The Hitch's Immortal Rejoinders

Waking up at 4 A.M. to begin the day as a scribe

Q: What time of day do you get up?

In the 4’s. I set my alarm for 5, 5:15 a.m., but my body clock inevitably wakes me up between 4:30 and 5.

Q: And what time do you go to bed?

I’m usually asleep before 10 p.m. It’s the only way to survive and have a semi-healthy lifestyle. Not to say it’s a healthy lifestyle.

Q & A with Chuck Todd

Bouncing

"A man must bounce back from a woman's rejection; a woman must get used to bouncing any man; and a good father must act as a bouncer to his daughter."

Wilson's Wordsmithy

Wordsmithy | Why Christians must write, and what they must write about | Doug Wilson from Daniel Foucachon on Vimeo.

Failure liberates you

Those varied backgrounds enriched them as new journalist and enriched me as their professor/editor. New to the field, they brought a walk-through-fire work ethic and a willingness to fail, understanding that failure is the necessary precondition to success.

Failure liberates you; it liberates you from the fear of failure; it liberates you from the delusion you can somehow be flawless.

Samuel Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist, p.140-141.

The building blocks of journalistic greatness

All too few journalism programs, especially at the undergraduate level, strive to build your cultural and historical literacy and to imbue you with intellectual curiosity. Yet those are the building blocks of journalistic greatness.

Samuel Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist, p. 138

Fiction and Non-fiction's very separate contracts

The challenge is to accept fiction's influence, to study and apply its narrative means, without ever adopting its poetic license. Fiction and nonfiction, you see, establish very separate contracts with a reader. Nonfiction promises accuracy, to the greatest degree humanly possible, and in return has the power of actuality. No matter how implausible an event or an action, the nonfiction author can fairly to a reader, But that's what really happened. Fiction does not enjoy the escape catch of implausible fact.

Samuel Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist, p. 128

What's in your library, man

A man's library should be composed of the following.

Sound Advice: Volume 1

Sound Advice

Christopher Nolan's "Inception"

Parodies, I assume, will follow on YouTube.

David Denby, The New Yorker Film Review of "Inception"

Excerpts from Letters to a Young Poet

Page 3:

I cannot discuss your verses; for any attempt at criticism would be foreign to me. Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Page 5:

You ask whether your verses are any good.. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you -- no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Page 7:

Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance.

Further down the page:

If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The "quiet, serious, highly-endowed boy"

"It turned out that Horacek had been chaplain to the Lower Military School at Sankt-Polten fifteen years before, when Rilke was a student there. And he told Kappus about the "quiet, serious, highly-endowed boy" whom he had known and had since lost track of."

Stephen Mitchell, Foreword to Letters to a Young Poet

True Love

"True Love, like a ghost, is much talked of but seldom seen."

Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Old people, advice and consolation

"Old people are fond of giving good advice to console themselves for being no longer able to give bad examples."

Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucald

I wish we’d gone all the way

“The best sex this year was hands down was with an artist I dated over the summer. I think what made it so hot was, because we were trying to take things slow, we’d have epic public makeout sessions before one of us would finally be like, ‘Let’s go to my place.’ Also, in almost two months of dating we never actually had sex-sex, as in the ‘p’ never actually went in the ‘v.’ It was all oral sex and massaging and rolling around naked for hours at a time. Funny how he sticks out as the best over the guys I actually boned. Though in retrospect, I wish we’d gone all the way. Because I bet that would’ve been amazing, too.”

What Was The Best Sex You Had In 2010?

In a perfect world

In a perfect world, the ideal would be for exes to succeed at being friends, but in one where bitterness, jealousy, passion, and human nature exceed reasoning and rational thought, it's impossible.

Being Friends with Exes

The Ups and Downs of Uniqueness

"I realized a long time ago in high school that I was not the type to blend in, but the type to stand out. But uniqueness can have its downsides: like standing out at all the wrong times, or idolizing your uniqueness and cheapening it." -Original

I did, I do, and I will

“If I never met you, I wouldn't like you. If I didn't like you, I wouldn't love you. If I didn't love you, I wouldn't miss you. But I did, I do, and I will.”

Until lions have their historians

“Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter”

African Proverb

Love me when I least deserve it

“Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I really need it.”

Swedish Proverb

Have You Ever Been In Love?

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.”

Neil Gaiman

Freedman on The Act of Writing

From his stellar book:

To put it another way, the act of writing is the act of turning chaos into cosmos, of seeking to explain the hurly-burly of existence. Real life takes place in equal increments of sixty second to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours to a day, none weighted any more or less than any other. A journalist dares to believe that he or she can selectively discern what is most significant from this ceaseless stream of activity and then explain it to the larger society. The basic forms of journalistic prose, if used judiciously, are the tools of doing so. They afford us venerable, proven ways of organizing material, and more importantly, they compel us to sharpen our thinking.

Samuel G. Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist

Gasp! Armies of Academics Measuring Poetry

From the movie Dead Poets Society:

Keep ripping gentlemen. This is a battle, a war, and the casualties could be your hearts and souls. Thank you Mr. Dalton. Armies of academics going forward measuring poetry, no! We will not have that here. No more Mr. J. Evans Pritchard.

A Moral Journalist

"A moral journalist, a journalist in full possession of both professional ethics and human empathy, the kind of journalist I pray you want to be, prepares for the day when he or she must stand before Thoth to be judged." Samuel Freedman, Letters to a Young Journalist

Holding you down -jazmine sullivan (anhayla)

My Only Published Poem (Circa 2005-2006)

The Boast

Alone I have stood stagnant for seventeen summers

Some think the reason I write

Is as simple as signing a fraudulent forged note

I tell you this tale:

Early in my minor middle school career

I careened out of a relationship rapidly

Avid and eager to advance

Perfecting poetry became much motivation

I quickly climbed the poetic plateau

The steep side,

Pacing and not rushing my written rhetoric

Now I need to conquer and neutralize any negative forces

With wicked words worthy of a Shakespearean scholar in solitary

C.Goins (Age:17), Published in "Celebrate! Young Poets Speak Out" Northeast-Spring 2006

The Fickleness of Feelings

There was a muted sadness in knowing that something that had affected me so strongly just didn’t anymore. Something must be said of the fickleness of feelings. But we had, it seemed, moved on.

Amy Van Vuuren, Ex Sex Success

Kim Strassel on Journalism 'Demystified'