Norman Mailer and The Mailer Review are featured in today’s St. Pete Times:
At 84, prolific author Norman Mailer shows no quit. The Mailer Review, a new literary journal edited by a USF professor, takes a closer look at the man and his work.
They were supposed to use my photo, but didn’t. The AP one is good, too.
The Paris Review published my photo of Norman Mailer. It was taken during the Society‘s annual conference in October 2006. The journal actually credits me, not under the photo, but on the contributors page in the back (180). It would have been ultra cool to have had my name under his photo. Still, pretty darn cool.
What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
Prayer. Of all the lofty practices, it is the most abused. Church professionals lead the scurry crew who profit from pushing prayer.
From a Proust Questionnaire answered by Norman Mailer in Vanity Fair. Thanks for the links, Ray. Here’s another (I can’t resist):
Which living person do you most despise?
Well, it used to be Ronald Reagan. He was the most ignorant president we ever had. Now George W. has appropriated his seat.
By now, anyone who is interested knows that American novelist Norman Mailer has published a new novel: The Castle in the Forest. What you may not know is that I was mentioned in a recent The Tampa Tribune article about Mailer, his new novel, and the upcoming premiere edition of The Mailer Review. The TBO article has been removed for now; apparently it was posed too soon. I’ll have an update when the real article is posted next week.
I’ve known about these for several days, but just managed to get around to posting about them. In the vein of the famous Hemingway six-word story (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”), Wired asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to give it a try. Here are my favorites:
This is a test of Picasa Web Albums. I might begin to use it for my professional images, rather than Flickr’s free account. Maybe.
While “José Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” calls into question the validity of extraterrestrial abduction, sightings, and existence, it nevertheless confirms the reality of its visual iconography in the popular imagination of our age. There remains a perpetual debate about the literal existence of supernatural entities and aliens, but when turning to William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum,” the manifestation of alternate, possible realities becomes a bit more uncertain and indeterminate, if that’s possible. While many critics suggest that “Gernsback” metafictively comments on the need for change in sf, from the utopian visions of the golden age of science fiction to a more socially critical and culturally conscious expression, others suggest that it and the collective dreams that it embodies plays a continued role in what Bruce Sterling calls a modern reform of science fiction (Sterling xv). Thomas A. Bredehoft (quoting Gibson quoting the Velvet Underground) uses the phrase “worlds behind us” to make evident the cultural and intellectual history that manifests “as the hidden underpinnings of our most modern-looking, modern-seeming machines” (Bredehoft 252). Gibson himself has reminded us several times that the computer itself is only a Gestalt of Victorian mechanisms packaged into a plastic box — a box that despite the stylish designs of Apple Computer’s candy colors and cubes retains its mechanical link to the past with spinning mechanisms and hard wiring (Trench). The hard wiring of “Gernsback” might be explained away by semiotic ghosts, but, in a truly science-fictional theory, they might represent breeches by quantum realities that continued to exist and evolve even though they were passed up in the waning days of Gernsback by a narrowing view of reality and possibility. Certain paths were chosen — Hitler’s rise to power precipitated the post-holocaust cold war — so the images and desires of “I.G.Y.” remain only romanticized fictions, or do they?
© 2010 Gerald R. Lucas. All Rights Reserved.
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