Let me tell you about Norman Mailers

Source: The Wichita Eagle (Original Article)

“The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom” by Martin Amis (Alfred A. Knopf, $24)

Martin Amis is one of those rare-bird writers, at one and the same time a novelist, political and cultural critic, essayist and public intellectual. He has written wickedly entertaining novels like “London Fields” and “The Information,” as well as murky self-satisfied drivel like “Yellow Dog” and “Night Train.”

His latest book, “The Second Plane,” a collection of pieces originally published in English newspapers or American magazines like the New Yorker, takes on terrorism, terrorism’s relation to religious faith, and Western ideals.

This is pretty heady stuff, and Amis has come in for his share of criticism and ridicule for being outspoken in an offensive way, derivative in his arguments, and insensitive, particularly as it comes to “everyday Islam” and the billions who practice that religion peacefully. “The Second Plane” also takes on the Iraq war, an endeavor opposed by almost every thinking Briton save the one who counted, Tony Blair.

Novelists who wander away from fiction — and here Norman Mailer comes to mind — have a curious capacity to both astonish and disgust, as Mailer did in his brilliant investigations of politics in the late 1960s. In his own inimitable way, with stylistic ripostes worthy of Waugh, Amis does what he sets out to do, which is to make political controversy interesting.

Despite the fact that “The Second Plane” is fatally uneven in quality, the essays largely entertain, provoke and consternate.

In the provocative mode, for example, in “Terror and Boredom,” one of the utter failures in the book, Amis writes, “Religion is sensitive ground, as well it might be. Here we walk on eggshells. Because religion is itself an eggshell. Today, in the West, there are no good excuses for religious belief — unless we think that ignorance, reaction, and sentimentality are good excuses. This is Citibank Platinum Credit Card not so in the East…” Never …continue reading

Source: Salt Lake Tribune (Original Article)

Click photo to enlargeBrandon Griggs«1»In five-plus years of Culture Vulturing, I’ve never thought this column should be about me - until today. Barring a freelance gig or an eventual change of heart, this will be the last thing I write for The Salt Lake Tribune. After 14 years I’m leaving Utah for Atlanta, where I’ll be writing and editing for CNN.com.

    I know, I know - Atlanta? Never in my most fevered dreams did I imagine I’d live in the South, where you can choke on the humidity and some folks still refer to the Civil War as the “war of northern aggression.” But then I never thought I’d spend half my adult life in Salt Lake City, either.

    I grew up mostly in Washington, D.C., and was living happily enough there when I fell for a woman from Park City and moved, in a fit of impetuosity, to Utah to be with her. It was January 1994. A month later, the Trib offered me a job writing features and arts and entertainment news.

    Things didn’t work out so well with that woman. But the job turned out great. After stints at other newspapers, mostly covering crime, I was thrilled to finally be writing about colorful, interesting people who weren’t wearing leg irons.

    I interviewed Brooke Shields in her trailer on the set of a shot-in-Salt Lake TV miniseries while her then-boyfriend, Andre Agassi, sat beside her, reading a magazine. They were very polite and sweet, and they couldn’t wait for me to leave. I stalked AdvertisementQuentin Tarantino at the Sundance Film Festival and played tennis with actor Barry Williams, better known as Greg on “The Brady Bunch.” I endured an afternoon listening to Orrin Hatch play his songs on a piano and lunch at the Judge Cafe with former Jazz manchild Greg Ostertag, who spent the meal throwing his food at teammate Bryon Russell.

    I had a memorable prison interview with convicted murderer Dan top gear video Lafferty, who told me, “If God …continue reading

Source: Boston Globe (Original Article)

Photography Review

The rhythms of New England through a restless eye

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By
Mark Feeney

Globe Staff
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May 16, 2008

Verner Reed (1923-2006) appears to have been a restless man. Born in Denver, he graduated from Milton Academy and went to Harvard before wartime service in the Army Air Force. He later lived in Vermont, Boston, Vermont again, and a couple of places in Maine. He made furniture, sculpted, ran a restaurant, farmed, and tried his hand at jewelry-making and silversmithing.He also took photographs. There are some 26,000 prints and negatives in the Verner Reed Archive, now held by Historic New England. Seventy-six of those images make up “A Changing World: New England in the Photographs of Verner Reed, 1950-1972,” which is at Suffolk University’s Adams Gallery through July 21.Even with no knowledge of Reed’s life, one could likely detect an innate restlessness through these pictures. They take in city and country, the famous and anonymous, formal compositions and human interest, art and journalism. Photography was a means to an end for Reed; it’s just that he never quite settled on what that end might be. Self-expression? Documentation? Just making a living? Elements of all three are on display.Reed worked for Life magazine, freelanced for various other publications, and took pictures for himself. (The portion of “A Changing World” devoted to Reed’s consciously artistic efforts is the weakest in the show.) He liked to cite Henri Cartier-Bresson as his foremost influence. “Puddle Jumper,” which shows a man striding over an expanse of melted slush, pays overt homage to Cartier-Bresson, the master of the “decisive instant.” Even more, though, one can see Walker Evans in Reed’s pictures - especially the ones of rural New England. The church in “Waiting” could come straight out of Evans, as could the people in “Northern Vermont Family.”Both men had a the suite life of zack and cody dvd similarly austere eye. Reed wasn’t above …continue reading

Source: The Times (Original Article)

There is a Jewish proverb that says: “God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.”

In the Woody Allen short film, Oedipus Wrecks, his dead mother appears in the sky over New York and continues to criticise his every decision — a cinematic interpretation of all Jewish men’s worst fears.

Famous mother lovers include Liberace, who was often accused of “momism” — the excessive love of one’s mother and comedian Lenny Bruce, whose mother encouraged and developed his love of the dirty side of life and who, throughout her life, remained his biggest fan. Norman Mailer married more times than anyone cares to remember, but believed that his mother was the true Mrs Mailer. Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, referred to his mother as “The All- American Bitch” and, when she died, he worried that, like Woody Allen’s mom-in- the-sky, she would rise out of her coffin to get the last word in. His dislike for his mommy may have been spurred by her decision to dress her future tough-guy boxing enthusiast in girl’s clothes as a child.

The French writer André Gide was raised by his mother after his father died when Gide was just 11 years old. His mother, believing that he was too sensitive for school, kept him at home and controlled all aspects of his life, from his clothes to his choice of reading matter, until her death when he was 25.

Other French mommy’s boys include Gustave Flaubert, who believed that no other woman could ever equal his mother; Marcel Proust who was devoted to his mother from childhood until her death in 1905 when he was 34 years old. He withdrew into seclusion from society following her death and remained there for the rest of his life. Marie Henri Beyle (better known as Stendhal) lost his mother when he was seven, never really got over her death and Instant Approval Credit Cards had erotic thoughts about her for …continue reading

Source: Washington Post (Original Article)

BRIGHT SHINY MORNING

By James Frey

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MEDIUM dvd

Source: Kalamazoo Gazette - MLive.com (Original Article)

BY KURT ANTHONY KRUG

Special to the Gazette

DOWAGIAC — For novelist Ivan Doig, the triumph of language
on a page is what fascinates and inspires him.

“I enjoy working with language. The language is the alpha
and omega and all between. I’m fascinated by trying to
say things as they’ve not been said before,”
said Doig, 68, of Seattle, who will be the visiting author
at this year’s Dogwood Fine Arts Festival in Dowagiac.

The festival previously has hosted such notable authors as
Dave Barry, Amy Tan, Joseph Heller, Margaret Atwood, Frank
McCourt, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Kurt
Vonnegut, Jim Harrison, Ted Kooser and Sara Paratesky.

Doig will discuss “The Whistling Season,” his
latest novel, at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Dowagiac Middle
School Performing Arts Center.

“I feel a writer has to be a cosmic mechanic of the
language,” Doig said. “I take the best of what
exists and what people say in a given profession or in a
given way of life. … I’ve been living in World War II
for the past couple of years, reading soldiers’ old
memoirs to catch how people talk.”

He was referring to his next novel, “The Eleventh
Man,” which is set during the war.

“I’ll be talking some in Dowagiac about the craft of
writing — the magic stuff that goes onto the page — as
well as creating characters,” he said.

Many of the prolific author’s works take place in
Montana, where he Free Credit Cards was born.

CONTINUED   1 | 2
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Source: Washington Post (Original Article)

This is compelling television to be sure — after all, we’re talking about sex: hippies cavorting in the altogether. Women’s libbers brandishing their bras. Playboy bunnies and Hugh Hefner. Helen Gurley Brown and Burt Reynolds’s naked centerfold. Suburban swingers. Jaybird-naked couples shedding what remains of their inhibitions at facebook directory the infamous Plato’s Retreat. Drag queens and porn stars.

Source: International Herald Tribune (Original Article)

FRANKFURT: Peter Olson, the chief executive of Random House and one of the most powerful figures in American book publishing, will step down in the next few weeks, according to two executives at Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate that owns the division.

Olson, who since 1998 has run Random House, the world's largest consumer publisher, with authors including John Grisham, Dan Brown, Norman Mailer and Toni Morrison, has come under mounting pressure in recent months as Bertelsmann's financial results have been damaged by lower profit at Random House and steep losses at its American book clubs.

Bertelsmann's recently appointed chief executive, Hartmut Ostrowski, has lost patience with the performance of the American outpost and wants to install his own person, said these executives, who spoke on condition of anonymity because it involved internal personnel issues.

The terms and exact timing of Olson's departure were still under negotiation, these people said. Bertelsmann's board is scheduled to meet in New York in two weeks. An announcement could come shortly after that. “It's just a question of working out his deal,” one executive said.

It was not yet clear who will replace Olson, although these executives said it would not necessarily be a prominent figure from New York publishing, and maybe not even an American.

Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said: “Olson is pursuing a normal business schedule today and for the foreseeable future.” On Monday, Olson held a reception for a group of Bertelsmann managers visiting from Germany.

Olson, 58, has worked for Bertelsmann for 20 years and was instrumental in helping to negotiate the company's acquisition of Random House from Advance Publications a decade ago, when he was made chief executive of the group. He led the merger of Random House with Bantam Doubleday Student Credit Card Dell, already owned by Bertelsmann, and …continue reading

Source: Irish Independent (Original Article)

I’m what you might call a Philo-Semite. My favourite writers, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Franz Kafka, Norman Mailer, my favourite movie directors, Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, my favourite classical musicians, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, David Oistrakh, are all Jews. Ditto with artists, Marc Chagall, Mark Rothko, Lucien Freud, and composers, Gustav Mahler, George Gershwin, Steve Reich.

The Sweeney pantheon is a wall to wall Jewfest. And Dublin manager Paul Caffrey apparently shares my interests given that his defence of his team’s behaviour against Meath leant heavily on the use of the old Yiddish word shemozzle. Sometimes I even wonder if I was swapped at birth with a lad who is at this moment sitting in Haifa eating Tayto, listening to Brendan Shine, watching D’Unbelievables and ordering a Glenroe box set from Amazon.

I used to think this was why I was so fond of Avram ‘I’m just minding the grim reaper’s scythe while he’s on his holidays’ Grant. Now I see that it’s simpler than that. I admire Avram Grant because he is a fine manager doing his job well and getting no credit whatsoever.

The more or less blanket dismissal of Grant’s managerial abilities requires a certain amount of doublethink. If Chelsea do badly, he’s entirely to blame. If Chelsea do well, he has nothing to do with it. Whatever happens, the world’s least cheerful man can’t win. You don’t need to be Albert Einstein to see how unfair that is.

All that’s necessary to gauge the extent of Grant’s achievement this season is to recall the scenario after the sacking of Jose Mourinho. It was confidently predicted in those fraught weeks that the glory days were over for Chelsea, that the departure of The Special One heralded the end of an era and that Grant’s undoubted incompetence would soon manifest itself. When Chelsea lost 2-0 at Old Trafford, they looked in rag order, a team safely to be dismissed from contention.

Yet sudoku tips a few months later we find …continue reading

Source: The Age (Original Article)

NOT so long ago, a book conference session dedicated to graphic
novels would not happen. But the books are everywhere now, and
best-selling author Neil Gaiman is in Melbourne to talk about their
place in the publishing world: do we read them or simply love them
for their art?
“Finally we live in a world where every bookshop and library has
dedicated shelving for graphic novels,” says Minnesota-based
Gaiman, who is on a panel at the Children’s Book Council National
Conference this weekend.
In the late 1980s, Gaiman started his Sandman series
— a collection that Norman Mailer called “a comic strip for
intellectuals”. These days Gaiman refers to the books as graphic
novels that were written as 75 comic books.
He agrees that the line between comics and graphic novels has
blurred over the past two decades and that readership has changed,
too.
“Twenty years ago if you were reading comics, you were male.
Now, especially in places like Singapore, readers are more likely
to be women,” he says.
Gaiman has a few theories about why the genre no longer remains
on the fringe. “I think we have a generation that’s visually
sophisticated and familiar with comic-book language.”
Gaiman is not concerned about the large number of graphic novels
being published.
“I’ve seen at least one boom and bust in the late ’80s because
publishers had no idea what they were doing — they’d ask a
waiter if he was writing a graphic novel and if the waiter said
yes, they’d sign him.” But he adds: “In the long run, the good
stuff takes care of itself.”
The good stuff, according to Gaiman, includes Shaun Tan’s fully
illustrated The Arrival.
“This book could never have been a novel — it’s utterly
unique and you read the book on an experiential level.”
Gaiman has two books out this month: The Dangerous
Alphabet, a picture book for children illustrated by Gris
Grimly, and M is for Magic, a collection of scary tales for
younger readers.
Gaiman’s books have made the leap ANZ Frequent Flyer Card from page to screen repeatedly
— …continue reading