November 10th, 2007
Norman Mailer dies
Aged 84, and after a serious illness, Norman Mailer has died. Unbelievably, he was only 25 when he wrote The Naked and the Dead, one of the best books ever written about war. Mailer also won two Pulitzer prizes and once headbutted Gore Vidal (off air, but the on air debate is here). A life well lived…
November 10th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
When asked how she would punish Bart if she caught him reading a ‘Playdude’ Sherry Bobbins declared she would force him to read all the articles including ‘Norman Mailer’s latest clap-trap about his ailing libido’.
RIP indeed.
November 10th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
I hear you, Joe. And I didn’t even mention him stabbing one of his many wives with a pen-knife. A lot of feminists hate him and always cite that incident, among other things, as proof of his misogyny. To me, his rants made him sound like he was afraid of women, which seemed quite infantile.
TNATD is still great though. Up there with All Quiet on the Western Front as brilliant war writing goes.
November 10th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
I’d agree Mailer was a macho pugilistic character that many women, feminists or not, wouldn’t like. He loved an intellectual fight simply for the hell of it. For me his The Armies of the Night, about mass mobilisation in the USA against the Vietnam War in the late ’60s, will be a memorial to my own student idealism days.
Mailer once ran for election as Mayor of New York, to publicise his anti-Vietnam War views and other things. A reporter asked him what he’d do if he woke up one winter morning to find the city under 6 feet of snow.
“I’d piss on it,” was Mailer’s immediate reply. He must have been the most candid Mayor that New York never elected.
November 11th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Mailer’s book The Executioner’s Song is worth a look also. An incredibly detailed portrait of a murderer, it makes Capote’s In Cold Blood look like a pamphlet, although it lacks some of the structural finesse.
November 12th, 2007 at 12:37 am
Insecure bed wetter….
November 12th, 2007 at 10:52 am
As a fanatic reader of intelligent sports books (no, I haven’t yet read Steven Gerrard’s autobiography), I very much liked The Fight, about the Rumble in the Jungle between Ali and Foreman in 1974.
It is regularly held up as the best sports-book ever written, and while I wouldn’t go that far, it is a fascinating insight into the minds of the boxers and their promoters. The access he enjoyed, particularly to Ali, during that month or so in Zaire was incredible.
I also bought An American Dream in Oxfam a year or two back but it’s part of my ever-growing Great Pile of the Unread.
November 12th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Ah man, it seems like everytime I visit your blog I add another book or film to the list. I’m not complaining though, you and your commentors are keeping me on my toes.
November 12th, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Aren’t we forgetting this, the funniest (eek!) of all the Mailer facts?
(i) 1980: Mailer heads successful campaign to have convicted murderer, Jack Abbot, released from prison. (ii) 1980, still: Abbot kills again. (iii) 1980-1992: Mailer defends Abbot’s action, sighting some shtick about the bourgeouis (iv)1992: Mailer’s defence of Abbot finally ends.