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Saturday, November 10, 2007
Norman Mailer Has Died.
It was a summer during my high school years, and I was unhappily camping in the Pyrenees with Catalan friends of my family and a bunch of other camping Catalans. It was hellishly hot. I hated setting up tent, standing in line for mashed beans, shitting in the woods. While everyone put on their big boots and went for mountain hikes, I holed up in my tent, reading Norman Mailer's novel, The Naked and the Dead. He wrote it when he was absurdly young. It was about his war experiences. I remember being lost in the powerful narrative momentum of the thing -- remember a description of a man pissing himself in terror as his group of soldiers is drawn into a bloodbath by a malign commander... Around the same time, late 1960's, as UD marched with her high-school boyfriend on the Capitol, it was Mailer's Armies of the Night that helped her figure out what she was doing (her only memory of the march is her boyfriend massaging her feet afterwards). I doubt UD understood then what Mailer meant by "the overpsychologized loins of the liberal academic intelligentsia." Does she ever now. "It is a work of personal and political reportage that brings to the inner and developing crisis of the United States at this moment [1968] admirable sensibilities, candid intelligence, the most moving concern for America itself," wrote Alfred Kazin in New York Times. |