11 Replies to “Mailer Remembered [Dan Collins]”

1. Mark says:

   November 10, 2007 at 4:32 pm

   Norman Mailer sucks, and always will. Hemingway puts him in the minor leagues. Mailer was a c*cks*cking apologist for some POS named Jack Abbot, a murderer. Hey, Norm, may dogs piss on your headstone.

2. serr8d says:

   November 10, 2007 at 5:49 pm

   Jack Abbot did the right thing. The noose.

3. happyfeet says:

   November 10, 2007 at 6:06 pm

   All I know is I think he interviewed Madonna for Esquire in the 90s. I think that defines him pretty well right there.

4. happyfeet says:

   November 10, 2007 at 6:07 pm

   Well also the part about him being dead is pretty definitional too.

5. The Sanity Inspector says:

   November 10, 2007 at 6:51 pm

   Did you ever see the 60 Minutes episode, after the murder, when Mailer is barking at reporters? He said something like,

   “”The United States, in order to save its honor and pride, holds the world hostage to nuclear destruction! Correct? Correct? Then how can I not, at some risk to certain parts of society, save a doomed man’s talent, when the United States, for its power and pride, holds this world, this universe, this earth, over the brink of total annihilation!”

   That’s a paraphrase, so what he said verbatim might be even dopier.

6. The Cutting Edge says:

   November 10, 2007 at 7:59 pm

   Norman Mailer wakes up Dead

   Larger than life, room-filling, a writer self-compared to Hemingway (but not quite as gifted), macho (he was a boxer), leftist mostly, Mailer stabbed his 2nd wife almost to death, caused the death of a New York playwright by convincing The Establishm…

7. ahem says:

   November 11, 2007 at 4:43 pm

   Read Roger Kimball.

8. SEK says:

   November 11, 2007 at 7:35 pm

   Mailer wrote some horrible novels—Ancient Evenings was a better Glass Tiger song, for fuck’s sake—but when he was on he was on. Take this passage from Armies of the Night:

   [Mailer] was inclined to think that the body of students who followed [Paul] Goodman must have something de-animalized about them to put up with the style or at least such was Mailer’s bigoted view. His fundamental animus to Goodman was still, unhappily, on sex. Goodman’s ideas tended to declare in rough that heterosexuality, homosexuality, and onanism were equal valid forms of activity, best denuded of guilt. Mailer, with his neo-Victorianism, thought that if there was anything worse than homosexuality and masturbation, it was putting the two together. The super-hygiene of all this mental prophylaxis offended him profoundly. Super-hygiene impregnated the air with medicated-Vaseline—there was nothing dirty in the damn stuff; and sex to Mailer’s idea of it was better off dirty, damned, even slavish! than clean, and without guilt. Without guilt, sex was meaningless. One advanced into sex against one’s sense of guilt, and each time guilt was successfully defied, one had learned a little more about the contractual relation of one’s own existence to the unheard thunders of the deep—each time guilt herded one back with its authority, some primitive awe—hence some creative clue to the rages of the deep—was left to brood about.

   Obviously, I disagree with 99 percent of that. But it’s some interesting shit to disagree with, and it’s written with a controlled hyperactivity I’m eternally envious of. Say what you will about the man and his many, many stunts, but don’t say (as Kimball did) that he couldn’t write. He risked sounding like an idiot to hit his desired effect, and often as not he missed. But he was never bland.

9. Dan Collins says:

   November 11, 2007 at 8:28 pm

   Scott, I just don’t see what’s interesting about that. I mean, put it next to “Confessions of an Opium Eater,” and what have you got? Some kind of rationalized neo-primitivism.

   He stabbed one of his wives in the back. Burroughs blew the brains out of his.

   Edgy.

10. Rusty says:

    November 12, 2007 at 5:26 am

    Funny. The only thing I can remember about him is a released prisoner stabbing a busboy. His friends on the left didn’t seem to think it was a big deal. He was a writer too, you say?

11. Nigel says:

    November 13, 2007 at 8:32 am

    Brian McMurphy, who’s making me miss Smantix a bit less over at Six Meat Buffet…

    Yeah, that Smantix guy was a real a-hole. I don’t miss him one bit. I’m glad Preston found Brian to replace him…

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