Norman Mailer died two weeks ago

[stilltrucking]

Bohonato

Mailer saw little combat in the war and finished his military career as a cook in occupied Japan. But his wartime experience, and in particular a single patrol he made on the island of Leyte, became the raw material for "The Naked and the Dead," the book that put him on the map.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/10/ ... 2#end_main

I never had much interest in Mailer, too macho for me.

Also missing from many mainstream tributes to Mailer was any acknowledgment of his disturbing streak of sexism. Mailer cultivated a “macho” image and declared himself an enemy of the women’s liberation movement. In his rants against feminism, he attempted to justify opposition to birth control, and he blamed the struggle for equality for destroying the “mystery” of sex.


EACH OBITUARY did at least mention The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first and most important novel. It is one of the great antiwar classics in literature and a book that speaks to all activists committed to ending the brutality of wars for empire

Yet The Naked and the Dead is barely known today outside of academic circles--because it challenges the standard assumptions about the Second World War as “the good war,” and unmasks the hidden motives of U.S. involvement.

http://www.ivaw.org/node/2081

I just can't read anymore war novels. I got no interest in war movies either. I am so tired of hearing about good wars, and necessary wars. For all his faults I respect him for challengeg standard assuptions about war. I thought The Naked and The Dead was just another dirty war novel. I remember Vonnegut told a friend that he was writing an anti-war novel (Slaughter House Five) ANd his friend said you might as well write an anti glacier novel. Well it looks like his friend was wrong about that, we are elimnating glaciers. Maybe wars will go the way of glaciers in this brave new world.


I have never read anything by Bukowski except for bits and pieces.

I find it strange that Mailer won two Pulitzer prizes and Vonnegut did not.
Shows you how little I appreciate great literature.

Just curious Bohonato
Have you read The Naked and The Dead?
If you did what did you think of it?

[Totenkopf]

Hah. Sartre worked alongside the Vichy--he was treated like a king by the nazis. He changed his tune after the war: more than a few said he was a collaborator.

(The "Vichy bum" comment referred to Bukowski. OK some of his jottings may entertain a bit (and we even have a copy of some Celine mahsterbatepiece somewhere--Buk loved Celine's writing) but he wasn't exactly some Joycean sort of genius)

Russell wrote things against the fascists, and against Hegel, who arguably laid the blueprint for fascism (and some against Nietzsche as well)--and for communism as well, since Marx also made use of Hegelian errors, er concepts. Really I don't think Russell and positivists were great or noble men and ah have no love for Brits, but in a context (or Hitler, Il Duce, Stalin, etc.) they are not the monsters that some modern leftists claim . Russell--also TS Eliots and Wittgenstein's mentor---opposed mystics so the navel comment not too accurate.

[e_dog]

Like a good sectarian, he Bertrand Rustle opposed mystcism so he could worship Logic (There's is no God but And/Or/Not/IfThen).

Wittgenstein, the truest mystic Britain's shores ever saw wash ashore, since perhaps some Druid priest or other.

Sartre was dissing the Nazis under they noses. Check out The Flies. Thats pretty freakin radical.

how was Bukowski "Vichy", exactly?

Hegel's about as close to Nazis as, say, Aristotle.

TS Eliot, Catholic new age mystic if there ever was one. writer of a few gems. mostly boring hyper scholastic poetry.

[Totenkopf]

Like a good sectarian, he Bertrand Rustle opposed mystcism so he could worship Logic (There's is no God but And/Or/Not/IfThen).

The "logicism" of Russell--and Frege-- may have a certain Platonic element to it, but it's not correct to say he worshipped logic. He held, as did Frege, to a certain anti-psychological view in regards to logical entities (not merely connectives, but argument forms) and to mathematical foundations. But BR was well aware of the anti-platonic aspects of empiricism and natural science as well, and he sounds quite materialist in some later writings, though objecting to the naive material-empiricism of the behaviorists--and marxists for that matter.

Wittgenstein could barely keep up with his mentor in regards to serious philosophical matters. That's one reason he took up the strange anthro-linguistic method of the Philosophical investigations, methinx. The Tractatus is really quite Russellian, even in a bad sense. Ludwig also appears to have been quite mad (not only the petty stuff such as attacking Popper with a fire iron, but possible child abuse--and worse). And LW was more conservative than Russell.

TS Eliot's writing is not my cup of tea, but even TS had a certain respect for Russell, one of his professors at Oxford. And Russell had a certain respect for TS's crazy galpal Viv, and reportedly even goat-phucked her at one point.

(Buk. loved Celine's writing. Celine was Vichy, all the way. Thus Buk loved Vichy writing. I don't really care, but call a spade a spade, and a bum a bum. Sartre sucks shieete. Hegel doesn't, though entirely. I respect GWF Hegel's process thought, and history writing. His metaphysics are interesting if rather abstruse (and religious, really--Der Geist is not some humanistic ego or something), but Hegel had no problem praising gents like Luther, and/or Machiavelli. And he did have a certain love of warfare and nationalism).

[jimboloco]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071210/dickstein
essay | posted November 21, 2007 (December 10, 2007 issue)
The Nijinsky of Ambivalence
Morris Dickstein

In 1967 Norman Mailer went to Washington for the march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. He was joined by 100,000 other Americans. As one of many antiwar demonstrations around the nation, the march might be largely forgotten today had he not written an article about it that took up an entire issue of Harper's and was then expanded into a book, The Armies of the Night, that won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In late October, on the fortieth anniversary of the march, a number of us gathered at Georgetown University to think back on the meaning of the march by reconsidering Mailer's momentous book about it, for it is rare that literature and history--a great writer and a great subject--have been so closely interwoven. Mailer himself had intended to be there as the main speaker, but illness kept him away. He died on November 10, at 84, putting a period to one of the most challenging and unpredictable careers in modern letters.>>>

gee thanks fer yer ab·struse comments toting cup
i gotta go back and thoroughly research this
meanwhile
it's all very entertaining writing
to a poor peasant like me
breathtaking really
ahem

[jimboloco]

imteresting, those vichy french
in vietnam during the japanese occupation, the french colonial administration turned vichy, helped the japanese run the place,
then continued to occupy when the allies ran the japanese off, with viet minh help.

a similar pattern happenned in cuba after the spanish-american war, when "we " defeated the spanish, instead of celebrating the cuban revolutionaries, we kept the entire spanish colonial administration in place and proceeded to establich a neo-colonial enterprise, culminating in our man in havana, batista.

somebody else was vichy
i was vc
still am
a viet cong
buddhist
universalist
empirical mathematics aside
talk to someone in grief about their home state
find some common interests
and connect that with spiritual meanings
what i learned today from a chaplain
a baptist in wooly sackcloth

[e_dog]

you sure are VC

if by that you mean Very Cool.

[mnaz]

Mailer stabbed his wife. Did I mention that?

[jimboloco]

gee thanks wally

deadhead already noted that burroughs shot his wife whilst playing wiliam tell wih a pistol
i suppose mailer and his wife were playing asshole macho basturd and surprised abused woman, tho i don't see how reckless manslaughter is more classy than enraged idiocy

we all dark angels treading
character development

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-The Laughing Heart; Charles Bukowski

i wish i had this one in my pocket back in the 70's, as well as t'other all th way pep-talk
i am printing this out right now!

by th way, i have an invitation to speak at a clearwater, flo high school in a course on the history of the vietnam war, hopefully within the next couple of weeks, found the link in my viet vets agin th war paper, waiting for the form to fill out, maybe another start

http://www.studioeight.tv/phpbb/viewtop ... 5071#75071
Montster's From The Id, page threee

i have thought somewhat about this development stuff versus ego transcendence, and believe that the developmental tasks are true and necessary, trust and autonomy the cornerstones

transcendence is an adult function, but requires a developed psyche to attain this non-attainment state, and does not pre-clude the rational autonomous psyche, but rather compliments or envelopes it

how else could a zen practitioner be a mental health counselor

[the flaming ace]

i seen the naked and the dead
some dead were naked
some were in their finest thread

i seen naked yet alive
i believe i believe
but i never seen a live one
in a body bag

tho i suppose
the private contractors who make such apparral
have dummies to try them on

probably good christian community folk

[Totenkopf]

imteresting, those vichy french
in vietnam during the japanese occupation, the french colonial administration turned vichy, helped the japanese run the place,
then continued to occupy when the allies ran the japanese off, with viet minh help.

Yes, interesting. Also interesting that when one compares even Vichy to like the maoists who replaced 'em, the froggie-imperialists don't seem quite so sinister.

[stilltrucking]

Transcending Mailer
I just never could get interested in Mailer.

Mailer wrote: "The psychopath murders -- if he has the courage -- out of the necessity to purge his violence, for if he cannot empty his hatred, then he cannot love."

"What put the ape in apricot?" "Courage!"

And I always thought I was a coward.

[jimboloco]

no the maoists did not replace the french colonialists
in vietnam
yes they did in cambodia
but were beaten back by the vietnamese
and in laos
the transition to the pathet lao was peaceful

the french colonialists were slave drivers

[stilltrucking]

Ho Chi was in Paris during the Vesaille peace conference, pleading the case for French Indo China. I think that is true. I knew Ho was a marxist but I never thought he was a Maoist. The only Maoists I ever met were two sophomores at the University of Maryland during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the seventies. They thought those red guards had their shit together.

Was Mailer a Maoist?

[e_dog]

Maoism's so sophomoric.

What was Ho Chi? A Minhist?

Minhimalism.