Norman Mailer RIP

[justiceiro]

Damn, is we havin more hifalutin conversations than those boors over AtS or what?

We should start a WJC "finer things" club.

every time I hear the word "culture" I reach for my revolver.



Hi-YAH!

[AmbushBug]

Damn, is we havin more hifalutin conversations than those boors over AtS or what?

We should start a WJC "finer things" club.

[justiceiro]

I'm not bashing mailer in favor of Hemmingway and Saramago.  I actually don't like Hemingway very much; other than his description of bullfighting his style strikes me as simplistic and tedious. His characters also irritate me.  I remember how irritating the dickheads who ran around Prague in the mid 90's trying to be Hemingway were, and I recall that Hemingway was likely up to the same shit in Paris in the 20's.  Much of his writing seems to be thinly reconceived autobiogaphical stuff about his friends and himself.  Overeducated, overfunded, overintoxicated, and fucking ponderous.

Saramago also, frankly, stinks as a writer.  He's tragically awful- kind of a polar opposite to Hemingway.   It's tragic because he could have been one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but the cult of literature fucked him.   Unlike Hemingway, he actually  has extremely interesting stories to tell, and usually the first 1/5th of any of his books are good.  Then he remembers that he is an "artist" and tries to be the Portuguese James Joyce or something.  He's proud of the fact that he has sentences that are 4 pages long.  I think he drowns his good story in a flood of verbiage and displays of pointless syntactical virtuosity.  It is possible to write a four page sentence. But why should you?

I'm not being fair to Mailer, perhaps.  The reason I am suspicious of him is that his Novel, the gosel according to the Son, came out in 1997.  Saramago's book came out in 1992, and at that point he had not yet won the Nobel prize, so he was little known outside Portugal, or at the very least Europe.  So the fact that the overarching themes were so similar, particularly the God and devil conversations, seemed very, very, odd.  Calling "executioner's song" a ripoff of "in cold blood" isn't fair.  Then again, he didn't write it two years after capote's publication. It's a little odd.

I am starting off with an enormous chip on my shoulder against Mailer, because he is a darling of the American Literary Establishment, and I can't stand most of what that establishment purports to admire, what it holds forth as the American canon, its generally excrable tasts in lierature, and its imperious dismissal of what is most exciting, revolutionary, and truly good in American writing.  Mailer reeks of intellectual self-congratulation.  He often takes "art" as "artifice", an idea that has spawned generations of truly awful writers who go about producing indigestible crap, and congratulating each other, within their own circles, on the beauty and authenticity of it all, and how the hoi polloi can't process it because of its amazing erudition and loftiness.  As one writer put it, who Mailer quoted while attempting to criticize her but instead ended up revelaing a great deal about himself, "[the hipster]  contents himself with a magical omnipotence never disproved because never tested."  Mailer was that hipster.  His writing is permeated with it.  It bores the shit out of me.

I much prefer the honest writing of someone like Steven King or William Gibson than the turd that passes itself off as "literature."

[AmbushBug]

What the hell kind of name is Gore anyway?

Why not just name your kid Bloodnguts?

Actually, that's a pretty cool name for a kid.

Blood 'Nguts Verbinski.

[Soshin]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21825211/

[glx]

Incidentally, didn't Vidal and Mailer hate each other? I seem to remember them being bitter rivals.

I love his shampoo.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/rGRvWMq38XQ&amp;rel=1" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/rGRvWMq38XQ&amp;rel=1</a>

[AmbushBug]

I haven’t read Saramago but Mailer wouldn’t be the first to rewrite history or examine it from another point of view, hell, Gore Vidal has made an entire career out of this.

Incidentally, didn't Vidal and Mailer hate each other? I seem to remember them being bitter rivals.

[AmbushBug]

executioner's song= In cold Blood (capote)

This is a pretty cold thing to say, Justi. Capote created a whole new genre with In Cold Blood, and you can't discount later authors for building on it. Especially when you're talking about a book as gripping as Executioner's Song.

There'd be no Spinal Tap without War of the Worlds or the first five minutes of Citizen Cane; there'd be no Sex Pistols without Chuck Berry.

My point is, read the Naked and the Dead. You'll never be able to experience it the way people did in 1948, when almost all of it was anathema, if not inconceivable, but that remove only barely compromises its effect.

Also, if you've read Executioner's Song and didn't care for it (or even if you haven't read it) do yourself a favor and read Shot in the Heart, by Mikal Gilmore, one of the best memoirs I've ever read, based on the same events (and much of the same research), and very much in the Capote/Mailer school. Like Executioner's Song, it uses the form of the nonfiction novel to create something exciting and terrible but at the same time deeply personal.

[Soshin]

executioner's song= In cold Blood (capote)

Gospel according to the son= The gospel of Jesus Christ (saramago)

Those are the only two I read, and they were clearly derivative.  Never read the Naked and the dead, I figured it was a Hemmingway ripoff.

It’s funny that you bring up a Hemingway comparison because ALL these guys wanted to be Heminway, Mailer, Plimpton… hell, Hunter Thompson went so far as to visit the site of Hemingway’s suicide (There is an essay on it, I think it is in “A Proud Highway”) then 50 years later stick a gun in his mouth and Hemingway himself into the next world.

I can’t read Hemingway.

There is something about his writing style, it has a stop-start rhythm that gets on my nerves.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started “For Whom the Bell Tolls” only to put it down halfway through.  This is strange because I am generally always interested in anything about the Spanish Civil War, “Homage to Catalonia” by Orwell is one of my favorite books and the people who volunteered for the International Brigades in the fight against Fascism are some of the forgotten heroes of the 20th Century.

I haven’t read Saramago but Mailer wouldn’t be the first to rewrite history or examine it from another point of view, hell, Gore Vidal has made an entire career out of this.

Maybe I am simplifying this (and I’m sure Brightmoments will take me to task if I am), but there is a turning point in American literature in the late 50’s when the drink and drugs really started to kick in.  This is why I think that your comparisons between “An Executioners Song” and “In Cold Blood” are valid, but that Executioners Song is vastly better book, even if nowhere near as influential.

I am the most anti-death penalty person on the planet but the story of Gary Gilmore fighting for his OWN execution, at a time when the establishment was also anti-death penalty was so well written that it had me questioning my own beliefs by the end.  Morals were out the window, it was ugly and ambigious.

With the Beats on the scene the rhythm of everything changed.  I read Truman Capote, I read F. Scott Fitzgerald, I tried to read Hemingway and they all feel old.  There is something of the establishment about them. 

Mailer, along with Kerouac, Vonnegut, Heller, Thompson, Wolfe, Kesey to name but a few, changed the establishment and the writing style (at least in American literature), that to my 20-year old, drug addled mind, felt fresh and bursting with life……..

[justiceiro]

executioner's song= In cold Blood (capote)

Gospel according to the son= The gospel of Jesus Christ (saramago)

Those are the only two I read, and they were clearly derivative.  Never read the Naked and the dead, I figured it was a Hemmingway ripoff.

[CeeDub]

Those guys, they were too much.  Guys like Bogey, Mailer, Cronkite, my Uncle Sam, WoodStock's Uncle Al (Purple Heart on Iwo Jima when he was 16) - they were larger than life.  More manlier than any men.  They truly were the greatest generation - of their time.

I met Walter, Art Buchwald, Styron - but never Norman.  RIP muthafuckha.

[skwirrlking]

I know someone who used to date one of his daughters. he was a lot shorter in person than I'd expected.

[Bobblehead]

Bummer. 

[Soshin]

In the last few years we have lost Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter Thompson, now New Jersey's own Norman Mailer is gone too.  RIP.

BBC Obit:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/231694.stm 

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