Let me tell you about Norman Mailers

Source: The Times (Original Article)

A new documentary about Hunter S Thompson continues to vaunt the author as a romantic hero. Bollocks, says Bongani Madondo.

Hunter S Thompson — better known as “Dr Gonzo” — is high : sky high. I mean, we are speaking of Thompson in present terms, to denote the enduring memory and myth surrounding the man.

Let’s get this fact straight before we dive into a world that Thompson — and his more elegant and wittier predecessor, Mark Twain, as well Thompson’s contemporaries, the “New Journalists” — understood so viscerally.

For these chaps the hard drill of reporting was not mere journalistic practice, no: For them it was a helluva personal, subjective and intimate art.

The New Journalists — later to be modified as “literary” or “narrative” — were as crazy and immersed in their “art” as the very brightest in the expressive and performing arts were.

It is not like New Journalists were, by definition, all great reporters or writers even. The greatest among them were sublime, yes — but the worst of the bunch were criminally atrocious.

Which brings us to Thompson’s essence: To truly appreciate or even disapprove of him as a writer, you must — as a start — agree with one thing. .. the man was a phenomenon. How did he attain it? And why is he still a phenomenon?

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson is a 2008 documentary that answers this question incisively and offers a clichéless portrait of the man — sans the usual groupie-blind love definitive of most bio pic directors. Directed by Alex Gibney, the 118-minute documentary is 10 times better than Fear and Loathing in Vegas, the Johnny Depp feature film based on Thompson’s now iconic ANZ First Credit Card story for Rolling Stone magazine. Gibney’s …continue reading

Source: in print - The Age (Original Article)

Kate Jennings’ latest book emerged out of a desire to
understand why she loved her dogs so much, she tells Jane
Sullivan.
KATE JENNINGS WAS NOT the sort of woman to fall for anything
cute. “Call me cold. Actually, call me vinegary,” she writes. Then
she fell in love at first sight. Twice. First, with Stanley, an
aristocratic alpha male; second, three years later, with Sophie, a
streetwise, scrappy, orphaned alpha female. They were border
terriers, exasperating little buggers, and they took over her
life.
Hang on. That won’t do. That makes it sound as if her new book,
Stanley and Sophie, is a certain kind of doggy book, and
it isn’t. Recently, John Grogan’s Marley & Me became a
huge bestseller. The publishers describe it as “the heartwarming
and unforgettable story of a family in the making and the
wondrously neurotic dog who taught them what really matters in
life”.
“I will not comment on the quality of it,” Jennings says darkly.
“But people always refer to it as if I were trying to do a
Marley & Me. I was trying to do a Thomas Mann,
Bashan and I, which is a terrific book.”
The dog-book genre has attracted some of the most “manly”
writers, Jennings says: Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Rudyard Kipling. But these days, though the genre is undoubtedly
popular, it’s also seen as sentimental, even mushy; and if there’s
anything that inspires horror in her, it’s mush.
Jennings is an Australian writer who has lived in New York for
29 years. As she tells it, she’s had her heart broken and reformed
many times: it comes back together like the Magic Pudding.
She describes herself as “prickly, prideful”. There’s not a lot
of prickle or pride on view today in the Melbourne hotel lobby, but
there is a certain wariness. Though it’s warm, she keeps her scarf
on. Long freckled arms push out of a loose pullover.
She tells funny stories in that laconic Australian way, but she
mutters. If she were in class, the teacher would tell her to House And Garden Article 6341 speak
up. Writers should have unhealthy …continue reading

Source: Telegraph.co.uk (Original Article)

Post this story to:
del.icio.us
|
Digg
| ANZ Gold
Newsvine
|
NowPublic
|
Reddit
|
Fark

Other Stories

Source: Toronto Star (Original Article)

The literary pursuits of James Frey lend new meaning to the term unreliable narrator. And, if you believe the famously discredited memoirist, that was the plan all along.

Far from running away from his reputation as a writer who baldly smudges the lines between fact and fiction, Frey has re-emerged from his TV chiding by Oprah Winfrey more determined than ever to keep his readers guessing.

Two years after copping to the charge that he made stuff up while writing the bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces and its popular sequel My Friend Leonard, the 38-year-old writer has published his first work of fiction, Bright Shiny Morning, a sprawling, multi-layered narrative set in contemporary Los Angeles.

Reviews of the book, which debuted at No. 9 on the New York Times bestseller list last Sunday, have ranged from rapturously laudatory to derisively dismissive.

Once again, everything is not as it seems. Interspersed among the novel’s several plotlines are lists of "fun facts" about L.A. Not all of the facts are true. But don’t say you weren’t warned. The very first page issues the following disclaimer: "Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable."

"I laid it out right there," Frey said before an onstage interview and signing session at Indigo yesterday. "In a way, it’s a joke. In a way, it’s a statement of defiance. In a way, it’s saying that I’m going to do what I’m going to do and I don’t care what you have to say about it."

It was Frey’s first visit to Toronto – not counting a family trip here from his native Cleveland as a kid – and he was concerned it might be cut short if his wife called from New York to report she was about to give birth to the couple’s second child. A previously planned promotional visit to Toronto was cancelled in 2006 after accusations appeared about the veracity of his writing.

Frey, who St George Vertigo Credit Card moved to New York after living …continue reading

Source: The Oregonian - OregonLive.com (Original Article)

Spaceships. Astronauts. And . . . Kanye West?

If any pop artist thinks he (or she) can save the world, it
is West. His blend of production skills and mike bravado,
his outsize personality and naked ambition, his ego and his,
uh, ego, have made it clear over the past few years that he
plans to conquer as much of the planet as he can. So why not
the universe?

Hence the conceit for his latest tour: West is an astronaut
whose mission is to return creativity to Earth; his music
threads through a story that starts with a spaceship crash
and, according to early reviews, ends with eventual escape.

Rock ‘n’ roll has its self-appointed messiah
figures; literature has plenty of outsized personalities
(Hemingway, say, or Norman Mailer); and more than one
Hollywood heavy has sniffed, “Don’t you know who I
am?” to some unsuspecting mortal.

But returning creativity to Earth? Because, you know, no one
else on the whole planet is doing anything creative? That,
right there, is chutzpah.

So what can you expect from tonight’s show? A few
predictions and words of advice:

Take a nap beforehand. Seriously. Any of the artists on this
tour (Rihanna, Lupe Fiasco, N.E.R.D.) could be out on a
headlining trek this summer (though admittedly not
necessarily a stadium tour). None of these is a
10-minute-quickie artist. So this show is going to be a
marathon — eat some Wheaties for breakfast, take a nap in
the evening and stay hydrated at the show. Maybe even do
some calisthenics beforehand or run a lap around the Rose
Garden to warm up.

If you only think of West as an ego on legs, you’ll be
surprised at his intelligence. Look, it takes smarts to
engineer the kind of success he’s had — and he’s
very much pulling his own strings. On top of that, he had
the brains to pack his tour with so much other talent that
his show would almost certainly be pegged the standout
concert of the summer: Rihanna caribbean villas is top-of-the-pop-princess
parade right now. Simply …continue reading

Source: Centre Daily Times (Original Article)

I was listening to a National Public Radio story about a developer who is trying to turn the downtown section of Miami along Biscayne Bay into a walking city, like Paris and New York. Aside from hurricanes and stretches of third-world

poverty, Miami would make a beautiful walking city. For a while that morning, I daydreamed about going back to a place where winter never comes. Like many people my age, what I really wanted was to recapture the past.

From the 20th floor of one of the developer’s new condominiums — if I had a half-million dollars to spare to purchase it — I could look down on the place where my small campus used to stand, a few blocks inland from the waterfront in the South Beach section of Miami Beach.

Every weekday I rode my wobbly motorcycle to school with a backpack of books on my back, not a sporty backpack like today’s but an old green canvas bag from the Army/Navy store. The Vietnam War was still chugging along, and military gear was popular, God knows why. Veterans were trickling back home from overseas and returning to school. I hung around with one, a student named Ray, a Marine who had been shot up during his second tour. Ray was working on a degree in history so he could rejoin the Marines as an officer. It was such an endless war that he probably got his wish.

By luck, I had fallen into a piece of the old Grove of Academe, a square half-block of palm trees and Spanish architecture with a few dozen classrooms where maybe 200 students were enrolled. It was a branch campus of Florida Atlantic University up the coast in Boca Raton. I don’t think the South Beach campus lasted long after I graduated, but while I was there, it was a remarkable place.

There was a poet/professor, Edmund Skellings, who taught Shakespeare and poetry and recited the great English poets like they were set to music. He was one of a group of inspiring teachers who had American Express Card landed in this unlikely spot, and …continue reading

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

Email|Print|Single Page|
Text size
–
+

By
Mark Feeney

Globe Staff
/
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