The death of Norman Mailer made me...well, it made me go looking to see what other bloggers were saying about the death of Norman Mailer. I would have been better prepared to assess his efforts in my own specialized field had I been able to check out the Anthology/Film Society of New York retrospective of his movie work over the summer, but I was not able. Hell, I can't even find my copies of Tough Guys and/or Ragtime to get an apropos screen grab...Ah well.
In the meantime, would it be too terribly unfair to assume that some of those who are most pointedly looking down their noses at once-Stormin' Norman, before his corpse is by most lights sufficiently cold, are, at least in part, responding to the fact that they themselves are, and forever shall be, somewhat, shall we say, experientially challenged relative to Mr. Mailer himself? (Look at that bowtie on Kimball...my lord, he makes George Will look like Ice Cube...) By the same token, the sentimentality indulged on behalf of a very unsentimental writer by some of his admirers ("The fact that Mailer continued writing up until the very end says more about him as a creative being than anything that any critic could offer," gushed one, but come on—the fact is you'd be harder pressed to name one writer worth his or her salt who, unless too infirm to, didn't go down swinging) and at least one former acolyte, is pretty ghastly too...although I guess it speaks well of James Wolcott (as is my usual practice with this critic-turned-cluck and his monolithic corporate sponsor, I leave it to you to find the link) that he actually looked up from his peculiar, frenzied attempts to whine and wheedle his wife into the dance critic's seat at The New Yorker long enough to take notice of Mailer's passing...
If you yourself are perplexed by precisely why Mailer is mourned, Roy Edroso at alicublog will clue you in briskly, cogently, and with no sentimentality whatsoever. He also furnishes pertinent and off-the-beaten-path quotes to support his argument about why Mailer matters—to literature, before politics or even "culture." Check it out.
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