I won’t bother linking to it or calling out the writer by name, but I happened upon a piece today about Kanye West that spent it’s first several paragraphs railing against Norman Mailer, who the writer imagined must have been a difficult subject for critics back when he was considered one of America’s best writers. Mailer’s personality and non-literary deeds were analyzed and then the writer turned to Kanye, with some relief.

Along the way, the writer tried to relegate Mailer to the past, as if his works aren’t still among the best American writers have produced in the last hundred years. It’s nonsense. Think what you will of Mailer as a person (I never met the man), but if you don’t acknowledge his writing, you simply don’t write well enough to criticize art.

My favorite Mailer, by the way, is one of his least celebrated short novels: The Gospel According to the Son. I read it around the time I read The Last Temptation of Christ and I think about it now as I consider delving into Leo Tolstoy’s retelling of the gospels.

It seems like some people would like us to be in some sort of cultural interegnum, where we must slay the giants of the past so that new talens can be born. I think this is folly. We shoul celebrate our cultural legacy, improve upon it and advance it, without being so dismissive.

There’s a book to be written about all the good we’re throwing away, mistaking a hasty clearance of history for progress.