chris hitchens can suck it

I'm a big fan of Vanity Fair. I'll even pay ten bucks here to get a current copy, and as most of you know it is not easy for me to part with ten bucks. A pair of jeans for ten bucks at TJ Maxx? Ok, if they're really great. Say, if they've been knocked down from a hundred and fifty. Then, alright. Maybe. But most stuff, not so much. Magazines, I'm sometimes willing to spring for. I picked up the latest copy of Vanity Fair - with Robert Pattinson on the cover, swoon - yesterday and started flipping through.

Here's my usual modus operandi for reading VF:

1. Read the table of contents in its entirety.

2. Read the upper crust scandal article first.

3. Zip over to the "More from the VF mailbag" section (ah yes, the one I was published in last year - that's me, the eminence grise of VF letters to the editor...)

4. Flip to the best photos of the issue, usually the party section and the other major articles, but only look at the photos and the captions, not the text.

5. Slowly, over the next week or so, read the articles in the following order: more scandal / crime, hollywood, other arts and entertainment, evil finance stories, "opinion" pieces, fashion, letters to the editor, contributors' profiles, proust questionaire, politics, editor's letter.

6. I never read the book section. I hate it. "Elissa Schappell's Hot Type"? More like "Elissa Blah Blah Yawn Snore". Ha, I'm so funny and snarky. I should send another letter to their editor, huh?

I always end up reading the Christopher Hitchens articles though I think he's also a bit of a hack. He thinks he's all, like, gonzo and audacious with his whole "people with boobs aren't funny" and "I love to smoke" and "I'm trying to stop smoking and to start exercizing" and "god who" schtick, but his rants just aren't fresh. Seriously, Turner could write a funny, incisive, effectively digressing but then getting to the point dramatically article with both his hands tied behind his back so that he had to peck out his opinion with his nose on the keyboard and that article would so kick Hitchens' article's butt. If an article's butt could be kicked. Which it can. Cause I said so. Neh neh!

This month, Hitchens got top billing on the front cover with the headline: "Hitchens: The Mystery and Cult of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". I recently read all three of the books (uh, in one night a piece) in this trilogoy by Stieg Larsson, so I was pretty interested to find out more about the mystery (and cult!) surrounding them. Unfortunately, the article ended up being short, relatively uniformative, and Hitchens had a totally VF take on the stories. The VF take can be summed up like this: hoity toity wah wah cultural degeneration plus also I I don't get it fully. Hitchens complains because the heroine, Lisbeth Salandar, is unbelievable. Well, dude, how many super master sleuths do you know who are boring normal people like you? That's why it's POPULAR FICTION. So she has a photographic memory, is a super hacker, got buried alive, and had breast implants. That makes her COOL and fun to read about. But that wasn't what annoyed me the most. Nope, there were three additional points that Hitchens made that are So Wrong.

Wrong the first: Hitchens says that the male protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist is "lumbering" and that he supposes "Philip Seymour Hoffman will be offered the ursine Blomkvist role". I find this fascinating given that Blomkvist is consistently described as fairly fit and exceedingly attractive to beautiful women of all ages and sizes. Whassup, Hitchens? (And no offense to you, Philip Seymour Hoffman if you're reading fixed address - I think you're great! Loved you in Almost Famous and thought that when you brought back the rock-and-roll character for Pirate Radio you were verging on cute...but you're just not a chick magnet like Blomkvist, sorry).

Wrong the second: Hitchens pulls out a cheap quote from Larsson to demonstrate his poor writing. I just don't buy this kind of critique. Like, come on, an airport-bookstore-type-of-book doesn't sound like it was written by Nabokov? Really? Nooooo, I don't believe it! VF also did the same thing with Twilight, excerpting some of the cheesier passages. Once again: not Jane Austen? Really? Nooooooo, I don't believe it. And this gets me on to my larger rant about VF: why are they spending all their time bemoaning the lowering of culture? Who cares? It's not like there hasn't been lowbrow entertainment since, like, ancient times in every civilization in the whole world. Get over it! Either have fun satirizing stuff, or proclaim the brilliance of the latest avant garde installation art but stop the bloody moaning and complaining. In the Pattinson issue alone, there is also an article on "How Grandmas and 12 Year Old Girls Are Corrupting Our Culture" (no, not because they're sexing it up in miniskirts, because they like things that are CUTE! OMG herald the death of all things good in the world! Head for the cultural fallout shelters!) and then in "I'm a Culture Critic...Get Me Out of Here" James Wolcott cries like a baby over how reality TV has ruined not just TV, not just culture, BUT LIFE ITSELF. Note to Walcott, Hitchens, Carter et al: PULL YOURSELVES TOGETHER BOYS!

Wrong the third: Finally, Hitchens does a complete misreading of the entire Larsson series when he writes that in the novels, "there is much sex but absolutely no love." There is a serious undercurrent of love rippling through the books, but perhaps it takes forms that Hitchens doesn't recognize. Like, unrequited love despite requited sex. Or, decades-long-love matched with decades-long-physical-love-affair but no marriage. Or short term love that doesn't last. Or confusing love that is also friendship. Actually, come to think of it, Larsson is pretty heavy on the friendship side of love. For his characters, sex is important, friendship is important, and love is important. It's just that all three don't necessarily combine together in equal amounts every time; connections are more complicated and difficult and yet also sometimes easier than in traditional, straight-forward love stories, and maybe Hitchens' universe just can't comprehend that.

And so, to Hitchens and the other whiners at VF, I say unto you: go suck on some lemons! At least then you'll have an excuse for being so sour.

[Delhi-29-November-2009]