Executioner's Song: Norman Mailer Dies

Executioner's Song is breathtaking.

One quibble with a previous post... I wonder if Gilmore is a serial killer.

Gilmore's disdain for the Hi-Fi Killers from Provo had interested me. Those two, Pierre and Andrews were truly sadistic, and Gilmore would taunt them every chance he got.

 

I don't normally like non-fiction books, but Executioner's Song held me throughout. It was an awesome, awesome book. I don't think I've ever read anything else by him, but maybe I will have to check out Armies of the Night.

RIP.

 

Chip McGrath writes the obit for the Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/books/11mailer.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

A quick flyover from A.O. Scott at Salon:

http://salon.com/books/feature/2007/11/10/norman_mailer_guide/

 

RIP.

I've never read Executioner's Song, but I read Miami And The Siege Of Chicago when I was younger and it was riveting, even long after the events he described in the book had passed into history.

 

From the Times Topics page, everything Mailer.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/norman_mailer/index.html

 

"All over the ship, all through the convoy, there was a knowledge that in a few hours some of them were going to be dead."

That is how one writes a sentence.

 

It is good and proper that it be a sad day hereabouts whenever a great writer dies.

RIP, though I wonder if he's even the least bit interested in being at peace, even now.

 

Fug, I hope not.

 

RIP. The way he put words together just riveted me.

 

Was never overly fond of the man.

But thrilled at/to the talent. What talent. My God.

RIP

 

My reading of Mailer is limited -- mostly his journalism -- but I always loved this two-paragraph description about Los Angeles from "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." I kept meaning to post it on the thread about greatest sentences.

"It is not that Los Angeles is altogether hideous, it is even by degrees pleasant, but for an Easterner there is never any salt in the wind; it is like Mexican cooking without chile, or Chinese egg rolls missing their mustard; as one travels through the endless repetitions of that city which is the capital of suburbia with its milky pinks, its washed-out oranges, its tainted lime-yellows of pastel on one pretty little architectural monstrosity after another, the colors not intense enough, the styles never pure, and never sufficiently impure to collide on the eye, one conceives the people who live here—they have come out to express themselves, Los Angeles is the home of self-expression, but the artists are middle-class and middling-minded; no passions will calcify here for years in the gloom to be revealed a decade later as the tessellations of hard and fertile work, no, it is all open, promiscuous, borrowed, half bought, a city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men—one has the feeling it was built by television sets giving orders to men. And in this land of the pretty-pretty, the virility is in the barbarisms, the vulgarities, it is in the huge billboards, the screamers of the neon lighting, the shouting farm-utensil colors of the gas stations and monster drugstores, it is in the swing of the sports cars, hot rods, convertibles, Los Angeles is a city to drive in, the boulevards are wide, the traffic is nervous and fast, the radio stations play bouncing, blooping, rippling tunes, one digs the pop in a pop tune, no one of character would make love by it but the sound is good for swinging a car, electronic guitars and Hawaiian harps."