1. Mailer pseudo-kerfuffle follows a pattern: there's a type of male writer who tends to be a star when alive & then goes into reputational decline soon after death: macho, two-fisted, sometimes substance abusing: Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, Mailer, Harlan Ellison, Hitchens.
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4. If I had to bet, I'd say that basis for a Hitchens' revival will be on the literary essays (mainly from Atlantic & LRB, best seen in his book Unacknowledged Legislators). The journalism was mostly too tied to topical &, particularly post 9/11 stuff doesn't hold up.
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5. Oddly, Hitchens' atheists polemics also seem time-bound: The Old Atheists (say Bertrand Russell) were philosophical & sturdy. The New Atheists were very much of a piece with era of post 9/11 Islamophobia & liberal worries about Bush's public piety.
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6. Hitchens was once a name to conjure with & his legacy is still unsettled. What is living and what is dead in his oeuvre?
@bellye66 & I sat down to talk some Hitchens:https://jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-what-happened-to-christopher?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email …Show this thread
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A lot of good things to say about Hitchens but would hardly put him in the same company as Thompson or Hemingway.
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(Also a lot of bad, to be clear!)
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Obviously funny and witty. But I'm not at all convinced that he still matters.
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That were a product of they time. Male writers today just haven’t had Hemingway’s, Mailer’s (et. al.)… experiences. Yes?
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