norman mailer RIP

[luba]

NEW YORK - Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country's literary conscience and provocateur with such books as "The Naked and the Dead" and "The Executioner's Song" died Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84.ADVERTISEMENTMailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author's biographer.From his classic debut novel to such masterworks of literary journalism as "The Armies of the Night," the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.Some of his works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old "enfant terrible."Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.He had nine children, made a quixotic bid to become mayor of New York, produced five forgettable films, dabbled in journalism, flew gliders, challenged professional boxers, was banned from a Manhattan YWHA for reciting obscene poetry, feuded publicly with writer Gore Vidal and crusaded against women's lib.But as Newsweek reviewer Raymond Sokolov said in 1968, "in the end it is the writing that will count."Mailer, he wrote, possessed "a superb natural style that does not crack under the pressures he puts upon it, a talent for narrative and characters with real blood streams and nervous systems, a great openness and eagerness for experience, a sense of urgency about the need to test thought and character in the crucible of a difficult era."Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923 in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn ? later described by Mailer as "the most secure Jewish environment in America."Mailer completed public schools, earned an engineering science degree in 1943 from Harvard, where he decided to become a writer, and was soon drafted into the Army. Sent to the Philippines as an infantryman, he saw enough of Army life and combat to provide a basis for his first book, "The Naked and the Dead," published in 1948 while he was a post-graduate student in Paris on the G.I. Bill.The book ? noteworthy for Mailer's invention of the word "fug" as a substitute for the then-unacceptable four-letter original ? was a best-seller, and Mailer returned home to find himself anointed the new Hemingway, Dos Passos and Melville.Buoyed by instant literary celebrity, Mailer embraced the early 1950s counterculture ? defining "hip" in his essay "The White Negro," allying himself with Beat Generation gurus Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and writing social and political commentary for the leftist Village Voice, which he helped found. He also churned out two more novels, "Barbary Shore" (1951) and "Deer Park" (1955), neither embraced kindly by readers or critics.Mailer turned reporter to cover the 1960 Democratic Party convention for Esquire and later claimed, with typical hubris, that his piece, "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," had made the difference in John F. Kennedy's razor-thin margin of victory over Republican Richard M. Nixon.While Life magazine called his next book, "An American Dream" (1965), "the big comeback of Norman Mailer," the author-journalist was chronicling major events of the day: an anti-war march on Washington, the 1968 political conventions, the Ali-Patterson fight, an Apollo moon shot.His 1968 account of the peace march on the Pentagon, "The Armies of the Night," won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was described as the only person over 40 trusted by the flower generation.Covering the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago for Harper's magazine, Mailer was torn between keeping to a tight deadline or joining the anti-war protests that led to a violent police crackdown. "I was in a moral quandary. I didn't know if I was being scared or being professional," he later testified in the trial of the so-called Chicago Seven.In 1999, "The Armies of the Night" was listed at No. 19 on a New York University survey of 100 examples of the best journalism of the century.Mailer's personal life was as turbulent as the times. In 1960, at a party at his Brooklyn Heights home, Mailer 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 own book, how close she had come to dying.In 1969, Mailer ran for mayor on a "left conservative" platform. He said New York City should become the 51st state, and urged a referendum for "black ghetto dwellers" on whether they should set up their own government.Mailer had numerous minor run-ins with the law, usually for being drunk or disorderly, but was also jailed briefly during the Pentagon protests. While directing the film "Maidstone" in 1968, the self-described "old club fighter" punched actor Lane Smith, breaking his jaw, and bit actor Rip Torn's ear in another scuffle.Years later, he championed the work of a convict-writer named Jack Abbott ? and was subjected to ridicule and criticism when Abbott, released to a halfway house, promptly stabbed a man to death.Mailer had views on almost everything.The '70s: "the decade in which image became preeminent because nothing deeper was going on."Poetry: A "natural activity ... a poem comes to one," whereas prose required making "an appointment with one's mind to write a few thousand words."Journalism: irresponsible. "You can't be too certain about what happened."Technology: "insidious, debilitating and depressing," and nobody in politics had an answer to "its impact on our spiritual well-being.""He had such a compendious vision of what it meant to be alive. He had serious opinions on everything there was to have an opinion on, and everything he had was so original," said friend William Kennedy, author of "Ironweed."Mailer's suspicion of technology was so deep that while most writers used typewriters or computers, he wrote with a pen, some 1,500 words a day, in what Newsweek's Sokolov called "an illegible and curving hand." When a stranger asked him on a Brooklyn street if he wrote on a computer, he replied, "No, I never learned that," then added, in a mischievous aside, "but my girl does."In a 1971 magazine piece about the new women's liberation movement, Mailer equated the dehumanizing effect of technology with what he said was feminists' need to abolish the mystery, romance and "blind, goat-kicking lust" from sex.Time magazine said the broadside should "earn him a permanent niche in their pantheon of male chauvinist pigs." Mailer later told an interviewer that his being called sexist was "the greatest injustice in American life."Two years later, he wrote "Marilyn" and was accused of plagiarism by other Marilyn Monroe biographers. One, Maurice Zolotow, called it "one of the literary heists of the century." Mailer shot back, "nobody calls me a plagiarist and gets away with it," adding that if he was going to steal, it would be from Shakespeare or Melville."He could do anything he wanted to do ? the movie business, writing, theater, politics," author Gay Talese said Saturday. "He never thought the boundaries were restricted. He'd go anywhere and try anything. He was a courageous person, a great person, fully confident, with a great sense of optimism."In "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), Mailer promised to write the greatest novel yet, but later conceded he had not.Among other notable works: "Cannibals and Christians" (1966); "Why Are We in Vietnam?" (1967); and "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (1968), an account of the two political conventions that year."The Executioner's Song" (1979), an epic account of the life and death of petty criminal Gary Gilmore, whom Mailer never met, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. "Ancient Evenings" (1983), a novel of ancient Egypt that took 11 years to complete, was critically panned."Tough Guys Don't Dance" (1984) became a 1987 film. Some critics found "Harlot's Ghost" (1991), a novel about the CIA, surprisingly sympathetic to the cold warriors, considering Mailer's left-leaning past. In 1997, he came out with "The Gospel According to the Son," a novel told from Jesus Christ's point of view. The following year, he marked his 75th birthday with the epic-length anthology "The Time of Our Time."Mailer's wives, besides Morales, were Beatrice Silverman; Lady Jeanne Campbell; Beverly Bentley; actress Carol Stevens and painter Norris Church. He had five daughters, three sons and a stepson.Mailer lived for decades in the Brooklyn Heights townhouse with a view of New York harbor and lower Manhattan from the rooftop "crow's nest," and kept a beachside home in Provincetown, Mass., where he spent increasing time in his later years.Despite heart surgery, hearing loss and arthritic knees that forced him to walk with canes, Mailer retained his enthusiasm for writing and in early 2007 released "The Castle in the Forest," a novel about Hitler's early years, narrated by an underling of Satan. A book of conversations about the cosmos, "On God: An Uncommon Conversation," came out in the fall.In 2005, Mailer received a gold medal for lifetime achievement at the National Book Awards, where he deplored what he called the "withering" of general interest in the "serious novel."Authors like himself, he said more than once, had become anachronisms as people focused on television and young writers aspired to screenwriting or journalism.When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me.""Obviously, he was a great American voice," said a tearful Joan Didion, struggling for words upon learning of Mailer's death.Lennon said arrangements for a private service and burial for family members and close friends would be announced next week, and a memorial service would be held in New York in the coming months

[luba]

posle hantera tompsona, otisao i on. pogodilo me je mnogo vise nego sto sam ocekivala da ce me tresnuti smrt 84-godisnjaka. a i hanter se (ipak) sam ubio, te tako ne mogu da zamerim sto je odlucio da prestane da bivstvuje medju nama.ali majler. vec dugo znam da je bio veoma vazna bljak javna bljak licnost u mom zivotu. otkrio mi ga je otac, pokusavajuci da me privoli da odgledamo neverovatan mec izmedju kralja i formana, koji mi tada, priznajem, nije mnogo znacio. objasnjavajuci mi u cemu se krije lepota u posmatranju dva razbacanka koji se mlataraju na nekoj gumenoj strunjaci, rekao mi je da su svi njemu vazni ljudi skoro patoloski voleli boks. jednog sam ubrzo upoznala zahvaljujuci sumanutoj ideji da se starac i more ubace u lektiru za osnovnu skolu, a drugog, danas cini mi se vaznijeg, malo kasnije. ali ga nikad nisam zanemarila, zaboravila i, da upotrebim onaj najgori klise, mnogo toga sam naucila od njega.kada sam, godinama kasnije, procitala "the fight", sigurno najbolju knjigu o boksu, mozda i o sportu uopste, kasijus klej vec je bio jedan od mojih najvecih heroja, oca vise nije bilo a majler je, rekli bi frojdovci, preuzeo njegovu vaspitno-obrazovno-propagandnu ulogu. gutala sam sve cega bih se dokopala, nisam se obazirala na nekad nimalo simpaticne price iz zivota i stavove, ucila i upijala stil, recenice, lazi, nagrade, sve. pokusavala sam nedeljama da ga slucajno sretnem na ulicama bruklin hajtsa, neuspesno. cekala jedini put u visesatnom redu da udjem na retko predavanje studentima na kolumbiji, neuspesno. jutjubovi i video kasete nekada ne mogu da nadoknade te propuste.jeste, bio je egoista, muska sovinisticka svinja, bitanga, alkos i sta sve ne. pa sta. bio je norman majler.volela bih da postoji neki taj raj u kome ce ga docekati neprestani boks mecevi, hektolitri burbona i tone kalifornija golda. a mozda i merlin monro.

[Indy]

Years later, he championed the work of a convict-writer named Jack Abbott ? and was subjected to ridicule and criticism when Abbott, released to a halfway house, promptly stabbed a man to death.

"Mogućnost da se pojedinci rađaju sa slabom savesnošću ide direktno nasuprot doktrine o "Plemenitom divljaku". Ona liči na staromodne predstave o rođenim kriminalcima i lošem semenu, i potpuno je uništena od strane intelektualaca 20. veka, te zamenjena verom da su svi zlodelnici žrtve siromaštva i loših roditelja. Kasnih 70-tih, Norman Mailer dobio je pismo od robijaša Jack Henry Abbotta, koji je proveo najveći deo života iza rešetaka za dela koja su varirala od čekova bez pokrića do ubistva drugog zatvorenika. Mailer je pisao knjigu o ubici Gary Gimloreu, te se Abbott ponudio da mu pomogne da pronikne u um ubice, deleći sa njim svoje zatvorske dnevnike i svoju radikalnu kritiku sistema krivičnog prava. Mailer je bio opčinjen Abbottovom prozom i proglasio ga je briljantnim novim piscem i misliocem - "intelektualcem, radikalom, potencijalnim vođom, čovekom opsednutim vizijom savršenijih ljudskih odnosa u boljem svetu do koga revolucija može dovesti". Uredio je da New York Review of Books objavi Abbottova pisma, a zatim i u vidu knjige In the Belly of the Beast, 1980. Evo odlomka, u kome Abbott opisuje kako je to izbosti nekog do smrti:Možeš osetiti kako život treperi kroz nož u tvojoj ruci. To te skoro obuzme, nežni osećaj u sred grubog akta ubistva... Padneš sa njim na pod da ga dovršiš. To je kao da sečeš topli puter, nema nikakvog otpora. Oni uvek šapnu istu stvar na kraju: "Molim te". Dobiješ osećaj da te ne umoljava da ga ne povrediš, već da to uradiš valjano.Uprkos primedaba zatvorskih psihijatara, koji su preko Abbottovog čela videli ispisano "psihopata", Mailer i drugi njujorški pisci pomogli su mu da dobije ranije uslovno otpuštanje. Abbott je uskoro vođen po literarnim večerama, upoređivan sa Solženjicinom i Jacobo Timermanom i intervjuisan za Good Morning America i People magazin. Dve nedelje kasnije posvađao se sa ambicioznim mladim dramskim piscem koji je radio kao konobar u restoranu, koji je zatražio od Abbotta da ne koristi toalet za zaposlene. Abbott ga je pozvao da izađu napolje, tamo ga je ubo u grudi i ostavio da iskrvari do smrti na pločniku.Psihopate mogu biti pametni i šarmantni, i Mailer je samo jedan u nizu intelektualaca sa svih krajeva političkog spektra koji su bili prevareni 1960-tih i 70-tih." (Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, str. 261-262) Edited November 10, 2007 by Indy

[čekmeže]

Malo knjiga sam pročitao, a još manje je na mene ostavilo utisak. Jedna od njih je Goli i mrtvi.

[luba]

nece da se ljuti cika majler sto cu ovo da mu prilepim.drugi covek koji najlepse pise o boksu. (i o mnogim drugim stvarima, ali to je za poseban topik).That night I sat on the steps outside my apartment and looked at the garage that held my heavy bag and speed bag, my scrapbook of press clippings, fight programs and publicity stills. I thought about being good but not really good, about keeping my weight down when I could have put on an extra ten pounds and fought heavyweight, about fighting tortilla-stuffed Mexican middleweights at the Eagle Rock Legion Hall where my old man went to his Bund meetings. Light heavyweight was a no-man's-land division, and early on I pegged it as being tailor-made for me. I could dance on my toes all night at 175 pounds, I could hook accurately to the body from way outside and only a bulldozer could work in off my left jab.But there were no light heavyweight bulldozers, because any hungry fighter pushing 175 slopped up spuds until he made heavyweight, even if he sacrificed half his speed and most of his punch. Light heavyweight was safe. Light heavyweight was guaranteed fifty-dollar' purses without getting hurt. Light heavyweight was plugs in the Times from Braven Dyer, adulation from the old man and his Jew-baiting cronies and being a big cheese as long as I didn't leave Glassell Park and Lincoln Heights. It was going as far as I could as a natural-without having to test my guts.Then Ronnie Cordero came along.He was a Mex middleweight out of El Monte, fast, with knockout power in both hands and a crablike defense, guard high, elbows pressed to his sides to deflect body blows. Only nineteen, he had huge bones for his weight, with the growth potential to jump him up two divisions to heavyweight and the big money. He racked up a string of fourteen straight early-round KOs at the Olympic, blitzing all the top LA middles. Still growing and anxious to jack up the quality of his opponents, Cordero issued me a challenge through the Herald sports page.I knew that he would eat me alive. I knew that losing to a taco bender would ruin my local celebrity. I knew that running from the fight would hurt me, but fighting it would kill me. I started looking for a place to run to. The army, navy and marines looked good, then Pearl Harbor got bombed and made them look great. Then the old man had a stroke, lost his job and pension and started sucking baby food through a straw. I got a hardship deferment and joined the Los Angeles Police Department.I saw where my thoughts were going. FBI goons were asking me if I considered myself a German or an American, and would I be willing to prove my patriotism by helping them out. I fought what was next by concentrating on my landlady's cat stalking a bluejay across the garage roof. When he pounced, I admitted to myself how bad I wanted Johnny Vogel's rumor to be true.

[palfoot]

okolo spomenute opsesije boksom, evo malog uvida u jedan on-screen infamni almost-box match iz filma maidstone /mailer u rediteljskoj ulozi kao wannabe-godard, prejako!/ u kom gosn (u filmu igra reditelja normana kingsley-ja, na kojeg treba da bude izvrshen atentat?) zamalo odgriza deo uveta gonzo superstara ripa torna ,kojem prethodi jedan besomuccni karusel ego-trip puke-ova, film-u-filmu badly-executed mindfuckova, (samoparodiccno?) improvizovanje tako da ni sami akteri ne mogu da razdvoje stvarnost od iluzije / i jednog od drugog normana/ dok kamera 'rola', ostavljajucji mozzda i trecji, ne-parni paradoks za sumnjom-ophrvanog gledaoca? screenplay:http://subcin.com/maidsilences.htmli clip

Edited April 25, 2008 by palfoot

[luba]

konacno se uhvatih u kostac sa "the castle in the forest" i svaki pasus je idealan podsetnik zasto ga volim. krenem malo da kopam i naletim na ovo, propusteno prosdle godine:The passing of Norman Mailer has elicited tributes, memories, and even a video of Rip Torn trying to hit Mailer in the head with a hammer (in Spanish!), but here at Boston magazine we have something else: his self-written obituary.In the September, 1979 issue of Boston, Mailer composed his own obit, as did Tip O?Neill (self-deprecating fat jokes), and a few others whose deaths, real or imagined, elicit nary a reaction.Mailer?s eulogy is, as you would expect, hilarious and contentious, and he manages to get back at his enemies even in the pretend afterlife. The full text is after the jump.Reprinted from the September, 1979 issue of Boston magazine:Novelist ShelvedBy Norman MailerNorman Mailer passed away yesterday after celebrating his fifteenth divorce and sixteenth wedding. ?I just don?t feel the old vim,? complained the writer recently. He was renowned in publishing circles for his blend of fictional journalism and factual fiction, termed by literary critic William Buckley: Contemporaneous Ratiocinative Aesthetical Prolegomena. Buckley was consequentially sued by Mailer for malicious construction of invidious acronyms. ?Norman does take himself seriously,? was Mr. Buckley?s reply. ?Of course he is the last of those who do.?At the author?s bedside were eleven of his fifteen ex-wives, twenty-two of his twenty-four children, and five of his seven grandchildren, of whom four are older than six of their uncles and aunts.At present, interest revolves around the estate. Executors have warned that Mailer, although earning an average income of one and a half million dollars a year, has had to meet an annual overhead of two million, three hundred thousand, of which two million, two hundred and fifty thousand went in child support, alimony, and back IRS payments. It is estimated that his liabilities outweigh his assets by eight million, six hundred thousand.When asked, on occasion why he married so often, the former Pulitzer Prize winner replied, ?To get divorced. You don?t know anything about a woman until you meet her in court.?At the memorial service, passages from his favorite literary works, all penned by himself, were read, as well as passages from prominent Americans.His old friend, Truman Capote, said, ?He was always so butch. I thought he?d outlive us all.?Gore Vidal, his famous TV and cocktail-party adversary, complained sadly, ?Norman did lack the wit that copes. I would add that he had the taste of Snopes, but why advertise William Faulkner, who?s responsible for everything godawful in American penmanship?one can?t call it letters.?Andy Warhol said, ?I always thought Norman kept a low profile. That?s what I liked about him so much.?Gloria Steinem stated: ?A pity. He was getting ready to see the light.?Jimmy Carter, serving his fifth consecutive term as president, replied in answer to a question at his press conference this morning, ?It is my wife?s and I regret that we never did get to invite Norman Miller [sic] to the White House, but we will mourn his passing. He did his best to improve the state of American book-writing and reading, which we all need and applaud.?i naravno, covek kome je verovatno najvise krivo sto nije majler.

[Lrd]

Ovaj update me podseti da ponovo pročitam topik, pa sam se podsetio i ovoga:

to je za poseban topik.

Hoće li biti posebnog topika za to? Nekako mi je besmisleno da ga pokrećem pored tebe žive, ali mi je još besmislenije da te silim da prosipaš intimu ako nećeš. Inače, obnovio sam Tabloid i 6k i još mi je gore, ne mogu ništa da čitam. Ka'će Rover? :'(aaaaaa sori za oftopičarenje