Category: Media Page 11 of 13
John Buffalo Mailer recently appeared on Huffpost Live, discussing topics ranging from his new film Hello Herman to The Game of Thrones. Congratulations, John, on a great job.
Hello Herman, a film about high-school violence and penned by John Buffalo Mailer, opens this this Friday, June 7th, in theaters in fifteen cities, on demand, and on iTunes everywhere.
Mike discusses the publishing process. Video 3 of 3.
Mike discusses the publishing process. Video 2 of 3.
Mike discusses the publishing process. Video 1 of 3.
Barbara Wasserman and Norris Church Mailer, 2009 (Photo: Donna Lennon)
I was sorting through some papers in preparation to pick up work on the edition of Mailer’s letters I am editing for Random House. I found a sheet of paper containing the citation accompanying the JJLS Lifetime Achievement Award given him at the Society’s meeting in Paris, June 22, 2002. It was a terrific conference, and Mailer, his wife Norris and George Plimpton did a reading of the letters of Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald at the American Church on Quai d’Orsay.
Scribbled on the paper were some of the things Mailer said about Jones when he spoke on a conference panel. He said, “Jones took beautiful swings at the bastards,” meaning no particular individuals, but the whole gamut of assholes and shits in contemporary society. He went on to say that in his writing he was fearless, and “pressed wounds to the other side.” Jones, he continued, “had his finger on the nation’s pulse for 40 years.” He ended his remarks with this: “Jones disabled the grief button by embracing life like no one ever has.”
These fragmentary notes made me recall a letter Mailer wrote to William Styron in July 1953, shortly after Mailer visited the Handy Writers Colony, and which I quote from in my forthcoming biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life. Jones’ gusto always fascinated Mailer. Here is an excerpt from the letter:
Lowney Handy and Jones are people whom one can satirize so easily, and yet one’s missed it all, for both of them are such extraordinarily passionate people, that their errors as well as their successes have a kind of grotesque to them. Lowney Handy burns—I kept thinking of fanatics like John Brown when I looked into her eyes. Jones like all of us is having his troubles with the second book, but everything happens to Jonesie on so big a scale that his troubles are flamboyant next to ours, and involve money, movie scripts, gymnastics, obscenities, raw insecurity, triumphant phallicism and wham, wham, wham, it’s all explosion. With it all, I like him tremendously. I suppose I have the kind of friendship with him that I had when I was a kid with other kids.
From James Jones Journal (19.1) Spring 2013.
Provincetown is the most interesting and beautiful summer resort town on the East Coast. It has Bar Harbor’s salt breezes, old inns and chowder houses, but not its manicured stuffiness; its dunes are superior to those on the Jersey Shore (where Norman Mailer lived as a boy); and its trinket shops are preferable to Atlantic City’s tawdry casinos.
Like Fire Island, P-Town has a summer crowd of artists, collegians, gays and assorted eccentrics putt-putting around on mopeds, but it also has some real history. If it lacks Newport’s robber barons, its colonial roots are more impeccable, since the Pilgrims shivered for three weeks on the dunes near Race Point before moving on to Plymouth. It also has a venerable community of Portuguese fishermen, Yankee houses with widows’ walks, and the tallest structure along the 100-mile peninsular arm running to Boston, a 252-foot stone monument to the founding Pilgrims.
But six weeks after Labor Day, the town turns from circus to seaweed. All that remains are the Portuguese, a few Yankees and a clutch of burned-out cases. One of them is Timothy Madden, a bartender and erstwhile writer and the hero of Norman Mailer’s latest novel, a thriller set in the near-empty bars, cottages and dunes of the town at the edge of America.
Ghosts rattle and gibber through the story, which takes place during a few days in drizzly November. Some of the ghosts are old (Pilgrims, Indians, fishermen and whores), but two others are the recent dead—two blonde women who have been decapitated. Both had been involved with Madden—in fact, he is pickling himself in bourbon to ease the pain brought on by the desertion of one of them: Patty Lareine, his wife. Between times he remembers with fear and trembling his failed attempt to scale the Pilgrim Monument.
The second blonde, Laurel Oakwode, he meets in a bar and loses track of after a night of drink, sex, suicide and murder. Within 50 pages, Madden has awakened with a thundering hangover, found a bucket of blood spilled on the passenger seat of his car, and discovered a blonde head buried in his marijuana cache in the dunes of nearby Truro (I won’t reveal whose head), and the name “Laurel” tattooed on his arm. Discovering who killed whom and why is, of course the raison d’etre of the story, a literal tangle of baling wire, anchor chain and blonde hair.
[box type=”note”]Excerpted from a review of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, first appeared in the State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL), August 24, 1984.[/box]