Norman Mailer: A Double Life By J. Michael Lennon NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2013 Release date: October 15, 2013 960 pp. Cloth $40.00 Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Edited by Phillip Sipiora Introduction by Jonathan Lethem New York: Random House Release date: October 15, 2013 632 pp. Cloth $40.00 Full disclosure: J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life, and Phillip Sipiora, editor of Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, are good friends of mine, as were Norman and Norris Mailer, though I did not know them nearly as long as did Lennon or Sipiora. But as I learned in reading Lennon's scintillating and thought-provoking new biography, it was not unusual for members of New York's literati establishment "family" to review their friends' works, and the assessments were not always favorable. It seems that quite a few literary feuds had their origins in bad reviews from friends, transforming many a wine-sipping Upper East Side salon and drug-fueled Greenwich Village bacchanal into literal blood sport. Happily, from my reaction to both volumes, I expect from Professors Lennon and Sipiora no such head-butting, drink-splashing, invitations to step outside or extended periods of malign silence--all favored techniques of the author in question. Norman Mailer: A Double Life is as close to a definitive biography as is likely possible from this close and recent a remove. And Mind of an Outlaw is a virtual casebook of the nonfiction essays that exemplify and explicate the narrative of Mailer's protean life. What emerges from both books is a vivid and engrossing portrait of the artist as a young, middle-aged and old man, who never abandoned the courage to keep trying new things no matter the success of previous ones, who spent a long literary lifetime as a public intellectual and agent provocateur, breaking old molds and recasting new ones; continually venturing into new subjects, wholly new styles and ways of seeing things, very much a literary equivalent of his art world icon Picasso. In his Editor's Preface, Sipiora calls the task of shaping the collection "daunting" because of the sheer volume and gamut of Mailer's nonfiction. "For Mailer, the essay, even more than fiction, provided him a forum to unrelentingly confront the social, political, and cultural crises of the day. In the essay, Mailer's relentless curiosity, coupled with his discursive prose, engages, opposes, clarifies, complicates, and rigorously challenges whatever subjects he takes on." Jonathan Lethem's Introduction puts it even more directly: "Norman Mailer was a writer who never met a corner he didn't wish to paint himself into." The subtitle Double Life resonates on many levels. And Lennon knows what every good novelist and playwright discovers: that our best qualities and our worst qualities coexist side-by-side. Sometimes, it is difficult to tell them apart. So may it be with Mailer. The title of a 1993 essay states it in the context of boxing: "The Best Move Lies Close
{"title":"Words with Friends","authors":"M. Olshaker","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv7r41dw.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv7r41dw.37","url":null,"abstract":"Norman Mailer: A Double Life By J. Michael Lennon NewYork: Simon & Schuster, 2013 Release date: October 15, 2013 960 pp. Cloth $40.00 Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays Edited by Phillip Sipiora Introduction by Jonathan Lethem New York: Random House Release date: October 15, 2013 632 pp. Cloth $40.00 Full disclosure: J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life, and Phillip Sipiora, editor of Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays, are good friends of mine, as were Norman and Norris Mailer, though I did not know them nearly as long as did Lennon or Sipiora. But as I learned in reading Lennon's scintillating and thought-provoking new biography, it was not unusual for members of New York's literati establishment \"family\" to review their friends' works, and the assessments were not always favorable. It seems that quite a few literary feuds had their origins in bad reviews from friends, transforming many a wine-sipping Upper East Side salon and drug-fueled Greenwich Village bacchanal into literal blood sport. Happily, from my reaction to both volumes, I expect from Professors Lennon and Sipiora no such head-butting, drink-splashing, invitations to step outside or extended periods of malign silence--all favored techniques of the author in question. Norman Mailer: A Double Life is as close to a definitive biography as is likely possible from this close and recent a remove. And Mind of an Outlaw is a virtual casebook of the nonfiction essays that exemplify and explicate the narrative of Mailer's protean life. What emerges from both books is a vivid and engrossing portrait of the artist as a young, middle-aged and old man, who never abandoned the courage to keep trying new things no matter the success of previous ones, who spent a long literary lifetime as a public intellectual and agent provocateur, breaking old molds and recasting new ones; continually venturing into new subjects, wholly new styles and ways of seeing things, very much a literary equivalent of his art world icon Picasso. In his Editor's Preface, Sipiora calls the task of shaping the collection \"daunting\" because of the sheer volume and gamut of Mailer's nonfiction. \"For Mailer, the essay, even more than fiction, provided him a forum to unrelentingly confront the social, political, and cultural crises of the day. In the essay, Mailer's relentless curiosity, coupled with his discursive prose, engages, opposes, clarifies, complicates, and rigorously challenges whatever subjects he takes on.\" Jonathan Lethem's Introduction puts it even more directly: \"Norman Mailer was a writer who never met a corner he didn't wish to paint himself into.\" The subtitle Double Life resonates on many levels. And Lennon knows what every good novelist and playwright discovers: that our best qualities and our worst qualities coexist side-by-side. Sometimes, it is difficult to tell them apart. So may it be with Mailer. The title of a 1993 essay states it in the context of boxing: \"The Best Move Lies Close","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"147 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2013-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121767162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2012-09-22DOI: 10.5040/9781501325540.CH-008
S. Bishop
JUST AS THE TEXT OF NORMAN MAILER'S ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF IS AN attempt to let the reader in on a range of aspects of Norman Mailer's writing life, the paratext of the original 1959 edition is remarkable for its efforts to show the consumer detailed facets of Mailer's image. The cover shows him smiling seductively into the camera, in a white t-shirt and yacht cap, playfully upper-class clothing that resonates with images of Mailer's own existential hero, presidential hopeful Senator John F. Kennedy, who was frequently photographed at the Hyannis Port Yacht Club (Fig. 1). The back cover of the book shows the author in four different poses: in the first, Mailer is the young and brooding author of The Naked and the Dead; in the second, he is the more mature intellectual behind Barbary Shore; the third captures him in a checkered shirt, looking casual and cool, the real-life model for Sergius O'Shaugnessy in The Deer Park; and the fourth portrays him as a bearded beatnik, a middle-aged white hipster with his head resting pensively on his hand (Fig. 2). Showing Mailer from every angle, Advertisements for Myselfoffers up "the real" Mailer for the reader's entertainment. A meditation on both self-expression and self-promotion, Advertisements for Myselfanthologizes Mailer's existential quest for authenticity at the same time as it reveals his performative approach to celebrity authorship. Depicting himself as the authentic author, unfettered by the need to maintain a carefully crafted image, take on false airs, or play a public role, Mailer presents himself as immune to the demands of his critics, his readers, and, most importantly, the market--a strange thing to do in a text entitled "Advertisements for Myself." Featuring the notorious essay "The White Negro," in which Mailer envisions the black hipster as a natural Method actor, Advertisements piggy-backs onto the paradoxical association that it delineates between the black subject as authentic and the black subject as performer in order to open up a space between reality and fantasy that Mailer can use to both political and profitable ends. Honing his ability to take on a variety of roles in the public eye as his celebrity grew in the 1960s, Mailer inspired the BBC documentary Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? (1968) and inspired Laura Adams to comment that "it would appear that [Mailer's] only consistency has been in deviating from commonly accepted literary manners" (4) in the introduction to her 1974 anthology of the same name. [FIGURE 2.1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2.2 OMITTED] Meeting direct cinema filmmaker Don Pennebaker in the middle of the decade, Mailer began testing the individual's ability to seem authentic and keep "cool" in the sights of the film camera. Making and starring in his third film, Maidstone (1968), Mailer finally got a chance to turn the cameras on the countercultural agenda for which he had recently become a figurehead. Creating a record of the creative and often violen
正如诺曼·梅勒的《为自己做广告》试图让读者了解诺曼·梅勒写作生活的方方面面一样，1959年版的原文也因其努力向消费者展示梅勒形象的细节方面而引人注目。封面上，他对着镜头迷人地微笑，穿着一件白色t恤，戴着一顶游艇帽，滑稽的上流社会服装，与梅勒自己的存在主义英雄、总统候选人参议员约翰·f·肯尼迪(John F. Kennedy)的形象产生共鸣，肯尼迪经常在海恩尼斯港游艇俱乐部(Hyannis Port yacht Club)被拍到(图1)。书的封底展示了作者四种不同的姿势:第一，梅勒是《裸者与死者》(The Naked and The Dead)的作者，年轻而沉思;在第二个故事里，他是巴巴里·肖尔背后更成熟的知识分子;第三张照片是他穿着格子衬衫，看起来随意而酷，是《鹿园》中塞尔吉乌斯·奥肖内西(Sergius O’shaugnessy)的现实模特;第四幅画把他描绘成一个留着胡子的垮掉的一代，一个中年白人潮人，他的头若有所思地放在手上(图2)。从各个角度展示了梅勒，《为我做广告》为读者提供了“真实的”梅勒，供读者娱乐。《为我而作的广告》是对自我表达和自我推销的沉思，它收录了梅勒对真实性的存在主义追求，同时也揭示了他作为名人作家的表演方式。梅勒把自己描绘成真正的作家，不受维持精心塑造的形象、装腔作势或扮演公众角色的束缚，他把自己描绘成不受评论家、读者、最重要的是不受市场需求影响的人——在题为《为自己做广告》的文章中，这是一件奇怪的事情。在那篇臭名昭著的文章《白人黑人》(the White Negro)中，梅勒把黑人嬉皮士想象成一个天生的方法派演员。《广告》利用了一种矛盾的联系，它描绘了作为真实的黑人主体和作为表演者的黑人主体之间的矛盾联系，以便在现实和幻想之间开辟一个空间，梅勒可以利用这个空间实现政治和利益目的。随着梅勒在20世纪60年代声名鹊起，他不断磨练自己的能力，在公众眼中扮演各种各样的角色。BBC纪录片《真正的诺曼·梅勒请站起来吗?》(1968)，并激励劳拉·亚当斯在她1974年的同名选集的引言中评论说:“看来[梅勒]唯一的一致性就是偏离了普遍接受的文学风格。”梅勒在90年代中期与直接电影导演唐·佩尼贝克(Don Pennebaker)会面，开始测试个人在电影镜头下表现真实和保持“冷静”的能力。梅勒拍摄并主演了他的第三部电影《梅德斯通》(1968)，他终于有机会将镜头转向反文化议程，而他最近已成为该议程的傀儡。梅德斯通创造了一个记录，记录了总是存在于“真实”形象背后的创造性的、往往是暴力的权威，揭示了反主流文化对现实的乌托邦愿景只是另一种意识形态结构，不幸的是，它经常模仿它声称反对的主流社会等级制度。但最终，《梅德斯通》最令人难忘的还是它向我们讲述了梅勒本人。梅德斯通最终向观众展示了“真正”的梅勒——一个看起来一点也不酷的梅勒——梅勒对表象与现实之间微妙界限的娴熟把握，使他的写作生涯在媒体上取得了成功。梅德斯通将个人自由和政治权力都定位于将真实作为模拟，将模拟作为真实的能力。梅德斯通提醒我们，梅勒之所以重要，是因为他利用自己的名声展示了个人抵抗权威和重新定义现实的潜力——即使这种潜力只能由少数精英实际实现。…
{"title":"The Life and Death of the Celebrity Author in Maidstone","authors":"S. Bishop","doi":"10.5040/9781501325540.CH-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501325540.CH-008","url":null,"abstract":"JUST AS THE TEXT OF NORMAN MAILER'S ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF IS AN attempt to let the reader in on a range of aspects of Norman Mailer's writing life, the paratext of the original 1959 edition is remarkable for its efforts to show the consumer detailed facets of Mailer's image. The cover shows him smiling seductively into the camera, in a white t-shirt and yacht cap, playfully upper-class clothing that resonates with images of Mailer's own existential hero, presidential hopeful Senator John F. Kennedy, who was frequently photographed at the Hyannis Port Yacht Club (Fig. 1). The back cover of the book shows the author in four different poses: in the first, Mailer is the young and brooding author of The Naked and the Dead; in the second, he is the more mature intellectual behind Barbary Shore; the third captures him in a checkered shirt, looking casual and cool, the real-life model for Sergius O'Shaugnessy in The Deer Park; and the fourth portrays him as a bearded beatnik, a middle-aged white hipster with his head resting pensively on his hand (Fig. 2). Showing Mailer from every angle, Advertisements for Myselfoffers up \"the real\" Mailer for the reader's entertainment. A meditation on both self-expression and self-promotion, Advertisements for Myselfanthologizes Mailer's existential quest for authenticity at the same time as it reveals his performative approach to celebrity authorship. Depicting himself as the authentic author, unfettered by the need to maintain a carefully crafted image, take on false airs, or play a public role, Mailer presents himself as immune to the demands of his critics, his readers, and, most importantly, the market--a strange thing to do in a text entitled \"Advertisements for Myself.\" Featuring the notorious essay \"The White Negro,\" in which Mailer envisions the black hipster as a natural Method actor, Advertisements piggy-backs onto the paradoxical association that it delineates between the black subject as authentic and the black subject as performer in order to open up a space between reality and fantasy that Mailer can use to both political and profitable ends. Honing his ability to take on a variety of roles in the public eye as his celebrity grew in the 1960s, Mailer inspired the BBC documentary Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up? (1968) and inspired Laura Adams to comment that \"it would appear that [Mailer's] only consistency has been in deviating from commonly accepted literary manners\" (4) in the introduction to her 1974 anthology of the same name. [FIGURE 2.1 OMITTED] [FIGURE 2.2 OMITTED] Meeting direct cinema filmmaker Don Pennebaker in the middle of the decade, Mailer began testing the individual's ability to seem authentic and keep \"cool\" in the sights of the film camera. Making and starring in his third film, Maidstone (1968), Mailer finally got a chance to turn the cameras on the countercultural agenda for which he had recently become a figurehead. Creating a record of the creative and often violen","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126656196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2011-09-22DOI: 10.5040/9781501325540.CH-012
M. Mailer
MY FATHER, NORMAN MAILER, once wrote that film exists somewhere between memory and dream. We recall a film--a good film--the way we recall our memories: fragments crystallized in our minds as visuals of a dream (or a nightmare)--points of light dredged up from our subconscious. I experienced my first taste of filmmaking when I was five years old. I was unwittingly a glorified extra--a day player in the parlance of the biz--and had my debut as a witness to the near death of my father at the murderous hands of Rip Torn. The film was Maidstone, the third and final attempt at underground filmmaking--cinema verite style-- that my dad attempted in the late Sixties. The cast was comprised of friends, ex-wives, sports and movie stars, and of course a few gangsters thrown in for good measure portraying some warped and far out version of themselves--persona extensions on steroids-if you will. They were summoned to Gardiners Island--a bucolic piece of land somewhere off the coast of the Hamptons--to vow their allegiance or disaffection of a certain Norman T. Kingsley (portrayed by who else), who happened to be a retired porn director running for President of the United States. Why not, after all? Qualifications for higher office being what they are you might argue that it was a prescient conceit. Those who arrived immediately drew tags from a hat identifying whether they became friend or foe to the candidacy. Though technically neither side knew the other's position, over three strenuous days the cast would exercise their voices, feelings, prerogatives and, in one case, an assassin's impulse. And like those stories you hear of people being invited to spend a weekend in jail, some as jail birds, others as the jailers, who take to their role with psychotic zeal so too did the denizens on Gardiner's act out their respective parts with manic intensity. I can't help but look at Maidstone--when I can look at it all objectively--as a testament to why the Sixties ultimately imploded. The movie embodies indulgence to the point of mental hazard. And yet the film stands the test of time as a sociological statement. Cutting to yours truly, for some reason in the midst of preparation for the film, one or both parents decided it was a good idea to bring the family along. Let the kids enjoy the great outdoors while the elders make a movie or some such thought must have filtered through their minds. So into the vortex trotted my older sisters, Danielle, Elizabeth, Kate, my younger brother, Stephen, and myself. We soon found ourselves unwittingly part of the cast, filmed as cherubs wandering through the fields of the island. But that's where the idyll ended. …
我的父亲诺曼·梅勒曾经写道，电影存在于记忆和梦想之间。我们回忆一部电影——一部好电影——就像我们回忆自己的记忆:片段在我们的脑海中结晶，成为梦境(或噩梦)的视觉效果——从我们的潜意识中挖掘出来的光点。我第一次尝试拍电影是在我五岁的时候。我无意中成为了一名被美化的临时演员——用行话来说，就是一名日间演员——我的首演见证了我父亲在杀人凶手瑞普·托恩(Rip Torn)手中濒临死亡。这部电影是《梅德斯通》(Maidstone)，是我父亲在60年代末尝试的第三次也是最后一次地下电影制作——真正的电影风格。演员阵容由朋友、前妻、体育明星和电影明星组成，当然还有一些黑帮成员，他们扮演了一些扭曲的、远远超出他们自己的版本——如果你愿意的话，他们的角色扩展了类固醇。他们被召集到加丁纳岛——汉普顿斯海岸附近的一片田园般的土地——宣誓效忠或不满某个诺曼·t·金斯利(Norman T. Kingsley)(由其他人饰演)，他碰巧是一位退休的色情导演，正在竞选美国总统。为什么不呢?获得更高职位的资格你可能会说这是有先见之明的自负。那些到达的人立即从帽子上抽出标签，表明他们是候选人的朋友还是敌人。虽然严格来说，双方都不知道对方的立场，但在三天紧张的时间里，演员们将练习他们的声音、感觉、特权，在一个场景中，还会练习刺客的冲动。就像你听到的那些故事一样，人们被邀请到监狱里度过一个周末，有些人是监狱里的鸟，有些人是狱卒，他们以精神错乱的热情扮演他们的角色加德纳岛上的居民也以狂躁的强度表演他们各自的角色。当我能够客观地看待梅德斯通事件时，我不禁将其视为60年代最终崩溃的证据。这部电影体现了放纵到精神危险的程度。然而，这部电影作为社会学宣言经受住了时间的考验。切到你的真实，出于某种原因，在准备电影的过程中，父母中的一方或双方决定带着家人一起去是个好主意。让孩子们享受户外的乐趣，而长辈们则看电影或一些这样的想法一定是在他们的脑海中过滤过的。于是，我的姐姐们丹妮尔、伊丽莎白、凯特、弟弟斯蒂芬和我自己也跑进了漩涡。我们很快发现自己不知不觉地成为了剧组的一员，被拍摄成在岛上田野里游荡的小天使。但这就是田园诗般的结束。…
{"title":"Overexposed: My First Taste of Filmmaking","authors":"M. Mailer","doi":"10.5040/9781501325540.CH-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501325540.CH-012","url":null,"abstract":"MY FATHER, NORMAN MAILER, once wrote that film exists somewhere between memory and dream. We recall a film--a good film--the way we recall our memories: fragments crystallized in our minds as visuals of a dream (or a nightmare)--points of light dredged up from our subconscious. I experienced my first taste of filmmaking when I was five years old. I was unwittingly a glorified extra--a day player in the parlance of the biz--and had my debut as a witness to the near death of my father at the murderous hands of Rip Torn. The film was Maidstone, the third and final attempt at underground filmmaking--cinema verite style-- that my dad attempted in the late Sixties. The cast was comprised of friends, ex-wives, sports and movie stars, and of course a few gangsters thrown in for good measure portraying some warped and far out version of themselves--persona extensions on steroids-if you will. They were summoned to Gardiners Island--a bucolic piece of land somewhere off the coast of the Hamptons--to vow their allegiance or disaffection of a certain Norman T. Kingsley (portrayed by who else), who happened to be a retired porn director running for President of the United States. Why not, after all? Qualifications for higher office being what they are you might argue that it was a prescient conceit. Those who arrived immediately drew tags from a hat identifying whether they became friend or foe to the candidacy. Though technically neither side knew the other's position, over three strenuous days the cast would exercise their voices, feelings, prerogatives and, in one case, an assassin's impulse. And like those stories you hear of people being invited to spend a weekend in jail, some as jail birds, others as the jailers, who take to their role with psychotic zeal so too did the denizens on Gardiner's act out their respective parts with manic intensity. I can't help but look at Maidstone--when I can look at it all objectively--as a testament to why the Sixties ultimately imploded. The movie embodies indulgence to the point of mental hazard. And yet the film stands the test of time as a sociological statement. Cutting to yours truly, for some reason in the midst of preparation for the film, one or both parents decided it was a good idea to bring the family along. Let the kids enjoy the great outdoors while the elders make a movie or some such thought must have filtered through their minds. So into the vortex trotted my older sisters, Danielle, Elizabeth, Kate, my younger brother, Stephen, and myself. We soon found ourselves unwittingly part of the cast, filmed as cherubs wandering through the fields of the island. But that's where the idyll ended. …","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132273897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-09-22DOI: 10.5040/9781501325540.CH-010
G. Rhodes
Films exist in many places. A film is in a reel stored inside of a can. A motion picture is encoded onto a shiny DVD that sparkles like a rainbow when held up to the light. But at the same time, those are just objects that contain films. We experience films not by staring at a reel or at a disc, but by gazing elsewhere, at a screen. But even the theatre or television screen is not a film's permanent home, certainly not in the same way that a frame provides to a painting. No, at best it is a fragile, temporal relationship, with the film bounded by opening credits and fades-to-black. The film exists for a short while, until it reaches The End and the screen goes dark. That is not to say that we don't try to provide frames for our cinematic paintings. We attempt to fix them in our memories, honing in, for example, on particular scenes that we like to recall, over and over again. Lines of dialogue as well, even when the memory that we create constitutes something different from our original experience with the film. Humphrey Bogart's Rick never actually said, "Play, It Again Sam" in Casablanca (1943), but he certainly did--and continues to do--in our cultural memory. But perhaps our favorite way to combat the temporal is to hinge particular adjectives onto films, as if a single word or two can encapsulate what they are. Movie X is "heartwarming," it is "uplifting," it is--like so many other films before it, of course--"inspirational." By contrast, Movie Y is "bold" and "daring" and "original." And then of course there is the darker underbelly of cinema, as exemplified by Movie Z, which is "shocking" and "graphic" and--egad--"titillating." Running time runs, but we can screech the experience to a halt with such adjectives, equally suitable for use in our own conversations as they are for the text on movie posters and videotape boxes. If most films exist (at least when they are not being viewed) as adjectives, I would argue that a small number are verbs. They just are. In some cases, like Bob Quinn's Poitin (1979) and the Coen Brother's No Country for Old Men (2007), perhaps it is because they are so unadorned, so unvarnished, so raw, that they require no flowery adjectives. In other cases, ranging from The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to Citizen Kane (1941) and A Bout de souffle (1960), they exist as if they have always existed. And they exert a gravitational pull, causing so many other films to orbit around them, tied irrevocably to the gravity of their influence, which is so strong as to just be. And then, well, there is Norman Mailer's 1970 film Maidstone. He directed the film and starred in it, both as the fictional character Norman T. Kingsley, a movie director who runs for President of the United States, and as Norman Mailer, playing himself as the director of Maidstone. After limited engagements in 1971, the film essentially disappeared from sight until a DVD was released in France in 2006, which was followe
电影存在于许多地方。胶卷装在一个卷轴里，储存在一个罐子里。电影被编码到一张闪闪发光的DVD上，在灯光下闪闪发光，就像彩虹一样。但与此同时，这些只是包含电影的物体。我们不是通过盯着卷轴或碟片来体验电影，而是通过盯着其他地方，盯着屏幕。但即使是剧院或电视屏幕也不是电影的永久家园，当然也不像画框对绘画的作用那样大。不，这充其量是一种脆弱的、短暂的关系，影片只局限于片头字幕和逐渐变黑。影片存在了很短的时间，直到影片结束，屏幕变暗。这并不是说我们不尝试为我们的电影绘画提供框架。我们试图将它们固定在我们的记忆中，例如，我们一遍又一遍地回忆我们喜欢回忆的特定场景。对白也是如此，即使我们创造的记忆与我们最初对电影的体验有所不同。亨弗莱·鲍嘉饰演的里克在《卡萨布兰卡》(1943)中从来没有说过“玩吧，山姆”，但在我们的文化记忆中，他确实说过——而且还在继续说。但也许我们最喜欢的对抗时间的方式是将特定的形容词与电影联系起来，就好像一两个词可以概括它们是什么一样。电影X“温暖人心”，“振奋人心”，当然，就像之前的许多电影一样，它“鼓舞人心”。相比之下，电影Y“大胆”、“大胆”、“原创”。当然，还有电影的阴暗面，比如《Z电影》(Movie Z)，它“令人震惊”、“生动”，而且——哎呀——“撩人”。时间在流逝，但我们可以用这些形容词把我们的经历戛然而止，它们既适用于我们自己的对话，也适用于电影海报和录像带盒上的文字。如果大多数电影以形容词的形式存在(至少当它们不被观看的时候)，我认为有一小部分电影是动词。他们就是这样。在某些情况下，比如鲍勃·奎因(Bob Quinn)的《波伊汀》(Poitin, 1979)和科恩兄弟的《老无所依》(Coen Brother, 2007)，也许正是因为它们如此质朴，如此未经修饰，如此原始，所以不需要华丽的形容词。从1903年的《火车大劫案》和1919年的《卡利加利医生的内阁》，到1941年的《公民凯恩》和1960年的《蛋松饼》，这些故事都像一直存在一样存在着。它们产生了一种引力，导致许多其他电影围绕着它们旋转，不可逆转地与它们的影响力捆绑在一起，这种引力是如此之强，以至于。然后是诺曼·梅勒1970年的电影《梅德斯通》。他导演并主演了这部电影，既扮演了虚构的角色诺曼·t·金斯利(Norman T. Kingsley)，一位竞选美国总统的电影导演，也扮演了诺曼·梅勒(Norman Mailer)，他本人是《梅德斯通》的导演。在1971年的有限放映之后，这部电影基本上从人们的视线中消失了，直到2006年在法国发行了DVD，之后又进行了一些公开放映，比如2007年在林肯中心的沃尔特里德剧院。此后的三十多年里，梅德斯通没有出现在银幕上的机会;它的运行时间停止了，只有文字。尽管梅勒坚持认为电影这种媒介“曾经脱离了文字”，但梅德斯通在其中断期间所依靠的文字在很大程度上是他自己的(《课程》第232页)。梅勒1971年在《新美国评论》(New American Review)上发表的文章《电影制作课程》(A Course on Film-Making)描述了他拍摄梅德斯通背后的理论。同年，这篇文章的一个略有不同的版本出现在他的书《梅德斯通:一个谜》中，书中还印了电影的对话和舞台指示，因为梅德斯通没有拍摄剧本，所以是在事实发生后转录的。当然，有很多词，但有一个词反复出现。不是形容词，甚至不是动词，而是一个名词:对诺曼·梅勒来说，梅德斯通是一个“突袭”。更具体地说，它“类似于一场军事行动，类似于突击队对现实本质的突袭——[参与制作电影的人]将通过袭击本身发现现实的位置，就像一队游骑兵可能会知道敌人不是在他们入侵的第一个城镇，而是在另一个城镇”(《课程》201)。…
{"title":"Commando Raids on the Nature of Reality","authors":"G. Rhodes","doi":"10.5040/9781501325540.CH-010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501325540.CH-010","url":null,"abstract":"Films exist in many places. A film is in a reel stored inside of a can. A motion picture is encoded onto a shiny DVD that sparkles like a rainbow when held up to the light. But at the same time, those are just objects that contain films. We experience films not by staring at a reel or at a disc, but by gazing elsewhere, at a screen. But even the theatre or television screen is not a film's permanent home, certainly not in the same way that a frame provides to a painting. No, at best it is a fragile, temporal relationship, with the film bounded by opening credits and fades-to-black. The film exists for a short while, until it reaches The End and the screen goes dark. That is not to say that we don't try to provide frames for our cinematic paintings. We attempt to fix them in our memories, honing in, for example, on particular scenes that we like to recall, over and over again. Lines of dialogue as well, even when the memory that we create constitutes something different from our original experience with the film. Humphrey Bogart's Rick never actually said, \"Play, It Again Sam\" in Casablanca (1943), but he certainly did--and continues to do--in our cultural memory. But perhaps our favorite way to combat the temporal is to hinge particular adjectives onto films, as if a single word or two can encapsulate what they are. Movie X is \"heartwarming,\" it is \"uplifting,\" it is--like so many other films before it, of course--\"inspirational.\" By contrast, Movie Y is \"bold\" and \"daring\" and \"original.\" And then of course there is the darker underbelly of cinema, as exemplified by Movie Z, which is \"shocking\" and \"graphic\" and--egad--\"titillating.\" Running time runs, but we can screech the experience to a halt with such adjectives, equally suitable for use in our own conversations as they are for the text on movie posters and videotape boxes. If most films exist (at least when they are not being viewed) as adjectives, I would argue that a small number are verbs. They just are. In some cases, like Bob Quinn's Poitin (1979) and the Coen Brother's No Country for Old Men (2007), perhaps it is because they are so unadorned, so unvarnished, so raw, that they require no flowery adjectives. In other cases, ranging from The Great Train Robbery (1903) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to Citizen Kane (1941) and A Bout de souffle (1960), they exist as if they have always existed. And they exert a gravitational pull, causing so many other films to orbit around them, tied irrevocably to the gravity of their influence, which is so strong as to just be. And then, well, there is Norman Mailer's 1970 film Maidstone. He directed the film and starred in it, both as the fictional character Norman T. Kingsley, a movie director who runs for President of the United States, and as Norman Mailer, playing himself as the director of Maidstone. After limited engagements in 1971, the film essentially disappeared from sight until a DVD was released in France in 2006, which was followe","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129662106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-09-22DOI: 10.5040/9781501325540.CH-007
Norman Mailer
This essay appeared in Existential Errands (Boston, Little Brown, 1972.) It was first published in Esquire, December 1967, under the title "Some Dirt in the Talk: A Candid History of an Existential Movie Called Wild 90." Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate. 1. ON THE THEORY The company, jaded and exhausted, happily or unhappily sexed-out after five days and nights of movie-making and balling in midnight beds and pools, had been converted to a bunch of enforced existentialists by the making of the film. There is no other philosophical word which will apply to the condition of being an actor who has never acted before, finding himself in a strange place with a thoroughgoing swap of strangers and familiars for bedfellows, no script, and a story which suggests that the leading man is a fit and appropriate target for assassination. Since many of the actors were not without their freaks, their kinks, or old clarion calls to violence, and since the word of the Collective Rumor was that more than one of the men was packing a piece, a real piece with bullets, these five days and nights had been the advanced course in existentialism. Nobody knew what was going to happen, but for one hundred and twenty hours the conviction had been growing that if the warning system of one's senses had been worth anything in the past, something was most certainly going to happen before the film was out. Indeed on several separate occasions, it seemed nearly to happen. A dwarf almost drowned in a pool, a fight had taken place, then a bad fight, and on the night before at a climactic party two hours of the most intense potential for violence had been filmed, yet nothing commensurate had happened. The company was now in that state of hangover, breath foul with swallowed curses and congestions of the instincts, which comes to prize-fight fans when a big night, long awaited, ends as a lackluster and lumbering waltz. Not that the party had been a failure while it was being filmed. The tension of the party was memorable in the experience of many. But, finally, nothing happened. So, at this point next day in the filming of Maidstone, on the lazy afternoon which followed the night of the party, the director had come to the erroneous conclusion his movie was done--even though the film was still continuing in the collective mind of some working photographers before whom the director was yet to get hit on the head by a hammer wielded by his best actor, and would respond by biting the best actor on the ear, a fight to give him a whole new conception of his movie. What a pity to remind ourselves of these violent facts, for they encourage interest in a narrative which will not be presented in a hurry and then only a little, and that after an inquiry into the director's real interest which is (less bloody and more philosophical) the possible real nature of film--not an easy discussion since the director has already found a most special way of making movies. When he be
{"title":"A Course in Film-Making","authors":"Norman Mailer","doi":"10.5040/9781501325540.CH-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501325540.CH-007","url":null,"abstract":"This essay appeared in Existential Errands (Boston, Little Brown, 1972.) It was first published in Esquire, December 1967, under the title \"Some Dirt in the Talk: A Candid History of an Existential Movie Called Wild 90.\" Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate. 1. ON THE THEORY The company, jaded and exhausted, happily or unhappily sexed-out after five days and nights of movie-making and balling in midnight beds and pools, had been converted to a bunch of enforced existentialists by the making of the film. There is no other philosophical word which will apply to the condition of being an actor who has never acted before, finding himself in a strange place with a thoroughgoing swap of strangers and familiars for bedfellows, no script, and a story which suggests that the leading man is a fit and appropriate target for assassination. Since many of the actors were not without their freaks, their kinks, or old clarion calls to violence, and since the word of the Collective Rumor was that more than one of the men was packing a piece, a real piece with bullets, these five days and nights had been the advanced course in existentialism. Nobody knew what was going to happen, but for one hundred and twenty hours the conviction had been growing that if the warning system of one's senses had been worth anything in the past, something was most certainly going to happen before the film was out. Indeed on several separate occasions, it seemed nearly to happen. A dwarf almost drowned in a pool, a fight had taken place, then a bad fight, and on the night before at a climactic party two hours of the most intense potential for violence had been filmed, yet nothing commensurate had happened. The company was now in that state of hangover, breath foul with swallowed curses and congestions of the instincts, which comes to prize-fight fans when a big night, long awaited, ends as a lackluster and lumbering waltz. Not that the party had been a failure while it was being filmed. The tension of the party was memorable in the experience of many. But, finally, nothing happened. So, at this point next day in the filming of Maidstone, on the lazy afternoon which followed the night of the party, the director had come to the erroneous conclusion his movie was done--even though the film was still continuing in the collective mind of some working photographers before whom the director was yet to get hit on the head by a hammer wielded by his best actor, and would respond by biting the best actor on the ear, a fight to give him a whole new conception of his movie. What a pity to remind ourselves of these violent facts, for they encourage interest in a narrative which will not be presented in a hurry and then only a little, and that after an inquiry into the director's real interest which is (less bloody and more philosophical) the possible real nature of film--not an easy discussion since the director has already found a most special way of making movies. When he be","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"61 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120919633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-09-22DOI: 10.5040/9781501325540.ch-002
Norman Mailer
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This essay appeared in Existential Errands (Boston, Little Brown, i972). It was first published in New American Review, No. 12 is (August 1971) and reprinted with small changes a few months later in Maidstone: A Mystery (New York: New American Library, 1971). Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate. Wild 90 is the name of a full-length underground movie which a few of us, soon to be cited, filmed on four consecutive nights in March this year. It was done in 16-millimeter and recorded on magnetic sound tape, and since the raw stock costs of processing 16-millimeter sound and film run about thirty cents a foot or ten dollars a minute of shooting, we shot only two and a half hours in all, or $1,500 worth of film. Obviously we couldn't afford to shoot more. Still, for reasons one may yet be able to elucidate, the two and a half hours were not so very bad, and from them was extracted a feature film which runs for ninety minutes. It is a very odd film, indeed I know no moving picture quite like it since there are times when Wild 90 seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on Little Caesar with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to Naked Lunch or Why Are We in Vietnam? It has the most repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made for public or even underground consumption, and so half of the ladies are fascinated because it is the first time in their life they have had an opportunity to appreciate how soldiers might talk to each other in a barracks or what big-city cowboys might find to chat about at street corners. But then the ladies are not the only sex to be polarized by Wild 90. While the reactions of men in the audience are more unpredictable, a rough rule of thumb presents itself--bona fide tough guys, invited for nothing, usually laugh their heads off at the film; white-collar workers and intellectual technicians of the communications industries also invited for nothing tend to regard the picture in a vault of silence. All the while we were cutting Wild 90, we would try to have a preview once a week. Since the projection room was small, audiences were kept to ten, twelve, or fifteen people. That is an odd number to see a film. It is a few too many to watch with the freedom to move about and talk aloud that you get from watching television; it is on the other hand a painful number too small to feel the anonymity of a movie audience. Therefore, reactions from preview night to preview night were extreme. We had banquet filmings when an audience would start to laugh in the first minute and never stop--other nights not a sound of happiness could be heard for the first forty minutes--embarrassing to a producer who thought just yesterday that he had a comedy on his hands. Finally we had a formula: get the hard guys in, get the experts out. That makes sense. There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the Hilt--for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be toug
{"title":"Some Dirt in the Talk","authors":"Norman Mailer","doi":"10.5040/9781501325540.ch-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501325540.ch-002","url":null,"abstract":"[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This essay appeared in Existential Errands (Boston, Little Brown, i972). It was first published in New American Review, No. 12 is (August 1971) and reprinted with small changes a few months later in Maidstone: A Mystery (New York: New American Library, 1971). Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate. Wild 90 is the name of a full-length underground movie which a few of us, soon to be cited, filmed on four consecutive nights in March this year. It was done in 16-millimeter and recorded on magnetic sound tape, and since the raw stock costs of processing 16-millimeter sound and film run about thirty cents a foot or ten dollars a minute of shooting, we shot only two and a half hours in all, or $1,500 worth of film. Obviously we couldn't afford to shoot more. Still, for reasons one may yet be able to elucidate, the two and a half hours were not so very bad, and from them was extracted a feature film which runs for ninety minutes. It is a very odd film, indeed I know no moving picture quite like it since there are times when Wild 90 seems close to nothing so much as the Marx Brothers doing improvisations on Little Caesar with the addition of a free run of obscenity equal to Naked Lunch or Why Are We in Vietnam? It has the most repetitive pervasive obscenity of any film ever made for public or even underground consumption, and so half of the ladies are fascinated because it is the first time in their life they have had an opportunity to appreciate how soldiers might talk to each other in a barracks or what big-city cowboys might find to chat about at street corners. But then the ladies are not the only sex to be polarized by Wild 90. While the reactions of men in the audience are more unpredictable, a rough rule of thumb presents itself--bona fide tough guys, invited for nothing, usually laugh their heads off at the film; white-collar workers and intellectual technicians of the communications industries also invited for nothing tend to regard the picture in a vault of silence. All the while we were cutting Wild 90, we would try to have a preview once a week. Since the projection room was small, audiences were kept to ten, twelve, or fifteen people. That is an odd number to see a film. It is a few too many to watch with the freedom to move about and talk aloud that you get from watching television; it is on the other hand a painful number too small to feel the anonymity of a movie audience. Therefore, reactions from preview night to preview night were extreme. We had banquet filmings when an audience would start to laugh in the first minute and never stop--other nights not a sound of happiness could be heard for the first forty minutes--embarrassing to a producer who thought just yesterday that he had a comedy on his hands. Finally we had a formula: get the hard guys in, get the experts out. That makes sense. There is hardly a guy alive who is not an actor to the Hilt--for the simplest of reasons. He cannot be toug","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128310585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This address was delivered at the Hopwood Awards ceremonies at the University of Michigan, April 1984. It was first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 24 (Summer 1985). It was later reprinted in Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures. Nicholas Delbanco, ed. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1990. Mailer reprinted a truncated version of the essay in The Spooky Art (2003) 67-73. Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate. There's nothing more boring than a speaker who starts to talk about a writing award and quickly reveals that he knows nothing about it. But it so happens that the Hopwood Awards really do have a well-deserved fame because they were the first significant college literary awards in the country. In the years when I went to Harvard, from 1939 to 1943, we always used to hear about them and wish we had awards of that sort at Harvard, at least those of us who were certain we were going to be writers. In 1946, the year I got out of the Army, I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and in the same brownstone, which had only four apartments in it, lived Arthur Miller. I soon learned from his and my friend Norman Rosten that Miller had won a Hopwood Award. That was the first thing I knew about him. He had a play on Broadway that year called All My Sons and that was the year he was writing Death of a Salesman and I was writing The Naked and the Dead. We used to meet occasionally in the hall when we went down to get our mail. Those days Miller was a shy man and I was fairly shy myself and we would just mutter a few words to each other and try to be pleasant and then go our separate ways. I think I can speak with authority about Miller's reaction, I know I can about my own: each of us would walk away and say to himself, "That other guy, he ain't going to amount to nothin." It's an anecdote about another writer that introduces my talk today. Kurt Vonnegut and I are friendly with one another, but wary. There was a period when we used to go out together a great deal because our wives liked each other and Kurt and I would sit there like bookends. We would be terribly careful with one another; we both knew the huge cost of a literary feud so we certainly didn't want to argue. On the other hand neither of us would be caught dead saying to the other, "Gee, I liked your last book" and then be met with a silence because the party of the second part could not reciprocate. So we would talk about anything else, we would talk about Las Vegas or the Galapagos Islands. We only had one literary conversation and that was one night in New York. Kurt looked up and sighed, "Well, I finished my novel today and it like to killed me." When Kurt is feeling heartfelt he speaks in an old Indiana accent which I will do my best to reproduce. His wife said, "Oh Kurt, you always say that whenever you finish a book" and he replied, "Well, whenever I finish a book I do say it and it is always true and it gets more true and this
这篇演讲是1984年4月在密歇根大学举行的霍普伍德奖颁奖典礼上发表的。它首次发表在《密歇根季刊评论》第24卷(1985年夏季)。它后来被转载在《说到写作:霍普伍德演讲选集》中。尼古拉斯·德尔班科编，安娜堡。密歇根大学出版社，1990。梅勒在《幽灵艺术》(2003)67-73中转载了这篇文章的删节版。经诺曼·梅勒遗产管理公司许可转载。没有什么比一个演讲者开始谈论一个写作奖，但很快就暴露出他对此一无所知更无聊的了。但碰巧的是，霍普伍德奖确实名不符实，因为它是美国第一个重要的大学文学奖。从1939年到1943年，我在哈佛读书的那些年里，我们总是听说他们，希望我们能在哈佛获得这样的奖项，至少我们这些确定自己会成为作家的人是这样。1946年，也就是我从军队退伍的那一年，我住在布鲁克林高地(Brooklyn Heights)的一栋褐砂石房子里。在这栋只有四套公寓的褐砂石房子里，住着阿瑟·米勒(Arthur Miller)。我很快从他和我的朋友诺曼·罗斯顿那里得知米勒获得了霍普伍德奖。这是我了解他的第一件事。那一年他在百老汇上演了一部戏剧《我的儿子们》，那一年他在写《推销员之死》，而我在写《裸者与死者》。过去我们下楼去取信的时候，偶尔会在大厅里见面。那些日子里，米勒是个害羞的人，我自己也相当害羞，我们只是互相咕哝几句，尽量表现得愉快些，然后就分道扬镳了。我想我可以很权威地谈论米勒的反应，我知道我可以谈论我自己的反应:我们每个人都会走开，对自己说，“另一个人，他不会有什么成就。”我今天演讲的引子是另一位作家。库尔特·冯内古特和我关系很好，但也很谨慎。曾经有一段时间，我们经常一起出去，因为我们的妻子都很喜欢对方，我和库尔特会像书挡一样坐在一起。我们会非常小心地对待彼此;我们都知道一场文学上的争执会付出巨大的代价，所以我们当然不想争吵。另一方面，我们都不会对对方说:“嘿，我喜欢你的上一本书”，然后因为第二部分的一方无法回报而陷入沉默。我们可以谈谈其他地方，我们可以谈谈拉斯维加斯或加拉帕戈斯群岛。我们只谈过一次文学，那是在纽约的一个晚上。库尔特抬起头，叹了口气:“好吧，我今天完成了我的小说，它好像要了我的命。”当库尔特发自内心的时候，他会用一种古老的印第安纳口音说话，我会尽力模仿。他的妻子说:“哦，库尔特，你每次写完一本书都会这么说。”他回答说:“我每次写完一本书都会这么说，这句话总是对的，而且越来越对，最后一句最让我伤心。”在我谈论书籍杀死你的方式之前，我想告诉你最后一个让我着迷了很长时间的故事。这个故事我想了好几年，就在前几天，当我想到它的时候，我想到了一个新的想法。所以我会用我以前讲故事的方式讲给你听，然后再加入新的想法。据说，著名画家罗伯特·劳森伯格(Robert Rauschenberg)曾收到威廉·德·库宁(Willem de Kooning)赠送的一幅粉彩。劳森伯格，在德库宁的允许下，擦掉了这幅蜡笔，然后签了名，德库宁的蜡笔罗伯特劳森伯格擦掉了，然后他卖掉了它。坦率地说，这个故事触动了我一半的心灵，因为我想，这里有一些深刻的东西，但我无法掌握它。然后我灵光一现。我说:“当然，劳森伯格说的是艺术家和金融家有同样的权利印钱。钱不过是印在空虚上的权威”，说完这个故事，我就心满意足了，直到有一天我想，等一下，也许买蜡笔的人既不是一个赌徒，也不是一个在绘画中很讲究时髦、知道自己会从中获利的人。…
{"title":"The Hazards and Sources of Writing","authors":"Norman Mailer","doi":"10.2307/3824325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/3824325","url":null,"abstract":"This address was delivered at the Hopwood Awards ceremonies at the University of Michigan, April 1984. It was first published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 24 (Summer 1985). It was later reprinted in Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures. Nicholas Delbanco, ed. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1990. Mailer reprinted a truncated version of the essay in The Spooky Art (2003) 67-73. Reprinted with the permission of The Norman Mailer Estate. There's nothing more boring than a speaker who starts to talk about a writing award and quickly reveals that he knows nothing about it. But it so happens that the Hopwood Awards really do have a well-deserved fame because they were the first significant college literary awards in the country. In the years when I went to Harvard, from 1939 to 1943, we always used to hear about them and wish we had awards of that sort at Harvard, at least those of us who were certain we were going to be writers. In 1946, the year I got out of the Army, I lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and in the same brownstone, which had only four apartments in it, lived Arthur Miller. I soon learned from his and my friend Norman Rosten that Miller had won a Hopwood Award. That was the first thing I knew about him. He had a play on Broadway that year called All My Sons and that was the year he was writing Death of a Salesman and I was writing The Naked and the Dead. We used to meet occasionally in the hall when we went down to get our mail. Those days Miller was a shy man and I was fairly shy myself and we would just mutter a few words to each other and try to be pleasant and then go our separate ways. I think I can speak with authority about Miller's reaction, I know I can about my own: each of us would walk away and say to himself, \"That other guy, he ain't going to amount to nothin.\" It's an anecdote about another writer that introduces my talk today. Kurt Vonnegut and I are friendly with one another, but wary. There was a period when we used to go out together a great deal because our wives liked each other and Kurt and I would sit there like bookends. We would be terribly careful with one another; we both knew the huge cost of a literary feud so we certainly didn't want to argue. On the other hand neither of us would be caught dead saying to the other, \"Gee, I liked your last book\" and then be met with a silence because the party of the second part could not reciprocate. So we would talk about anything else, we would talk about Las Vegas or the Galapagos Islands. We only had one literary conversation and that was one night in New York. Kurt looked up and sighed, \"Well, I finished my novel today and it like to killed me.\" When Kurt is feeling heartfelt he speaks in an old Indiana accent which I will do my best to reproduce. His wife said, \"Oh Kurt, you always say that whenever you finish a book\" and he replied, \"Well, whenever I finish a book I do say it and it is always true and it gets more true and this ","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"85 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1990-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131700222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IN 1963, FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF THE NAKED AND the Dead (1948), Norman Mailer discussed Barbary Shore and E. M. Forster in his Paris Review interview with Steven Marcus. "Forster," said the forty-year-old Mailer, "after all, had a developed view of the world; I did not. I think I must have felt at the time as if I would never be able to write in the third person until I developed a coherent view of life. " I This of course suggests that the twenty-five-year-old author who wrote The Naked and the Dead in the third person had such a view. Mailer's remarks in another interview, twelve years earlier, imply that the literary influence that most contributed to his confidence in presenting his own "coherent view of life" in his first novel was Moby-Dick:
{"title":"AHAB AND ISHMAEL AT WAR: THE PRESENCE OF MOBY-DICK IN THE NAKED AND THE DEAD","authors":"B. Horn","doi":"10.2307/2712688","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/2712688","url":null,"abstract":"IN 1963, FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF THE NAKED AND the Dead (1948), Norman Mailer discussed Barbary Shore and E. M. Forster in his Paris Review interview with Steven Marcus. \"Forster,\" said the forty-year-old Mailer, \"after all, had a developed view of the world; I did not. I think I must have felt at the time as if I would never be able to write in the third person until I developed a coherent view of life. \" I This of course suggests that the twenty-five-year-old author who wrote The Naked and the Dead in the third person had such a view. Mailer's remarks in another interview, twelve years earlier, imply that the literary influence that most contributed to his confidence in presenting his own \"coherent view of life\" in his first novel was Moby-Dick:","PeriodicalId":259119,"journal":{"name":"The Mailer Review","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1982-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128024380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：