16. A very upskirt Christmas
See you in the new year!
And a happy Christmas to you! It’s early, but this newsletter is taking a break now until the new year. Thank you so much for all your comments and thoughts, and just for reading these emails — writing a book is (it turns out!) quite a grind sometimes, and being able to try out ideas and share my trivial obsessions here has helped enormously. See you in January for more total immersion in celebrity, sexual exploitation and technological shifts!
Sarah x
Gimme, gimme more…
James Marriott marks ten years since the death of Christopher Hitchens. I think he’s right that the Hitch style of the noughties prefigured the endless blowhardery of the Twitter public intellectual, and my only quibble is that the New Atheists were not totally setting themselves against a paper tiger — religiosity might have been fading generally, but perversely (or consequently) fundamentalism of all stripes was on the up. This was after all the time when the hottest star in the world was wearing a promise ring.
And James is to blame for me having read this astonishingly bad 2006 C. Hitchens essay on the blowjob. I can be a bit precious about my self-anointed role of The Only Truly Lolita Understander, but really has anyone ever fluffed it harder than this? Honestly, what’s the point of being friends with Martin Amis if you can’t tell the difference between Humbert Humbert and the man who wrote him.
That wasn’t very Christmassy was it? Have Aaliyah doing “The Christmas Song” to make up for it.