Norman Mailer Society/News/2014

2014-07-21: Mailer Biographer Mike Lennon to Speak in Provincetown. 356 Commercial St. | Provincetown Public Library | Provincetown | $15 Aug 15th, 2014 at 5PM. Author J. Michael Lennon will visit the Provincetown Public Library on Friday, August 15 to present his New York Times Editor’s Choice book, Norman Mailer: A Double Life.
2014-07-20: Pre-order the The Selected Letters of Norman Mailer at Amazon. Keep up with Mike’s announcements and public appearances on his web site.
2014-07-15: The Utah-filmed truth behind the gritty story of murderer Gary Gilmore: Revisiting the true-crime TV movie “The Executioner’s Song,” a gritty period piece about the angry love story of convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, opens up a time capsule to the seedy small-town Utah life that served as a backdrop to two 1976 murders. Gilmore’s death by firing squad at the Utah State Prison on Jan. 17, 1977, captured international headlines as the first execution in a decade after the death penalty …
2014-07-13: Down With Factoid! Up With Factlet! — I wish you, and a whole lot of others, would cleave to Norman Mailer’s original coinage of the word factoid. The suffix -oid usually means resembling, but not really a member of some category. Examples: humanoid, planetoid. So a factoid should properly be (and as Mailer used it) something that resembles a fact, but is not a fact. You, and the whole lot of others, ought instead to use another word for a small probably unimportant but interesting fact. I suggest the coinage, factlet. In all other respects, I enjoy your writing and wish you well.
2014-05-29: David Thomson writes: “There is a new shot in the movies and it deserves attention. In truth, it has been around for some time, but meaning can take a while to sink in. The first time I felt its possibility was in the late ’50s, reading Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park. The narrator of that novel is Sergius O’Shaughnessy, who has been a first lieutenant in the Air Force. Stationed in Tokyo, he performed over Korea. “Sometimes on tactical missions we would lay fire bombs into Oriental villages. I did not like that particularly, but I would be busy with technique, and I would dive my plane and drop the jellied gasoline into my part of the pattern. I hardly thought of it any other way. From the air, a city in flames is not a bad sight.”
Patricia Ahearn
2014-05-28: The Society’s Board was saddened to hear of the passing of Patricia Ahearn, former Board member.
2014-05-26: At the Mailer grave on Memorial Day, by Stephen Borkowski. He writes: Memento Mori ¶ A long standing tradition in Provincetown is to place a flag on the graves of Veterans for Memorial Day.The large marker commemorating the fallen during the Civil War features the most prominent display with the square plot circled with flags about nine inches apart. ¶ I volunteered to do a portion of the cemetery historically known as the “Protestant Section” to distinguish it from the largely Portuguese Catholic section across the road.There are the graves of many artists of many denominations. The grave of Norman Mailer is among them, with his wife Norris Church Mailer interred by his side. The still gleaming white marble festooned with mementos unintentionally stands out among the stark terrain. ¶ I felt a certain pride as my gloved hands pushed the stake end about 6 inches into the soft earth to acknowledge his service during wartime. Broadly, their contributions to my life and to the local cultural landscape, over many decades, will not be easily forgotten.
2014-05-22: Via Harvard Review Online, Okla Elliott reviews Mind of an Outlaw: “Phillip Sipiora has usefully organized Mind of an Outlaw by decade, starting with the 1940s, which are represented by a lone essay on Mailer’s choice to support the Progressive Party over the Communist Party. The following decades are more fully represented, with perhaps the 1950s and 1960s being the most interesting, since those were Mailer’s most prolific years in terms of the essay form. This was also when he was helping to invent New Journalism and what we today call creative nonfiction.”

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We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.

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— Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings

2014-05-07: The new memoir from Board member Bob Begiebing has just been published. Congrats, Bob. Neither celebrity-gawk, “misery memoir,” nor confessional melodrama, A Berkshire Boyhood is more reminiscent of such memoirs as Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Emily Fox Gordon’s Are You Happy? In fact, A Berkshire Boyhood will strike readers as a parallel universe to Gordon’s book, her own story of growing up in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as a privileged faculty brat and young girl in the 1950s. Berkshire Boyhood is a boy’s story of growing up from working class roots in that same place and time. Although A Berkshire Boyhood explores family troubles arising out of the wounds and separations of World War II, ethnic religiosity, and adolescent sexuality (1950s variety), its deeper appeal comes from our curiosity about the 1950s and the Boomer generation, from the fraught relations between that generation and their parents who fought World War II, from our renewed interest in the influence of landscape on human development, and from a vision of the early post-war years as a decade seething with the anger and dissent of an incipient counterculture that would explode the sixties.”
2014-04-27: Deborah Martinson, our good friend, NMS Board Member, scholar: “Because I am a doer, I will manage this with as much gentleness and appreciation as I can — and make it work. Because I am a thinker, I resolve to think things through — so many of you I love deserve the best from me, and you give the best to me.” Sadly, Deb passed away at home last night. She requested that if anyone wished, they could make a contribution in her name to any organization doing research on breast cancer, to an animal rights organization, or to help writers.
2014-04-25: Limited edition of Marilyn by Taschen now available.
2014-04-24: Westport author, Dawn Tripp, and Partners Village Store present the Writer’s Series. The event will be a dynamic, open and interactive discussion with the author about the writing process, the work of creating a story, and Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon, Mailer archivist and authorized biographer will appear on Sunday, April 27, 3:00 – 5:00 pm. Call Partners to reserve a seat for this FREE writers series: 508-636-2572.

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The essence of spirit … was to choose the thing which did not better one’s position but made it more perilous. That was why the world he knew was poor, for it insisted morality and caution were identical.

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— Mailer, The Deer Park

2014-04-18: Barry Leeds has penned a new memoir, A Movable Beast, containing chapters on Norman Mailer and Norris Church Mailer. From the cover: “Poignant, funny, tragic, steamy, Barry Leeds’ A MOVEABLE BEAST is his most personal book to date, and shows that he himself, shaped by literature and life experiences, is a work in progress.” Congratulations, Barry. Get your copy now by following the link above. Prefer an ebook, try Kobo.
2014-04-11: From Larry Schiller: “I wanted to share a video from last summer’s fellowship and workshop program in Brooklyn Heights, New York. As we prepare and make arrangements for this summer’s program, just imagine all the fun you will have in Salt Lake City. Click the link to view the video from last year, then be sure to follow the links to the fellowship or workshop applications so you can join us in July of this year.”
2014-03-09: Theatre in LA announces a production of Ronald K. Fried’s Two Mailers at Edgemar Center for the Arts. Michael Aushenker has more: “The Big Empty Comes Full Circle in Two Mailers.”
2014-03-01: Speaking of Tough Guys, Music Box Records has just released on CD the soundtrack of TGDD, composed by Angelo Badalamenti. From their web site: “Music Box Records presents the remastered and expanded release of renowned composer Angelo Badalamenti’s (Blue Velvet, TV series Twin Peaks, The City of Lost Children) original score to the Cannon Films 1987 crime mystery comedy-drama feature film Tough Guys Don’t Dance, starring Ryan O’Neal, Isabella Rossellini, Debra Sandlund, Wings Hauser and Lawrence Tierney, and directed by Pulitzer Prize winning-author Norman Mailer, based on his best-selling 1984 novel.”
2014-02-28: James Parker and Rivka Galchen on the New York Times ask “What’s Become of the So-Called Literary Bad Boy?” William S. Burroughs was born 100 years ago this month. James Parker and Rivka Galchen discuss where literary bad boys live today.
2014-02-15: Via Eric Bryant on ArtSpace: “Decoding "River of Fundament": 8 Keys to Unlocking Matthew Barney’s Egyptian Epic.” The multiple narratives about jealous gods, reincarnated pharaohs, and Norman Mailer are confounding, but limpid storytelling is not the point. So what is Barney’s point?
2014-02-07: Via Art Matters: “Sexy Beast”—Summoning Norman Mailer, Egyptian mythology, an oboe-playing porn star and one dead cow, Matthew Barney creates “River of Fundament,” a baroque and no less baffling art-world spectacle.
2014-12-31: Today, Mailer would have turned 91. His last novel, The Castle in the Forest, was as complicated as its author. Few things say “dangerous writing territory” like a story about Hitler’s childhood. And yet Castle received the best critical reviews of Mailer’s career since Executioner. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, concluding that, “Mailer arrives at a somber, compelling portrait of a monstrous soul,” while Booklist commented that “In his first novel in more than a decade, Mailer continues to provoke. Only a writer with his temerity would attempt a novel interpreting perhaps the most notorious figure in modern history, Adolf Hitler.” (Via BookTrib.)

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