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a quick hit this morning as i have papers to secure and precious nickels to earn...
arsenal visit aston villa tomorrow morning - morning in the states anyhoo - here's hoping we get back on track. winning the league has to be priority one followed closely by lifting the euro-cup in moscow in may.
off now... here's a little piece by tao lin on the hierarchy of american writers nowadays... definitely something worth a couple minutes of your time.
ta ta.
brickwallboyout.
the lawrence arms (2006)
It doesn't take a big man to knock somebody down
just a little courage to lift him off the ground!
-dropkick murphys, fightstarter karaoke (1998)
yes yes yes, the gunners have been beaten... it was bound to happen eventually. so now all the pundits who have wondered how this very young, very talented team would respond to some adversity will get their answer. in spades i predict. the loss on a cold night in spain was painful.
my feelings in words:
right then.
a good day to all.
brickwallboyout.
mary heilmann, garden study (1998)
I like humanity for being stupid and irresponsible, and I like believing that this condition is incurable, ridiculous, and comical. We are all going to die.
The most caring thing we, as humans, could do for the earth is go away.
i guess at the end of the day we are all the same. skin bones blood shit tears.
vulnerable alive and kicking screaming twisting shouting.
i grow tired of having to think about what i observe though.
serial rapist or chef, we are all the same at base level.
so tired of it.
bad driver. rude shopper. whiner. complainer. liar. cheater.
surely there's some good in me.
i mean you. us. we. them. they.
there is good in all of us, right? just hard to see quite often.
at least she is here. delicate anchor.
keeping THEM at bay. ME at bay.
voices.
ghosts.
people.
why'd that asshole cut me off?
damn.
champions league. sevilla v arsenal. today 1:45 cst.
c'mon you reds!
brickwallboyout.
seth alverson, the goat herder (2006)
worth·less (wûrth'lĭs) adj.
sitting here or there having coffee or leaving some retail death-mart i have noticed a disturbing phenomenon...
a sizeable number of perfectly mobile people getting out of cars (WITH handicapped permits) parked IN handicapped spots... hmmm... perhaps some clarification of the concept is needed for those clearly not bright enough to reach this ever so logical conclusion on their own. ya see
JUST BECAUSE YOUR SECOND-COUSINS NEPHEWS SISTER HAD KNEE SURGERY AND (MAY?) NEED SOME HELP WALKING DISTANCES FOR A TIME... DOES NOT MEAN YOUR WASTE-OF-OXYGEN LAZY ASS CAN OR SHOULD PARK IN AREAS RESERVED FOR THE HANICAPPED.
BEING A STEAMING PILE OF SHIT IS NOT A HANDICAP!
YOU DICKHEAD!
hope everyone had a nice holiday.
brickwallboyout.
francisco goya, may the rope break (1815)
that's right, bullocks with the lot of it... noah cicero is a genius, but he needs real help with proofing / editing his work. bad spelling and grammar is not artsy, it's fucked up! and difficult to stomach.
anyway, all that crap i said about the romance of the "book", book as art object, the touch the feel the smell of books... screw it! to hell with all of it!
i want THIS! real bad. buy it for me. if you love me, even a little, you will buy me one.
or at least a shiny horn for my bicycle.
out.
francesco clemente, sun (1980)
trea·tise /ˈtri
tɪs/ [tree-tis]
–noun
a formal and systematic exposition in writing of the principles of a subject, generally longer and more detailed than an essay.
[Origin: 1300–50; ME tretis < AF tretiz, akin to OF traitier to treat]
obtained noah cicero's treatise yesterday via the good 'ol postman... one can get it free (pdf) or order the right proper paper-and-printed-words vesrion at the link a few words ago. mr cicero is not in a stephen king-like tax bracket. buy the book. i have not yet embraced reading long narratives on the computer. books are wonderous things! beautiful things! they are meant to be held, touched, placed on a shelf. perhaps just the romantic in me. or the collector-of-too-many-things?
no proper football this weekend as all the lads have dispersed to their various national teams for some more ghastly euro 2008 qualifiers and even more ghastly "friendlies". ussa versus south africa... that should be compelling. i'd rather see "w" and mandela arm wrestle.
from the, 'i shit you not' dept...
so mrs brickwall and i are pondering putting our wee daughter in a new (different) school... long story involving crimes against common sense and various tawdry misdemeanors. anyhow, the missus has dismissed one of the prospective new institutions already... not because of the quality of teaching, or the administration, or the programs offered or even the schools location, no... or beloved little one will not be attending kindergarten at said campus because...
the uniform will "itch" her!
long long long sad sad sad ummm... story.
however
i shit you not!
a happy weekend to ya!
brickwallboyoutofhereandstuff.
jean michel basquiat, self portrait (1986)
“I felt something shift to murder in me. I felt that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw, and I liked it.”
-norman mailer
i am swamped with reports to write here... although this is a good thing with regards to the family economy it takes away valuable time from more fulfilling endeavors like, ohhh... blogging, literary intake, web browsing, napping, tv watching, masturbation, freedom to revel in dark-thoughts... you know, important stuff.
anyway, if you are awaiting a new novel from norman mailer. don't. he's dead. as of last saturday (hey, did i not say i've been busy?). so, one might conclude that the last of the great-living-american-writers is now gone. not so, much new and upcoming talented wordsmith's out there. fear not. but he was a titan. probably the last of the fuck-you-all generation. hope not. many quotes about him feature the terms genius and son-of-a-bitch... some feature both. and that's ok.
reading 1 - arsenal 3
joy.
be kind to our language, use it correctly (whenever possible) and use it with the respect and appreciation it so deserves. cretins.
i had something else, but it eludes me.
brickwallboyout.
ps... this should keep you busy till I come up with something...
norman mailer, vienna (2002)
Norman (Kingsley) Mailer (1923-2007)
Innovator of the nonfiction novel, a towering figure in American literature for nearly 60 years. Norman Mailer developed in the 1960s and 1970s a form of journalism, that combined actual events, autobiography, and political commentary with the richness of the novel. (See also Truman Capote and the classic "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood.) Mailer's works always stirred controversy - because of both their stylish nonconformity and his controversial views of American life. The poet Robert Lowell praised him as "the best journalist in America", but what he thought of Mailer's fiction was left open.
'"I decided the only explanation is that God and the Devil are very attentive to people at the summit. I don't know if they stir much in the average man's daily stew, no great sport for spooks, I would suppose, in a ranch house, but do you expect God or the Devil left Lenin and Hitler and Churchill alone? No. They bid for favors and exact revenge. That's why men with power sometimes act so silly."' (from An American Dream, 1965)
Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but he was raised in Brooklyn, New York. Every summer the family went back to Long Branch, where Mailer's grandparents had a small summer hotel. Mailer's father, Isaac Barnett Mailer, was an accountant and businessman. The dominant figure in the family was Mailer's mother, the former Fanny Schneider, worked in a small trucking company.
Mailer's first literary effort was a 250-page story, called 'Invasion From Mars', which he wrote at the age of nine in notebooks, However, it was not until at Harvard, when he wanted to become a writer. In 1939 he graduated from Boys High School and then studied at Harvard University, Cambridge (1939-43), receiving S.B. in aeronautical engineering. In 1941 Mailer's 'The Greatest Thing in the World' won Story magazine's college contest.
During World War II Mailer was a sergeant in the United States Army. He wanted to go to Europe and be in the first wave of invasion troops, and was disappointed when he was sent to the South Pacific. He served in Leyte, Luzon, and Japan, as a cool and detached observer of what happened on the war scene. Most of the time in the Philippines Mailer felt tired. He saw a little bit action but not as much as it was in THE NAKED AND THE DEAD (1948).
In his letters to his first wife, Beatrice Silverman, he described patrols he was on during the war - Mailer did not want to carry notes with him. In 1946 he was discharged, and the next year he enrolled at the Sorbonne. The Naked and Dead was born in fifteen months. It was published when Mailer was just 25, and made him world famous. "Its success rips away my former identity," Mailer once said.
The Naked and The Dead drew upon the author's combat experiences in the Philippines. It is not so funny as Heller's Catch-22 or Jaroslav Hašek's Good Soldier Schweik, but more realistic than Remarques All Quiet on the Western Front, and not so sentimental as Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. The story depicts a group of American soldiers, who are stationed on the Japanese-held island in the Pacific. Flashbacks that illuminate their past mix with feverish combat scenes. The Naked and The Dead was on the other hand hailed as one of the finest American novels of WW II, and criticized as obscene, plainly motivated by personal disgust with army life. In England, several publishers rejected the book because of the obscenity of its language. - "It is virtually a Kinsey Report on the sexual behavior of the GI. Its style is an almost pure Army billingsgate that will offend many readers, although in no sense is it exaggerated: Mr. Mailer's soldiers are real persons, speaking the vernacular of human bitterness and agony. It gives off a skyglow that is quite faithful to the spectrum of battle, and exposes the blood, if not always the guts, of war." (David Dempsey in The New York Times, May 9, 1948)
Subsequent novels did not receive similar respect, among them BARBARY SHORE (1951). This left-wing novel was set in a Brooklyn boarding house and depicted the conflict between a former radical and a federal agent. Time Magazine called the novel "paceless, tasteless, and graceless".
In the late 1940s Mailer worked in Hollywood as a scriptwriter. He moved in 1951 to Greenwich Village in New York City. Mailer's third novel, THE DEER PARK (1955), was about the corruption of values in Hollywood. Several publishers refused to take the work. Mailer felt he was an outlaw; he listened to jazz and smoked marijuana. In the thinly veiled story Mailer dealt with his relationship with Adele Morales, an artist whom he married in 1954. The following years in the authors life were more or less chaotic, and in 1960 he stabbed Adele at the end of an all-night party in Manhattan with "a dirty three-inch penknife". Mailer was given a suspended sentence because Adele refused to press charges, but she later publisher her book of memoirs, The Last Party (1997).
In the mid-1950s Mailer started to gain fame as an anti-establishment essayist. He had read Marx's Das Kapital and later said that it helped him to become a better writer. However, he did not believe that Communism would solve all problems. In 1961 Mailer wrote an open letter to Fidel Castro, saying "you are giving us hope". In his notorious essay 'The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster' (1956) was originally published in Dissent and reprinted in ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959). Mailer examined violence, hysteria, crimes and confusion in American society through the fashionable existentialist framework, which owes much to Jean Genet. Mailer defined the hipster as a philosophical psychopath, and urban adventurer, who has adopted elements from black culture and could be called "a White Negro". To become a hipster is a conscious choice for members of the intellectual élite. However, the black man knows the art of the primitive "in the cells of his existence", and is forced to accepts the moral wilderness of civilized life, condemned by "the Square". "But the Negro, not being privileged to gratify his self-esteem with the heady satisfaction of categorical condemnation, chose to move instead in that other direction where all situations are equally valid, and in the worst of perversion, promiscuity, pimpery, drug addiction, rape, razor-slash, bottle-break, what-have-you, the Negro discovered and elaborated a morality of the bottom, an ethical differentiation between the good and the bad in every human activity from the go-getter pimp (as opposed to the lazy one) to the relatively dependable pusher or prostitute."
After the difficult, tumultuous period, Mailer realized that he can write well about people, who are like himself - people without roots, such as Henry Miller, Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali, and Picasso. In the 1960s Mailer was listed among the New Journalists, who applied the techniques of the novel to depict real events and people. He co-founded and named the Village Voice, one of the earliest underground American newspapers. He was a columnist ("Big Bite") at Esquire (1962-63) and Commentary (1962-63), a member of the executive board (1968-73), and the president (1984-86) of PEN American Center. In 1969 he was an independent candidate for mayor of New York City.
THE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS (1963) established Mailer as one of the most vigorous essayists in America. He wanted to advise President Kennedy, but he did not like Lyndon Johnson's face. "Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the Gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision." (from The Presidential Papers, 1963) He used in THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT (1968) the techniques of fiction, and studied his own reactions as a barometer of the events themselves. The work won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. In the same vein he wrote MIAMI AND THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO (1968) and OF A FIRE ON THE MOON (1970). In CANNIBALS AND CHRISTIANS (1966) Mailer accused American writers of not being able to produce works that would "clarify a nation's vision of itself" - "After his heroic failure, American literature was isolated-it was necessary to give courses in American literature to Americans."
When Mailer started to cover the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions in the 1960s, he placed himself at the center of American political and cultural life and also reported his observations on the civil rights movement, political assassinations and other upheavals. Mailer published essays in popular and men's magazines, such as Esquire and Playboy, as well as in more intellectual journals like Dissent, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books. "It is not routine to bring off a long novel when your ambition is more than major, when you will settle for nothing less than an attempt to write a great novel, and when you are into your sixties and not all that well." (Norman Mailer in The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1998)
Mailer's outspoken style led him in the 1970s into collision course with feminist movement. In THE PRISONER OF SEX (1971) Mailer proposed that gender might determine the way a person perceives and orders reality. He was labelled as the quintessential male chauvinist pig in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics. Mailer wrote a biography of the life and career of Marilyn Monroe, and published a highly successful true life novel, THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG (1979) - In Cold Blood in Mailer's style. The story was based on the life and death of a convicted killer Gary Gilmore. THE FIGHT (1975) was an account of the legendary bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
When the Italian director Sergio Leone started to work on his gangster film Once Upon a Time in America (1984), he asked Mailer to help with the screenplay. The film was based on the 1953 novel The Hoods by Harry Grey. Mailer barricaded himself in a Rome hotel room with several bottles of whisky, and spent there some three weeks, writing the script. "We could hear him singing, cursing and shouting for ice cubes from about ten blocks away!" Leone said later. Grey, a former Sing-Sing prisoner, met the author in New York, and was not happy with his adaptation of the book. "Mailer, at least to my eyes, the eyes of an old fan, is not a writer for the cinema", concluded Leone.
In the 1980s Mailer had become tired of politics. However, he visited in 1984 the Soviet Union and realized that it was not "the evil empire" but it was a "poor, third-world country". In his articles Mailer often compared the U.S. to the Roman empire. Howewer, Mailer's ambitious novel, ANCIENT EVENINGS (1983), was set in ancient Egypt (1290-1100 BC). Mailer wrote it for 11 years. Anthony Burgess characterized it as "one of the great works of contemporary mythopoesis". "Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade of grass equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes. If pain is fundament, then a blade of grass can know all there is." (from Ancient Evenings)
With TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE (1984), a thriller, Mailer returned to movie business - he wrote the screenplay for the film and directed it. The protagonist, Tim Madden, is an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon and women. He awakens with a hangover. He remembers practically nothing of the night before and then he finds in the nearby woods the severed head of a blonde. "Horror films do not prepare us for the hours lost in searching after one clear thought. Waking from nightmares and sleeping in terror, I climbed at last onto one conclusion. Assuming I was no part of this deed - and how could I be certain of that? - I still had to ask: Who was?"
Mailer supported the Persian Gulf War for patriotic reasons in 1991, feeling that the U.S. was in a bad state and needed a war. HARLOT'S GHOST (1992), which the author himself considered one of his best books, was a 1300 pages long chronicle of the CIA. While gathering material for it, Mailer also found not previously known Russian documents for OSWALD'S TALE (1995), his exhaustive biography of Lee Harvey Oswald.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SON (1997) was a relatively mild retelling of the Jesus story compared to Nikos Kazantzákis novel The Last Temptations of Christ (1955) or Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991). The book continued his series of portraits of well-known figures, from Monroe and Gary Gilmore to Oswald and Pablo Picasso. THE TIME OF OUR TIME (1998) was an anthology of Norman Mailer's fiction and non-fiction writings. "Yet what this volume makes clear, if it were not already quite apparent, is that Mr. Mailer's strength lies in non-fiction, not in fiction." (Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, May 8, 1998) Mailer celebrated his 80th birthday in New York and published THE SPOOKY ART (2003), a collection of writings about writing.
Mailer was awarded in 2005 the National Book Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His final novel, THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST (2007), about the young Adolf Hitler, formed in a way a complementary pair to the The Gospel According to the Son. The story was narrated by a devil. Mailer died of renal failure on November 10, 2007, in Manhattan. He was 84. Mailer was married six times.
For further reading: Ex-Friends by Norman Podhoretz (1999); Mailer: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn (1999); The Last Party by Adele Mailer (1997); Norman Mailer by Michael K. Glenday (1995); Norman Mailer Revisited by R. Merrill (1992); The Lives of Norman Mailer by C.E. Rollyson (1991); Radical Fiction and the Novels of Norman Mailer by N. Leigh (1990); Norman Mailer's America by Joseph Wenke (1987); Critical Essays on Norman Mailer, ed. by J. Michael Lennon (1986); Norman Mailer, ed. by Harold Bloom (1986); Norman Mailer: His Life and Times, ed. by Peter Manso (1985); Mailer: A Biography by Hilary Mills (1982); Norman Mailer by Robert Erlich (1978); Existential Battles by Laura Adams (1976) - see also: television document Dreams and Nightmares, dir. by Richard Copans (1998)
Selected works:
no no no... wait till the singer joins in... they get really really good at that point.
a fine weekend then!
rock and roll baby.
brickwallboyout.
diego velazquez, las meninas (1656)
before we get to the sorted recommendations, etc...
a tip o' the cap on this, the one-year anniversary of the passing of my father-in-law, carrol "chuccie" derouen. he too would have been disappointed in the rockies effort in the world series. save us a seat dad!
books, films and shit.
go see the coen brothers adaptation of cormac mc-carthy's "no country for old men"... AFTER you read the book. there are NO shortcuts in art people.
and while your' e at the local cinema, check out the biopic on the late joy division frontman ian curtis, control.
speaking of heroin. i am reading "the heroin diaries" by nikki sixx. yea, THAT nikki sixx. motley crue bassist and all-around millionaire rock star fuck-up. probably the last generation of "fuck the world" rock stars. he apparently had quite the drug problem, and finally saw the light (so to speak) after a 12+ month daily love affair with smack. he kept journals of his speedball nightmares, etc and they are laid out here in a very creative / graphic way. i am about 100 pages in and it is certainly a pretty good read, but a long way from the some other way-more-literary accounts of life with the needle and spoon. a+ for creative presentation though. and yea, i too was surprised that mr sixx had even READ a book, much less WRITTEN one!
(editors note: motley crue's "too fast for love" is easily a top 20 all-time metal album, maybe top 10)
read these books by noah cicero and get back to me (click images):
his controversial / "jaw dropping" novel "burning babies" is supposedly (finally) close to being published. here's a (mere) 52,000 word memoir he published as a blog-post. here's hamster, a novel he co-wrote with tao lin. and finally... THE DEAD CHILD LIES HIDDEN IN THE FLOWERS, an epic poem also published via his blog.
that should be enough to keep you busy / absolutely ruin your mind... after all, arsenal doesn't play until monday and i would be remiss did i not provide you with ample material to fill the void until kick-off!
pack plenty of anti-bacterial soap.
brickwallboyout.
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