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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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 Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 9:04 am Post subject: Norman Mailer is dead |
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I've never been a big reader of fiction, and haven't read a single novel by Norman Mailer. Nevertheless, he looms pretty large in my consciousness, as well as I'm sure a lot of people my age and older.
I've read a bit of non-fiction by him, essays and interviews and whatnot, the last one just a few weeks ago. It occured to me that he had kind of taken to recycling some tired artistic cliches, ie. pre-industrial society was better than our current technological one, etc. I'd been reading the same sort of thing by him for a few years now.
Anyway, here's the obit...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071110/ap_on_en_ot/obit_mailer |
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 10:58 am Post subject: ,,, |
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| "I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt � that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it." --Norman Mailer |
(On reaction to his publisher�s rejection of The Deer Park because of �six salacious lines Mr Mailer would not remove,�) |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 12:01 pm Post subject: Re: ,,, |
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| Nowhere Man wrote: |
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| "I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt � that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it." --Norman Mailer |
(On reaction to his publisher�s rejection of The Deer Park because of �six salacious lines Mr Mailer would not remove,�) |
He seems to have devoted himself quite considerably to promoting that sort of "psychic outlaw" reputation. And of course it wasn't always entirely a put-on...
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| Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times in which he lived. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, he stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a knife. She declined to press charges, and it was not until 1997 that she revealed in her memoir how close she had come to dying. |
I also read, in a biography of William S. Burroughs, that at an Edinburgh writer's conference a guy walked in and said he had just been beaten up by some street punks. Mailer made some mocking remarks along the lines of "oh so you think that makes you really tough huh", and proceeded to push the guy down a flight of stairs. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 12:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Sounds like a c*nt. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 12:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Sounds like a c*nt. |
Yeah, not a consistently nice or rational individual, by any means. Here's a list of some of his run-ins with other public figures...
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William Styron
Crime: Allegedly bad-mouthing Mailer�s wife Adele.
Action taken: Wrote a critical piece in Esquire and a letter to Styron in 1958 that said, �I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit.�
Blowback: Styron sniped at him in print for 25 years, and one of his villainous characters bore a certain resemblance to Mailer. They finally reconciled in 1985.
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Truman Capote
Crime: Saying of Mailer, �He has no talent. None, none, none!�
Action taken: Mailer sat on him.
Blowback: In 1980, Capote told an interviewer that while Mailer called In Cold Blood a �failure of the imagination � now I see that the only prizes Norman wins are for that very same kind of writing. I�m glad I was of some small service to him.�
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Adele Morales Mailer
Crime: Calling her husband a �faggot� when he was drunk and stoned at 4 a.m. at the tail end of a party to launch his mayoral campaign.
Action taken: Stabbed her twice with a penknife, nearly killing her.
Blowback: Though she refused to testify against him, he did spend seventeen days in Bellevue�s psych ward. They finally divorced two years later. She wrote a book about it in 1997.
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Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, et al.
Crime: Being feminists�and in the case of Millett, coining the phrase �male chauvinist pig� to describe him.
Action taken: Attacked them all in a retrograde essay titled �The Prisoner of Sex� and in a vicious debate at Town Hall with Greer and other women, immortalized in the 1971 D. A. Pennebaker documentary Town Bloody Hall.
Blowback: At Town Hall, Mailer was practically booed off the stage (with help from audience members Betty Friedan and Susan Sontag). Greer denounced the �masculine artist in our society� as a �killer,� but only after saying she wanted to sleep with Mailer. The two went for drinks afterward, but nothing reportedly came of it.
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Gore Vidal
Crime: Comparing �The Prisoner of Sex� to �three days of menstrual flow� and Mailer to Charles Manson.
Action taken: Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal�and punched him�at a Lally Weymouth soir�e.
Blowback: Still on the floor, Vidal said, �Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.� Days later, Vidal went on Cavett�s show to assert that Mailer had�literally�stabbed his second wife in the back. They, too, reconciled in 1985.
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Michiko Kakutani
Crime: Reviewing his books negatively.
Action taken: In 2005, he told Rolling Stone, �Kakutani is a one-woman kamikaze. She disdains white male authors, and I�m her number-one favorite target � But the Times editors can�t fire her. They�re terrified of her. With discrimination rules and such, well, she�s a threefer � Asiatic, feminist, and ah, what�s the third? Well � let�s just call her a twofer � She is a token. And deep down, she probably knows it.�
Blowback: Stay tuned. Someone at the Times has to review The Castle in the Forest, and we can be reasonably certain critics won�t like it. Kakutani hasn�t recused herself, and the takedown is her stock-in-trade.
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http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/26285/ |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 1:54 pm Post subject: |
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| I have read nothing by that jerk since he glorified Gilmore. There was no anguish at all on Gilmore's part. He was just a stone cold killer. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 5:31 pm Post subject: |
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"The Executioner's Song" was brilliant. "Armies of the Night" was pretty good. "Ancient Evenings" was garbage. Mailer was pretty uneven as a writer but always had an overinflated ego. He was better at the celebrity game than he was at writing.
Did Gore Vidal REALLY sleep with Kerouac? |
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igotthisguitar
Joined: 08 Apr 2003
Location: South Korea (Permanent Vacation)
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 5:45 pm Post subject: |
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| Kerouac was kinda BI wasn't he? |
I'd heard that rumor, but had never come across an allegation naming names. There was a suspicion mentioned by someone or other that Kerouac slept with Allen Ginsberg, but I never believed that. Why? I saw a photograph of Allen. |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 11:15 pm Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| "The Executioner's Song" was brilliant. |
Except for the part where Mailer had the stone cold killer having anguished over the killings he committed. The dude killed because he liked to kill. There were no moral qualms. And Mailer glorified him in that flick. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Sat Nov 10, 2007 11:27 pm Post subject: |
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| And Mailer glorified him in that flick. |
What I remember about the flick was being blown away by Tommy Lee Jones' performance. |
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