I’ve been reading On the Road. I really, really, really, really did not want to write about it.
Lately I feel as if my work here has come dangerously close to resembling clocking in for a shift at the Dead White Male Rehabilitation Factory. Whether it’s Hitchens, Mailer, or Wolfe, the formula is the same: acknowledge the faults, point out the good things, and end in a sense of grudging admiration, having done my bit to ease the passage of these disreputable figures back into the canon. Sotto voce there is perhaps even a bit of prurient nostalgia for a time when writers were allowed to be so boisterous on the page, when they lacked an inner flinch, an inner censor, even if it came at a high cost to others.
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