Nov

11

Norman MailerI am sad to see Norman Mailer's passing, though I did not always agree with him. He was an exalted writer and thinker. When I worked for Esquire, I was impressed at how remarkable his 'raw' copy was, requiring little in the way of emendation or in fact any orthographic edifications. He was a thinker and moralist (though I again add I did not agree with much of his recent thinking), loved women and rambunctious s-x (five stars for that, right there!), and was a protean personality and magnificent brawler in life on tiers too many to enumerate.

Not a herringbone wobbler, he thought through his positions and expanded and elucidated them. He was intoxicating in many of his justly celebrated books, The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, and others. If he occasionally bobbled the game, as he did with The Executioner's Song, he was prone to be forgiving of those who, like himself, manifested a scrivener’s gift.

I have a bolus in my throat as I write: He was not a man to easily dismiss, or one to welcome a shortage of. Who will not rue his absence in the coming sure-to-be-Vesuvial 2008 elections? Who will not miss his naughtiness and prolific expansions on everything sociological and gravitous?

A humorous reminiscence: When Citibank instituted robot paper and delivery bots, some decades ago, they called them "Norman" — because they were "Norman mailers."


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