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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I saw that, but it isn't just the short stories!
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I do think this applies completely to Mailer, Hemingway and Thompson, all of whom were walking caricatures of macho bluster. Mailer even stabbed his wife. He was a pathetic wretch with a lot of talent but no ability to think clearly at all.
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There was a lot more to Hemingway than macho bluster, though. Mailer? I'm not so sure. Wife-stabbing aside, he had a rather disturbing tendency to romanticize violence (including murder) as some sort of primal expression of the male life force.
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Huh? The Hitchslap videos tend to feature him extemporaneously withering someone with wit and high eloquence. I can’t imagine a bunch of MMA fans sitting around watching those clips.
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He’d have probably been the first Joe Rogan podcast guest to insult the host in a way that Rogan took it as a compliment.
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Your second tweet doesn’t. “Partial revival” is an insufficient characterization for a writer who is still taught in virtually every high school and college. Also, judging a writer’s machismo on the basis of how YouTube posters define it is not the height of cultural criticism.
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