User:PLowery/sandbox - Revision history

PLowery: pending review

2021-06-21T01:17:25Z

pending review

PLowery at 02:34, 19 June 2021

2021-06-19T02:34:59Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:34, 18 June 2021
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	{{DEFAULTSORT: A FAVOR FOR THE AGES}}		{{DEFAULTSORT: A FAVOR FOR THE AGES}}
			[[User:PLowery\|PLowery]] ([[User talk:PLowery\|talk]]) 22:34, 18 June 2021 (EDT)

PLowery: pending approval

2021-06-19T02:33:44Z

pending approval

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:33, 18 June 2021
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	Perhaps not, but a great novelist does--and so does a great journalist.		Perhaps not, but a great novelist does--and so does a great journalist.

	~~::::::~~Works Cited		===Works Cited===
			{{Refbegin}}
			{{cite book \| last=Doyle \| first=Sir Arthur Conan \| date=2006 \| title=''The Sign of Four'' ''The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.'' \| publisher=Ed. Leslie S Klinger \| location=New York: W. W. Norton & Co. \| pages=209-382 \| ref=harv}}

	~~Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. ''~~The ~~Sign of Four''. 1890~~. ''The ~~New Annotated Sherlock Holmes~~.'' Ed. ~~Leslie S Klinger~~. New York: ~~W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. 209~~-~~382. Print~~		{{cite book \| last=Hersey \| first=John \|date=2006 \| title="The legend on the License." ''Journalism: The Democratic Craft.'' \| publisher=Ed. G. Stuart Adam and Roy Peter Clark \| location=New York: Oxford University Press \| pages=152-163 \| ref=harv}}

	~~Hersey, John. "The legend on the License."~~ ''~~Journalism~~: ~~The Democratic Craft~~.'' ~~Ed. G. Stuart Adam and Roy Peter Clark. New York: Oxford University~~ Press, ~~2006. 152-163. Print~~		{{cite book \| last=Hillstrom \| first=Kevin and Laurie Collier \| date=1998 \| title=''The Vietnam Experience: A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films.'' \| publisher=Greenwood Press \|location=Westport, CT \| ref=harv}}

	~~Hillstrom, Kevin and Laurie Collier Hillstrom~~. ''~~The Vietnam Experience: A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films.~~'' ~~Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998~~. ~~Print~~		{{cite magazine \| last=Jones \| first=Malcolm \|title="Sentry of a Century; Norman Mailer: 1923/2007." \| magazine=''Newsweek'' \| pages=64-5 \| access-date=19 Nov. 2007 \| ref=harv}}

	~~Jones, Malcolm~~. "~~Sentry of a Century; Norman Mailer: 1923/2007~~." ''~~Newsweek~~'' ~~19 Nov. 2007: 64~~-5. ~~Print~~		{{cite book \| last=Mailer \|first=Norman \| date=1995 \| title=''Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery.'' \| publisher= Random House \| location=New York \| title="Oswald's Ghost." ''The American Experience.'' \| television=PBS \| access-date=14 Jan. 2008 \| ref=harv}}

	~~Mailer, Norman. '~~'~~Oswald~~'~~s Tale: An American Mystery~~.'' New York~~: Random House, 1995. Print. "Oswald's Ghost." ''The American Experience.'' PBS. 14 Jan. 2008. Print Transcript.~~		{{cite book \| last=Pound \| first=Ezra \| date=1934 \| title=''ABC of Reading.'' \| publisher=New Directions \| location=New York \| ref=harv}}
			{{Refend}}

	~~Pound, Ezra. ''ABC of Reading.'' New York~~: ~~New Directions, 1934. Print~~		{{DEFAULTSORT: A FAVOR FOR THE AGES}}

PLowery: Done typing. Need to review

2021-06-18T19:11:38Z

Done typing. Need to review

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:11, 18 June 2021
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	Mailer found no association conspiracy to be sufficiently encompassing, believable, and realistic enough to withstand long and cold scrutiny, and so he allows the answer to gradually emerge from what is palpable, known and understood.		Mailer found no association conspiracy to be sufficiently encompassing, believable, and realistic enough to withstand long and cold scrutiny, and so he allows the answer to gradually emerge from what is palpable, known and understood.

			Oswald, without any obvious reason to do so, took steps to provide for his family should he be captured or killed, and Mailer deduced that

			<blockquote>In the depths of Oswald's logic lies an equation: Any man who is possessed of enough political passion to reach murderous intensity in his deeds is entitled to a seat at the high table of world leaders. Such may have been Oswald's measure. The route to becoming a great political leader--given his own poor beginnings--might have to pass through acts of assassination.(505)</blockquote>

			On April 10, 1963, most likely acting on his own, Oswald tries to kill General Edwin A Walker, head of the ultra-right John Birch Society.

			<blockquote>It can be argued that in the course of his preparations, Oswald had scouted the house and knew Walker's habits, but that is not likely. Walker was away on his tour until Monday, April 8, two days before the attempt. The only conclusion, if Oswald managed it by himself, running entirely on his own schedule, is that he went to Walker's house on Wednesday night to shoot him, and there was the General in full collaboration ... Luck! Of course, luck may be the product of extra-sensory perception in crucial areas, and Oswald may be an unhappy example of a man with extraordinary luck.(513)</blockquote>

			Oswald's shot misses the mark, but that only bolsters his confidence. Mailer generously quotes Patricia Johnson McMillan, author of ''Lee and Marina,'' on the point.

			<blockquote>He had tried something cataclysmic--and he had not been caught. He had not even been touched.

			Thus by far the greatest legacy Lee carried out of the Walker attempt was the conviction that he was invulnerable, that he stood at the center of a magic circle swathed in a cloak of immunity. It was a feeling which fitted dangerously with the feeling he already had that he was special, that he had particular prerogatives. He and he alone was entitled to that which was forbidden to everybody else.(qtd. in Mailer 517)</blockquote>

			Mailer sees Oswald as a stoic, a narcissist, a futurist, a seeker of utopia, and ultimately, a nihilist. It is to the author's great credit that having employed as much impartiality as he could muster in his examination, he also is able to see Oswald as a human being torn by a choice. "To which half of himself will he be faithful," Mailer asks, "his need for love, or his need for power and fame? What is never taken seriously enough in Oswald is the force of his confidence that he has the makings of a great leader"(555).

			Mailer is scrupulous about letting the reader know his own leanings and prejudices, and goes so far as to note that if he embraces them too strongly and follows them too closely, they become more important than finding the truth, so he vows to be on guard against the pull of his own inclinations. In so doing, Mailer creates a journalistic work of great and compassionate charity, a metaphysical favor for the ages. The mark of his genius is to employ Oswald's grandiosity as a balm for us all:

			<blockquote>It is virtually not assimilable to our reason that a small lonely man felled a giant in the midst of his limousines, his legions, his throng, and his security. If such a non-entity destroyed the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, then a world of disproportion engulfs us, and we live in a universe that is absurd ... the sudden death of a man as large in his possibilities as John Fitzgerald Kennedy is more tolerable if we can perceive his killer as tragic rather than absurd.(198)</blockquote>

			Mailer confides that before he began the project, he favored conspiracy theory but was determined

			<blockquote>to take Oswald on his own terms as long as that was possible--that is, try to comprehend his deeds as arising from nothing more than himself until such a premise lost all headway. To study his life in this manner produces a hypothesis: Oswald was a protagonist, a prime mover, a man who made things happen--in short, a figure larger than others would credit him for being.(605)</blockquote>

			Mailer concludes not merely that Oswald had the character to kill Kennedy and do it alone, but that the assassination probably was undertaken without any special malice. It was simply an opportunity presented to Oswald by the same Fates that months earlier had served up Gen. Walker, and that just weeks earlier had given him a job at the Texas Book Depository right on the route of Kennedy's motorcade. All that remained was for him to step up, take advantage of the moment and savor the achievement that was meant to be his alone. "For Americans, the aftershocks would not cease for the rest of the century or more. Yet he would also be punishing the Russians and the Cubans. They would suffer side effects for decades to come. But then, he was above capitalism and he was above Communism. Both!" (780).

			The last part of Volume Two is titled "Oswald's Ghost," which not by accident also was the title of an "American Experience" documentary which aired on public television in 2008. In the program, Mailer said that to Oswald's way of thinking

			<blockquote>If he was caught, well, then he was quite articulate, and he would have one of the greatest trials in America's history, if not the greatest, and he would explain all of his political ideas, and he would become world famous, and might have an immense effect upon history even if he was executed ... Oswald is a ghost who sits upon American life .... What is abominable and maddening about ghosts is that you never know the answer. Is it this, or is it that? You can't know because a ghost doesn't tell you. ("Oswald's" 20)</blockquote>

			Perhaps not, but a great novelist does--and so does a great journalist.

			::::::Works Cited

			Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. ''The Sign of Four''. 1890. ''The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.'' Ed. Leslie S Klinger. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006. 209-382. Print

			Hersey, John. "The legend on the License." ''Journalism: The Democratic Craft.'' Ed. G. Stuart Adam and Roy Peter Clark. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 152-163. Print

			Hillstrom, Kevin and Laurie Collier Hillstrom. ''The Vietnam Experience: A Concise Encyclopedia of American Literature, Songs, and Films.'' Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Print

			Jones, Malcolm. "Sentry of a Century; Norman Mailer: 1923/2007." ''Newsweek'' 19 Nov. 2007: 64-5. Print

			Mailer, Norman. ''Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery.'' New York: Random House, 1995. Print. "Oswald's Ghost." ''The American Experience.'' PBS. 14 Jan. 2008. Print Transcript.

			Pound, Ezra. ''ABC of Reading.'' New York: New Directions, 1934. Print

PLowery: On page 13 of 16

2021-06-18T18:06:35Z

On page 13 of 16

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PLowery: On page 7 of 16

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 THE HEROES OF MY YOUTH DIED IN THE 1960S: my father and President John F. Kennedy in 1963,Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Assassins took them all: cancer the first, bullets the rest. Losses of that magnitude, at least for a time, stripped life of its joy, reduced living to a mere alternative. It wasn't just me. The loss of my father was only a private preview of the pain, confusion and anger that was to scar and undermine my generation. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan, by themselves or in concert with powers unknown, helped to twist and turn us unproductively inward while in the background arose a damnable Asian war that left us mocking the principles, self-reliance and patriotism of our parents and their parents, and their parents before them.
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 I knew nothing of Mailer until the late 1960s, when, as an undergraduate English major at the University of New Hampshire, I took a preponderance of courses in journalism. Our professor, the late Donald M. Murray, told us that we could never hope to be good if we did not first know what good really was, and so he insisted that as we learned to report, write and edit, we frequent the library's periodicals room, as well as newsstands and magazine racks in order to stay abreast of what our infinite betters were doing.

PLowery: Only 3 of 16 pages.

2021-06-17T21:04:24Z

Only 3 of 16 pages.

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THE HEROES OF MY YOUTH DIED IN THE 1960S: my father and President John F. Kennedy in 1963,Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Assassins took them all: cancer the first, bullets the rest. Losses of that magnitude, at least for a time, stripped life of its joy, reduced living to a mere alternative. It wasn't just me. The loss of my father was only a private preview of the pain, confusion and anger that was to scar and undermine my generation. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and Sirhan B. Sirhan, by themselves or in concert with powers unknown, helped to twist and turn us unproductively inward while in the background arose a damnable Asian war that left us mocking the principles, self-reliance and patriotism of our parents and their parents, and their parents before them.

We have been a naïve, narcissistic and arrogant generation, the Baby Boomers, quick to blame and slow to take responsibility. Despite ourselves, we managed to achieve some good along the way, but in a country turned upside down in the 1960s, spun inside out in the 1970s, and set before a fun-house mirror in the 1980s, we remained consumed by the mysteries of the self. Our unswerving indulgence and self-absorption right through the turn of the century has finally brought us, as we flirt with the end of the new millennium's first decade, to the brink of ruin.

Perhaps this is a glib and unfair judgement, the too fast stroke of a broad and darkening brush. I do believe that more hope abides from coast to coast in the year 2009 than during any year in recent memory. And if we look back over all of the years and even quickly consider the day-to-day of it all, where life was lived, only rarely did tomorrow seem unremittingly bleak. There have been moments of great joy, righteous, tide-turning anger, clarity of purpose and, most importantly, understanding.

We owe much of that--although we have always been loathe to admit it and certainly do not do so now--to the best of American journalism, and in particular to those who have been the boldest, brightest, and most tenacious and passionate of the practitioners. They push, prod and knead the prosaic forms of their craft until what might otherwise be homely articles instead become illuminating stories that strain and tilt inexorably toward something more. Invariably, the goal is a keener, clearer, more circumspect knowledge: truth, in other words, with a capital letter T, or as close to it as anyone can possibly come.

Their work on this last literary frontier has gone by various names, some invented by the journalists themselves, others by critics and academics who, for the sake of predictability or perhaps merely for wont of neatness, always feel compelled to categorize--fly-on-the-wall reporting, window-pane reporting, drop-out journalism, submersion journalism, immersion journalism, nonfiction fiction, fictional nonfiction, reporting from the worm's-eye view, new journalism, gonzo journalism, creative nonfiction, narrative journalism. Well into the exercise, with labels flying everywhere, some pedant is likely to sniff, "Literary journalism? Isn't that an oxymoron?" Eventually the effort mires in priggish declarations of what is literary and what is not. It is at roughly this juncture that someone is most apt to reel out Ezra Pound's dictum that "Literature is news that stays news"(29). Curses are shouted, oaths taken, punches thrown. The police are called. 'Twas ever thus.

Reporters who dare also to write often become the makers of so many glimmering brass rings, the bearers of higher, different, more challenging standards. When one considers the fundamental importance of good journalism to a democratic society, their work can rightly be called heroic. They become models for others who would seek the truth and tell it with a style and grace of their own. This has been so in virtually every age, but in mine, these men and women have stood in for my slain heroes.

There have been so many truly fine writing reporters that no single list could accurately be called complete. Here are but a handful from the twentieth century: Jimmy Breslin, Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, Richard Harding Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, John Hersey, Gay Talese, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Pete Hamill, Lillian Ross, Rachel Carson, Jessica Mitford, Seymour Hersh, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Tom Wolfe, Mary Heaton Vorse, Joan Didion, Rick Bragg, Michael Herr, Hunter S. Thompson, and, of course, scrapping, jabbing, self-promoting but, best of all, brilliantly writing his way to the top, Norman Mailer.

With him there belongs ''Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery:'' a minority view perhaps, but one that is eminently defensible. Stylistically, the book is something of a Norman Mailer sampler. Some passages soar, some trudge. In very many, the author is invisible; in others he is omnipresent, but necessarily so. The book's unevenness gives it an engaging, if unwoven, vitality; it is easily among the most conscientiousness, candid and compassionate of Mailer's reportage.

Consider his summary estimation of Marina Prusakove Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's often- and easily-vilified widow:

<blockquote>She sits in a chair, a tiny woman in her early fifties, her thin shoulders hunched forward in such pain of spirit under such a mass of guilt that one would comfort her as one would hug a child. What is left of what was once her beauty are her extraordinary eyes, blue as diamonds, and they blaze with light as if, in divine compensation for the dead weight of all that will not cease to haunt her, she has been granted a spark from the hour of an apocalypse others have not seen. Perhaps it is the light offered to victims who have suffered like the gods. (788)</blockquote>

Who but a fellow traveler could write that last line? Only a novelist in reporter's clothing.

I knew nothing of Mailer until the late 1960s, when, as an undergraduate English major at the University of New Hampshire, I took a preponderance of courses in journalism. Our professor, the late Donald M. Murray, told us that we could never hope to be good if we did not first know what good really was, and so he insisted that as we learned to report, write and edit, we frequent the library's periodicals room, as well as newsstands and magazine racks in order to stay abreast of what our infinite betters were doing.