If we must talk about his legacy, we should say that it is not likely to be literary. The Mailerian voice, the vatic meltdown trammeled through the haughty Harvard-debater’s syntax, with its odd resort — often in the midst of psycho-sensory overload — to wheezy words such as “analogous,” is easily parodied but not susceptible of imitation: it has the distinct tone of his mind and his experience. And what we might call the Mailerian field of study — pharaohs, murderers, marijuana, riots and rocket launches, God and the Devil, sex, sex, sex — seems to have sunk like Atlantis. The times, for the time being, have changed. (If they change back, we will beg for another Mailer.)
So much depended on his equivocal, electric presence: with the man gone, it becomes miserably more easy — even in the few days since his death — to undervalue or abrogate his achievement. But memory is its own current, and a montage of Mailer moments provides the imaginative charge for swashbuckling generations to come. Looking out into TV land, through the “valves of video,” and announcing that one minute in the mind of General Westmoreland was more obscene than all the banned books ever written; taking a hammer in the head from Rip Torn in the concluding (it could hardly have been other than concluding) scene of Maidstone; refusing to budge from Sonny Liston’s chair at a pre-fight press conference in 1962 and being carried out, still seated, by cops, like a mad little king on his litter.
What a man. Like a certain kind of joke, or a good night, or a victory — unrepeatable.
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Eat, pray, shove, Stuff and nonsense, Grave Spotting, More 
- Eat, pray, shove
So after all the roarings and the thumpings and the garlands and the scandals, after all the sex and the jazz and the fires on the moon and the women’s-libbers howling for his blood and the glass bouncing off Gore Vidal’s head, the old lion ends his days in comfortable domesticity on the crooked fingertip of Cape Cod, nibbling teriyaki-infused oatmeal and reading baseball statistics on the crapper.
- Stuff and nonsense
Despite millions in production design, Peter Strietman's splendid photography, and some witty if trance-inducing music by Jonathan Bepler, the six and a half hours of Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle is sheer movie tedium, inert and unmoving, broken up by imagery that's more irritating than fascinating in its self-indulgent preciosity.
- Grave Spotting
I asked the question this way: "Where would you want to be buried?" Not "do," but "would." That is to say if, by chance, you were to die, unlikely as that might be, where would you want to spend all of nonexistence?
- Bouncers tell all
A young man of my acquaintance, a callow pube of a London club-goer, got himself bounced not long ago from an establishment on the King’s Road.
- Straight outta Kafka
We want to get into the shower and not emerge until November 2008.
- Armies of the light
Maybe the trauma of another intractable war has sparked the movies’ recent interest in ’60s headliners.
- The sound and the Führer
Having taken on such larger-than-life figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, Pablo Picasso, Jesus Christ, and, of course, Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer now essays “the most mysterious human being of the century,” Adolf Hitler.
- The Ballad of Greenwich Village
Filmmaker Karen Kramer’s best work on The Ballad of Greenwich Village was during production, getting Norman Mailer, Maya Angelou, Richie Havens, and the ever-reticent Woody Allen to reminisce before her camera.
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“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.
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Long before suburban kids began digging Dr. Dre and Tupac, an earlier generation of young white people venerated the jazz and swing music of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.
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In recent years, the Boston Film Festival has alternated between catastrophe and semi-revival.
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Books
, Media, National Public Radio Inc., Books, More
, Media, National Public Radio Inc., Books, Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer, Sonny Liston, Sonny Liston, Cormac McCarthy, Barton Fink, Don DeLillo, Less
