“Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer was, after J.D. Salinger, postwar America’s most famous writer of literary fiction. Today Mailer’s name no longer figures other than sporadically on lists of important postwar writers. It is instructive to recall that in 1959, he counted himself among ‘the strong talents of my generation, those few of us who have wide minds in a narrow overdeveloped time.’ This brash claim was typical of Mailer, and he would have expected nothing less six years after his death than the publication of two or three thousand-page biographies…”
Archives for January 1, 2014
TT: Snapshot
Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd play “Desafinado” on The Perry Como Show in 1962:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
TT: Almanac
“Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden