Yes! Thank you for including Ryan Ruby's book, and Yoko Tawada!

Sounds like revenge for the State not releasing Tina Peters.

Wow, he wants to play the "stolen land" game?

Maybe he pretends to be a climate denier. Maybe we know why he and his ilk want Greenland. Maybe the trick is, he shuts down NCAR to make sure the rest of us don’t know what’s happening. It won’t work. What’s happening will be quite evident, as it is already.

Nooooooo!

Repeat repeat repeat: Opposition to the government of Israel, opposition even to that government's version Zionism, is not the same as anti-Semitism. By that definition, millions of Jewish people are anti-Semites.

www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Thank you.

Feels personal. I mean, my gosh, as a seven-year-old on vacation in NYC, I saw Mailer in Central Park, and pointed him out to my parents. Yet, I can't tell you how whole-heartedly I cheered, still a pre-teen, when Germaine Greer (also questionable on some matters, now) beat him in various debates.

Thanks, Jeff. I have long-nurtured reflexes against these authors and cannot claim expertise in critiquing their skills. I remember how deeply offended I felt, reading each and all of them and now feel accompanied by others who have helped me understand the inseparability of style and substance.

Also, I’m not so sure I want to privilege “style” over content. Actually, I’m sure I do not.

I’m simply aping what my elders have taught me to say, and that I must pay homage to the style of Mailer, to the style of Updike, to the style of Hemingway. I know these are very different styles, but I take exception to each and every one of them.

Executioner's Song makes for an exception, in that the women express memory and complex thought. A real change for Mailer. However, his voyeuristic fascination with male-on-female violence always puts me off.

I apologize for over-reacting. Mailer has been on my do-not-read list for a long time.

As you say, so much of that depended on work done by another. I think Mailer was a master stylist, like Updike, and, like Updike, his violent, misogynist worldview inevitably slinks through his narratives.

Mailer's work built on that of others', too. He tends to receive so much of the adulation, large public personality as he was. Mailer's Armies of the Night served to exercise his pugnacious ego. His fictional characters are like dumpster-dipped cardboard. I think John Hersey deserves more credit.

Sometimes a poem comes along and I think, what else is there to say?