Brooklyn Heights Blog (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago
Brooklyn Heights resident, former NYC mayoral candidate and world renown author Norman Mailer died two years ago today from acute renal failure. We thought it appropriate to remember the cantankerous writer with this clip from his 1968 appearance on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. Also, today’s Brooklyn Eagle has an interesting retrospective on Mailer. Amazon.com [...]
Ink In My Coffee (Free subscription) | 10 hours ago
Tuesday, November 10, 2009 Waning Moon Uranus Retrograde Rainy and mild I’ve been dipping into OUR PRIVATE LIVES: JOURNALS, NOTEBOOKS AND DIARIES, which contains selections from 40 individuals including Paul Bowles, Bill Clinton when he was still a Governor, Gretel Ehrlich, Keith Basso, Tess Gallagher, Gail Godwin, Jim Harrison, Ursula K. LeGuin, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver [...]...
Miami Herald (Free subscription) | yesterday
These days, when literature springs from mere experience and memoirs are justified by a change in eating habits, it seems fitting to remark on the heritage of Lydia Davis. Her father, Robert Gorham Davis, was a literary critic and author. He taught literature at Harvard (where he urged Norman Mailer to submit his first short story to Story magazine), Smith (where he taught Sylvia Plath) and Columbia....
Church of the Acronym (Free subscription) | 11/09/2009
I think I've spotted what might be ELCA's problem. Have you looked through (Akaloo) Questions for life: Matthew's View ? It's Augsburg Fortress published in cooperation with Presbyterian Church USA (2006) and the cover says it's for grades 9-12. Akaloo means "follow." I don't know if UALC is using the series; checking the internet, I see many churches use this series for Sunday school. I...
Quigley (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Barney Frank is a pig by Bernie Quigley - for The Hill on 11/08/09 Speaking of self esteem issues, only an overweight career buffoon who proudly and conspicuously talks like a duck to display his endemic contempt for the world west of Boston would say that some of the people at the rally “ . . . appeared to have been the losers in the 'Are you smarter than Michele Bachmann contest?'" Thinking...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/08/2009
Amid Andre Agassi's self-serving revelations about drugs and his rivals, Geoff Dyer finds some thrilling insights into the game of tennis Norman Mailer reckoned that, as big fights loomed, great boxers "begin to have inner lives like Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or Faulkner, Joyce or Melville". If Andre Agassi's Open is anything to go by, great tennis players begin to have minds like...
the purest of treats (Free subscription) | 11/07/2009
He never graduated high school. He laid brick and cinder blocks for a living. Sometimes he pointed out houses and other buildings he had worked on. He used to tell me, "I worked hard, very hard." He started reading seriously as a young boy. He knew a lot about history and geography. When I knew him he read mainly fiction. He liked most kinds of popular novels but especially ones that were...
Professor VJ (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Now that the comprehensive exhibition in Athens is well underway, it's time for some serious name-dropping in another direction: What do John Ashberry, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Burroughs, Truman Capote, Robert Creeley. my old undergrad teacher Harry Crews, Louise Erdich, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Ted Mooney, my old undergrad teacher Alain Robbe-Grillet, Salman Rushdie,...
Dennis Perrin (Free subscription) | 11/05/2009
Writers are increasingly marginal, which may be best. Techno-distractions shred traditional thought patterns, reducing the young to monosyllables, grunts, and nods. Attention spans crumble in the slightest breeze. Add a fixed political arrangement, corporate assaults on what remains of public life, endless war abroad, religious insanity at home, and what's the point of reading, much less writing? Part...
A Boat Against the Current (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
“Ali, gloves to his heads, elbows to his ribs, stood and swayed and was rattled and banged and shaken like a grasshopper at the top of a reed when the wind whips, and the ropes shook and swung like sheets in a storm, and Foreman would lunge with his right at Ali’s chin and Ali go flying back out of reach by a half-inch, and half out of the ring, and back in to push at Foreman’s elbow...
New West Network Cities: Idaho Nort (Free subscription) | 10/27/2009
Helena-raised Kevin Connolly is on the road talking about his new memoir, Double Take. He'll visit Bozeman today (Country Bookshelf, 7 p.m.), and he'll be in Helena on October 28 (Montana Book Company, 7 p.m.), and in Missoula on October 29 (Fact & Fiction, 7 p.m.). The 24-year-old Connolly was born without legs, but according to his bio on his publisher's website, he was otherwise a healthy baby...
frog design™ (Free subscription) | 10/26/2009
“For experience, when it is not communicated to another, must wither within and be worse than lost.” — Norman Mailer I was a Pop!Tech virgin before arriving in Camden on Wednesday. As likely happens with any experience, I came with a set of assumptions. I found it to be a great privilege to be a part of the conversation to re-imagine America (the theme of this year’s conference),...
A Boat Against the Current (Free subscription) | 10/24/2009
October 23, 1969—The committee deciding the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded it to Samuel Beckett, a 60-year-old Irish expatriate who liked to let his cryptic novels and plays do his talking for him. By giving it to someone who hardly cared a fig for the attention, the committee annoyed Norman Mailer , an extraordinarily voluble 46-year-old American who frittered his considerable energies away...
The Independent (Free subscription) | 10/24/2009
Right now Provincetown might just be the most fashionable resort in the world. The former fishing village is certainly the most fashionable resort in North America. Well, at least on the East Coast. Sitting on the very tip of Cape Cod, this is where the Pilgrims first set foot on American soil (not at Plymouth, but here!) before moving inland and making a fuss elsewhere. And in many ways it probably...
TakePart Social Action Network™ (Free subscription) | 10/23/2009
Salman Rushdie ’s decree from the book Letters to the Six Billionth World Citizen to our little 6 billionth addition is surely the stuff of religious group contention, but its derivations on “freedom” present an irrefutable truth for our future. Freedom, “that space in which contradiction can reign,” has never been as illumined, yet muddled, owing to an increasingly mediated,...
Videos