Executioner's Song: Norman Mailer Dies

His finger wasn't on the pulse, it was jammed into an open vein.

That is jaw-droppingly entrancing.

 

Some stories from those who knew him:

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/11/11/mailer_obit/

 

Man, I was on the tail end of a 17-hour drive when I turned on the radio and heard the news in the wee hours of this morning. jgmacg is right: heartbroken. After When We Were Kings, I got a little trip with him. Never met the man, only stood outside his Brooklyn apartment one night, the sidewalk laquered with wet cherry blossom, hoping to see his figure fill the window; it never did. But I've been on a Mailer binge lately, and his writing is the most fortifying, electric stuff. He's become my Hemingway.

I'm sorry he's gone.

 

I read An American Dream this summer. At once brilliant and profoundly disturbing, the book simply reinforced that Mailer was a sick dude who wrote with the kind of brutal honesty most of us only wish we could summon. Breslin, I think, aptly compared him to Van Gogh.

 

This is what Breslin - and Jonesy, and jmac, and I -- are talking about. (From Miami and The Siege Of Chicago).

The Ampitheatre was the best place in the world for a convention. Relatively small, it had the packed intimacy of a neighborhood fight club. The entrances to the gallery were as narrow as hallway tunnels, and the balcony seemed to hang over each speaker. The colors were black and grey and red and white and blue, bright powerful colors in support of a ruddy beef-eating sea of Democratic faces. The standards in these cramped quarters were numerous enough to look like lances. The aisles were jammed. The carpets were red. The crowd had a blood in their vote which had travelled in an unbroken line from the throng who had cheered the blood of brave Christians and ferocious lions. It could have been a great convention, stench and all -- politics in an abbatoir was as appropriate as license in a boudoir. There was bottom to this convention; some of the finest and some of the most corrupt faces in America were on the floor. Cancer jostled elbows with arcomegaly, obesity with edema, arthritis with alcholism, bad livers sent curses to bronchiacs, and quivering jowls beamed bad cess to puffed-out paunches. Cigars curved mouths which talked out of the other corner to cauliflower ears. The leprotic took care of the blind. And the deaf attached their hearing-aid to the voice-box of the dumb. The tennis-players communicated with the estate holders. The Mob talked bowling with the Union, the principals winked to the principals, the honest and the passionate went hoarse shouting through dead mikes.

 

I thought this nagging question of mine would have been answered in the obits, but I couldn't find it.

Why was "The Executioner's Song" given the Pulitzer for fiction? (As opposed, obviously, to non-fiction.)

 

RIP. I'll echo the admiration for one who was a capital-M Master of creative writing and reportage.

Yeah, it's sad that we're too dumb to care about feuding literary figures any more.

Gore Vidal's a douche, BTW.

 

Interesting Slate essay by Chris Hitchens on Mailer, which includes this section that made me chuckle.

http://www.slate.com/id/2177819/

Also, an accompanying essay on Mailer's complicated legacy by Jim Lewis. He makes the point that Mailer was 1. The greatest lesbian writer since Stein. 2. The first great Jewish novelist who did not feel burdened or obligated to write about Jews or being Jewish.

http://www.slate.com/id/2177833/pagenum/all/#page_start

 

Asked about failure: "The last chapter of Marilyn, where I speculated on the possibility of her being murdered. It was not good journalism."

 

Sounds like Hitch is projecting a bit there.

 

Charlie Rose showing Mailer interview right now.