Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

The lights are all blinking red.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

So very ready.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

We still have time to mess this up!

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

The National Guard is not Batman.

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

You are here: Home / Popular Culture / RIP- Norman Mailer

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13Comments

  1. 1.

    daveinboca

    I ran into him in front of the Hilton Hotel at the Chicago Convention in ’68 and talked to him for a minute or two. Read some of his books, but he was much more vivid in real life—a complete talker in my two-minute face-to-face. Bursting with ideas and enthusiasm.

    RIP

  2. 2.

    fahs ibair

    You have to separate the man from his work.

    His work was second to none.

    He failed as a man. I will never say RIP to a wife-beater.

  4. 4.

    Ned R.

    Friend of mine who’s a writer/editor, in response to a comment elsewhere that Mailer ‘turned being an asshole into an art form,’ had this to say in response:

    there is an glimmer of insight here, mailer was arguably the first author-as-celebrity of the post WW2 era. unfortunately his blowhard public persona came to overshadow his writing, this is one reason his post-1970s novels are so bloated/over-ambitious. he’s not read so much anymore but his influence looms large: not so much in fiction as non-fiction. co-founder of the Village Voice and pioneer of personal journalism, he paved the way for successive generations of young writers, many of whom have probably never read him. too bad.

  5. 5.

    Jackmormon

    Arg. I loved his recent book on Hitler’s youth and was really curious to read the next installments in the promised trilogy.

  7. 7.

    jprice vincenz

    I saw Mailer at the Smithsonian over a decade ago, when he was giving a speech on the carpet-bombing of Dresden (and other German sities) as a form of terrorism. Interesting stuff, but what sticks with me the most was how he paced the stage nervously plucking at a pile of noisy change in his pants pockets. Talk about distracting. Back when I got out of the military back in the sane 80s, I drove down to P-Town and went VERRRYY SLOWLY past his house to see if I could spot him or his (previously stabbed) wife Adelle, who owned the house right beside him. Since I never saw him close-up, I decided to write the Great American Novel instead.

  9. 9.

    Bruce Moomaw

    Not much of a loss intellectually. He managed to prolong his childishness better than Pee Wee Herman.

  10. 10.

    Zuzu

    Ah yes, good times.

    “A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul,” announced Norman Mailer in a speech at the University of California at Berkeley. While Mailer waxed outrageous and his audience enthusiastically heckled, someone tossed a burning jockstrap onto the stage and a prancing pair of Gay Liberationists got themselves busted. Despite the racket. Mailer held forth on his subject: “Richard Milhous Nixon and Women’s Liberation.” In the process he dropped such nuggets as “Richard Nixon walks like a puppet with strings controlled by a hand within his own head,” “Most women have just started to think in the last two or three years,” “McGovern is the only man who is morally superior to me.” Finally Mailer invited “all the feminists in the audience to please hiss.” When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: “Obedient little bitches.”

    Time Magazine, 1972

    Evidently he told one audience that all you needed to write was “blank paper and balls.” At which point a woman stood up and asked him, “Uhm, Mr. Mailer, I’m just wondering what kind of ink you dip your balls in?”

  11. 11.

    Jess

    The professional asshole schtick did get old pretty quickly–it seemed to be willfully naive to me–but he was an excellent writer at his peak. I especially loved “An American Dream.” (There must be something deeply wrong with me…)

    I’m sorry to see him go, but I’m surprised he didn’t go a lot sooner. He was a free spirit in a really tragic way.

  12. 12.

    Xenos

    The Boston divorce bar tips its hat and raises a glass in appreciation of one of its greatest patrons and benefactors. He is sorely missed and fondly remembered.

    Whole firms have been created and sustained on reputations established by representing him and his various wives.

    1. Charisma;
    2. Misogyny;
    3. Lots of money;
    4. No fault divorce;

    Add them all together in liberal doses, and you get

    5. Profit!!!

  13. 13.

    Gus

    In a sense it’s hard to separate the man from the work. His persona was key to the work, it seems to me, at least to the work after The Naked and the Dead made him famous.

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