{"id":3003,"date":"2005-05-18T16:34:20","date_gmt":"2005-05-18T20:34:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3003"},"modified":"2010-07-12T20:21:14","modified_gmt":"2010-07-13T00:21:14","slug":"missed-meetings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3003","title":{"rendered":"Missed Meetings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stopsmilingonline.com\/archive_detail.html?id1=325\">A fantastic interview with Christopher Hitchens<\/a>, who I admit to having a little crush on.  I realize he is a drunkard, and I know he can be nuts and writes VICIOUS obituaries for people he hates, but dammit, I still love him.<\/p>\n<p>There are some great stories in the interview (how some poor editor tried to get Hitchens to remove the word &#8220;Promethean&#8221; from one of his pieces with predictable results) &#8211; but I was especially touched by the story he told about Solzhenitsyn.  Actually, there are a couple of stories.  I had heard the Kissinger one, but not the Nabokov one.<\/p>\n<p>Hitchens tells of a &#8220;missed meeting&#8221; between Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov, confessing that he has a fascination for &#8220;missed meetings&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I collect meetings that never occurred, but should have.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Wow.  For some reason, that has opened up a whole vista of associations in my mind.  What a marvelous concept, what a cool fascination to have.  It&#8217;s so mysterious, so evocative.  Stuff like that is why I love Hitchens.<\/p>\n<p>Great little interview.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A fantastic interview with Christopher Hitchens, who I admit to having a little crush on. I realize he is a drunkard, and I know he can be nuts and writes VICIOUS obituaries for people he hates, but dammit, I still &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=3003\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[1545],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3003"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18762,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3003\/revisions\/18762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}