Friday, December 16, 2011

Without a Hitch

I had a rather pleasant image of Hitchens walking through the pearly gates, scowling at the angels and shaking his head with disgust at a very long, smug queue of the bovine deist-departed waiting to have their first meeting with God; St Peter puts an arm around his shoulder and says, "Well, on the bright side", as he steers Hitchens to a celestial bar where the Scotch is good, cigarettes are lit with stars, and the conversation is about to get better.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The Choleric Purple

One of the things about writing that can be really annoying is when other people do it.

I hasten to add: there are some people out there who write very well and I am really glad they do. Haruki Murakami. Philip Roth. I could name literally hundreds more. But the rest? Like little ticker-machines producing airribbons of language in a continuous chattering stream, the invisible snake-like wordribbons evaporating into a coffee-scented breeze around our chests; horribly, a great many of these coils are translated into print and then pasted across our visors.