The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young: Difference between revisions

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 like a white man. And we learned stuff like, to kill a Jap sentry, you should stab him down behind the collarbone, not up into the kidney. A piece of advice that could save your life. I mean, to get that kind of lesson, you had to
 go to Stag Magazine and Men’s Bluebook, and half the time, no one would sell them to us.
-  </blockquote>This kind of special knowledge set off top-of-the-lungs debates over Mailer among the Junior High tuna sandwich-and-literary crowd. We broke down along two lines, both of a physical nature. The question? Who could Mailer take if it came down to a rough-and-tumble? The main contender, for some reason, seemed to be Jack London, who had mentioned some kind of Japanese death grip in his book The Assassination Bureau Ltd. Mailer was thought to be the victor in this contest because he knew how to stab Jap sentries and because he’d been trained in dirty fighting and hand-to-hand combat (as we’d read in ''The Naked and the Dead''.) However, in the minus column, among the literary guys walking home from school or in the cafeteria, Mailer had endorsed, on the cover, a volume called Jiu Jitsu Complete,
+  </blockquote>This kind of special knowledge set off top-of-the-lungs debates over Mailer among the Junior High tuna sandwich-and-literary crowd. We broke down along two lines, both of a physical nature. The question? Who could Mailer take if it came down to a rough-and-tumble? The main contender, for some reason, seemed to be Jack London, who had mentioned some kind of Japanese death grip in his book The Assassination Bureau Ltd. Mailer was thought to be the victor in this contest because he knew how to stab Jap sentries and because he’d been trained in dirty fighting and hand-to-hand combat (as we’d read in ''The Naked and the Dead''.) However, in the minus column, among the literary guys walking home from school or in the cafeteria, Mailer had endorsed, on the cover, a volume called ''Jiu Jitsu'' Complete,
 an early book on the Japanese combative art. This book detailed moves that we regarded unusable, you couldn’t even get them to work on your little brother. And believe me, we tried.