arguments!"

Argument! When you say you want argument, I think that means I'm going to reject your arguments. I'll give you — as we say in law — a full and fair opportunity to litigate... and then you should feel decently well treated enough when I reject your claim.

Was North Korea modeled on "1984"?

Christopher Hitchens speculates:



(Via Jaltcoh.)

If there is a heaven...

... Christopher Hitchens gets in.

ADDED: You may remember the religion I proposed.

The Freedom From Religion Foundation applies for a permit to set up a "slightly blasphemous" solstice display in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda...

... in response to the nativity scene already set up by Wisconsin Family Action.

Freedom From Religion is cagily referring to a display with "a different type of wise people." I'm not sure where they will get decent looking statuary, but I'm picturing figures of Charles Darwin, Einstein, and — why not? — Christopher Hitchens, gathered around... what?... a microscope and a telescope.

Meade suggests a depiction of a young couple camping out at Occupy Madison, sitting solemnly at a table stacked with brochures about abortion rights. Arriving at the scene, via bicycle, are 3 bearded UW professors.

You've heard of the Anti-Christ. This is the anti-creche. Let's generate some more ideas for what this display might look like.

"And this was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips."

"Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature."

Over the three days of my final visit I took note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton’s Catholicism; Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Mann’s “Magic Mountain” — he’d reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions toward Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton’s “German Requiem”: “How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times.”

Ian McEwan, attending the dying Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens explores the history of the...

... blowjob. ("The three-letter 'job,' with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American.")

And here's his classic "Why Women Aren't Funny." ("Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men...")

And here's that time he subjected his body to all manner of fancy spa treatments. ("I also take the view that it’s a mistake to try to look younger than one is, and that the face in particular ought to be the register of a properly lived life.")

All of these links come from this collection of Hitch-links at Vanity Fair.

It's so sad to have lost Hitchens! From that 3d link, above:

[M]ost of my bad habits are connected with the only way I know to make a living. In order to keep reading and writing, I need the junky energy that scotch can provide, and the intense short-term concentration that nicotine can help supply. To be crouched over a book or a keyboard, with these conditions of mingled reverie and alertness, is my highest happiness. (Upon having visited the doctor, Jean-Paul Sartre was offered the following alternative: Give up cigarettes and carry on into a quiet old age and a normal death, or keep smoking and have his toes cut off. Then his feet. Then his legs. Assessing his prospects, Sartre told Simone de Beauvoir he “wanted to think it over.” He actually did retire his gaspers, but only briefly. Later that year, asked to name the most important thing in his life, he replied, “Everything. Living. Smoking.”)

By the way, Jean Paul Sartre was way funnier than Simone de Beauvoir.

"Christopher Hitchens — the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant..."

"... died today at the age of 62."



"Exchange views with a believer even for a short time, and let us make the assumption that this is a mild and decent believer who does not open the bidding by telling you that your unbelief will endanger your soul and condemn you to hell. It will not be long until you are politely asked how you can possibly know right from wrong. Without holy awe, what is to prevent you from resorting to theft, murder, rape, and perjury? It will sometimes be conceded that non-believers have led ethical lives, and it will also be conceded (as it had better be) that many believers have been responsible for terrible crimes. Nonetheless, the working assumption is that we should have no moral compass if we were not somehow in thrall to an unalterable and unchallengeable celestial dictatorship. What a repulsive idea!"

(From "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever.")

ADDED: From the NYT obituary:

In a political shift that shocked many of his friends and readers, he cut his ties to The Nation and became an outspoken advocate of the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and a ferocious critic of what he called “Islamofascism.” Although he denied coining the word, he popularized it.

He remained unapologetic about the war. In 2006 he told the British newspaper The Guardian: “There are a lot of people who will not be happy, it seems to me, until I am compelled to write a letter to these comrades in Iraq and say: ‘Look, guys, it’s been real, but I’m going to have to drop you now. The political cost to me is just too high.’ Do I see myself doing this? No, I do not!”

"Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger."

An old aphorism makes Christopher Hitchens skeptical.

Worse than being told that you've got to leave and the party's going on without you...

... would be to be told the party's going on forever and you're not allowed to leave. And the host insists that you have a good time.

It's Christopher Hitchens, talking about dying.

"Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality."

Writes Christopher Hitchens:

To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me....
To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”...

What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.

"[T]he corny, brainless antics of a devout American non-entity, notice of whose mere existence is beneath the dignity of any thinking person...."

... have provoked "self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to take offence; the easy resort to indiscriminate violence and cruelty; the promulgation of makeshift fatwas by mullahs on the make; those writhing mustaches framing crude slogans of piety and hatred, and yelling for death as if on first-name terms with the Almighty."

Christopher Hitchens is writing about the Koran-burning and the offense taken.

(Where will we go for well-overheated prose if we lose Christopher Hitchens?)

But Christopher Hitchens was talking about the document leakage, and Assange has turned himself in over the... semen leakage.

Yesterday, Christopher Hitchens posted "Turn Yourself In, Julian Assange," and today, Assange has turned himself in.

ADDED: He warned us that he was going to release his code if people rubbed him the wrong way. His DNA code.

"Religion doesn't do policy. All my decisions were based on policy and so they should be..."

"... and you may disagree with those decisions but they were made because I genuinely believed them to be right."

Said Tony Blair, as if a religious person can think about what what he believes is right without religion being part of the idea of what is right. That Blair blur happened in a debate with Christopher Hitchens, who asked:

"Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs, to appeal to our fear and to our guilt — is it good for the world?...

"To terrify children with the image of hell ... to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?...

In the end, the audience got to vote on who won the debate, and Hitchens got 68% — 68% of those who would go to a debate — in Toronto — about whether or not religion is a force for the good.

(Via Crack Emcee — "Kick Ass: You Believers Are Little Kim Jong-Ils.")