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.
2. A commentator on my substack calls this literary school "penis-writing" and suggests it's fallen out of fashion. Hemingway has enjoyed a partial revival based on strength of his short stories, but it's hard to imagine Thompson, Mailer, Ellison or Hitchens doing same.
3. Hitchens is a particularly interesting case. The 10th anniversary of his death (Dec. 15, 2011) was last month and there is a flurry of attempts to reevaluate, shore up or restore, notably a @graydoncarter piece & @BenBurgis' new book.
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.
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.
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: jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-what…
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1. Peter Sellers has an awkward cameo in Get Back. He showed up at the studio while the Beatles were uncertain of their fate after George Harrison briefly left the band. His appearance is a reminder though of how the band is part of the history of comedy as well as music
2. We all know about the British Invasion as a musical story: the Beatles, the Stones, the Who. But, less visible in North America, this efflorescence overlapped with the great flourishing of English comedy: The Goon Show, Sellers, eventually Python.
3. There were multiple links between the comedy explosion & music explosion. Both owing a debt to musical hall & nonsense literature, records as a major venue for comedy in that era, George Martin as a producer for Goon Show & other comedians before becoming Beatles impresario.
1. As Spider-Man leaps to top of box office charts, worth remembering so popular a character was created by a true eccentric. Steve Ditko, the primary creator, shunned the spotlight (unlike credit-hog Stan Lee), living in overlapping covert worlds of fetish porn & libertarianism
2. As I discussed earlier, from 1958-1968 (which encompass years he created Spider-Man) Ditko shared a studio with Eric Stanton, a specialist in fetish art. The two artists influenced each other & a fetish flair shaped Ditko's character design. jeetheer.substack.com/p/the-sexual-s…
3. During the years where he collaborated with Stanton and co-created Spider-Man (not just drawing the art but plotting stories, designing characters & providing first draft of dialogue), Ditko became Ayn Rand devotee. Which reinforced the fetishist proclivities.
There's a lot of talk of post-liberalism but surprisingly not much discussion (as far as I've seen) of Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism, a really good intellectual genealogy. Reading it now and learning a lot. yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030024…
Rose's book shrewdly traces to post-liberal Right to the Conservative Revolution in Germany of the 1920s (Spengler, Schmitt, Heidegger), an intellectual variant that overlapped with but was distinct from the Nazis. That's a useful frame.
Post-Liberal Right is confusing because it includes a bunch of wildly conflicting traditions (Catholic theocrats, neo-pagans, neo-confederates). But perhaps best understood not as a doctrine but a situation: the right that confronts decolonization & end of global white rule
1. As a parent of three kids who love super-heroes I'm all for tact in keeping Spider-Man all ages. Romance yes, by all ages romance! But there's a paradox here because of the very outre sexuality that went into Spider-Man's creation.
2. Between 1958 and 1968, Steve Ditko, Spider-Man's primary creator, shared a studio with Eric Stanton, an artist who specialized in fetish art for, um, discriminating collectors. The two men would assist each other on art. Spider-Man was created in 1962, in the midst of this.
3. Ur-Spider-Man was brought to Marvel in 1962 by Jack Kirby (who already created insect heroes like Ant Man & The Fly). Ditko tasked with doing character and substantially reinvented, especially costume & origins.
1. Last week @EoinHiggins_ & I talked about @ggreenwald, which provoked this tweet. I took it as a challenge & sat down with Greenwald to "say this to [his] face."
2. In the even, Greenwald and I had a spirited discussion that took up the history of "America First" (from Charles Lindbergh to the Birch Society to Pat Buchanan to Trump) as well as anti-immigrant nativism (from Henry Adams to Tucker Carlson).
3. If I had to find a theme in our conversation, I'd say Greenwald really wants to bend over backwards to give Trump & Carlson every benefit of the doubt as putative advocates of anti-interventionism & pro-worker policies. I see no reason to accept their rhetoric at face value