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Provincetown on Memorial Day

mailer-grave

 

 

The Mailer grave on Memorial Day, by Stephen Borkowski. He writes:

Memento Mori

A long standing tradition in Provincetown is to place a flag on the graves of Veterans for Memorial Day.The large marker commemorating the fallen during the Civil War features the most prominent display with the square plot circled with flags about nine inches apart.

I volunteered to do a portion of the cemetery historically known as the “Protestant Section” to distinguish it from the largely Portuguese Catholic section across the road.There are the graves of many artists of many denominations. The grave of Norman Mailer is among them, with his wife Norris Church Mailer interred by his side. The still gleaming white marble festooned with mementos unintentionally stands out among the stark terrain.

I felt a certain pride as my gloved hands pushed the stake end about 6 inches into the soft earth to acknowledge his service during wartime. Broadly, their contributions to my life and to the local cultural landscape, over many decades, will not be easily forgotten.

The Ten Best Norman Mailer Books

In 1948, a 25-year-old World War II veteran leaped into prominence with a number one best-selling novel about his combat experience in the Pacific, The Naked and the Dead. Over the next 60 years he wrote across a range of genres: biography and memoir, a column in the Village Voice, crime and sports narratives, poetry and short stories, several film scripts, and ten more novels of astounding variety.

Why Mailer Matters

The Essential JFK Books

Not only is Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale the first mentioned, but Mike is quoted:

Mailer disappointed numerous conspiracy theorists by coming to the conclusion that, as Mailer’s biographer J. Michael Lennon put it,  Mailer chose “no conspiracy, and a complex Oswald; a man dealt a bad hand, in no way heroic, but bold, idealistic in a twisted way, and sympathetic.”

House Photos

Photos by Donna Pedro Lennon.

75 at 75: J. Michael Lennon on Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer was 75 in May of 1998 and had just published a 1300-page retrospective anthology of his work, The Time of Our Time. The defining event of the collection is the Cold War, and Mailer could have read from any number of excerpts, fictional and nonfictional, that unfold under its huge shadow, but because the Monica Lewinsky scandal was then being hotly debated, and the impeachment of President Clinton looming, Mailer read first from two recently published pieces about Clinton.

A Reading of “Don Juan in Hell”

A video of Norman Mailer, Mike Lennon, Gore Vidal, and Norris Church Mailer in Don Juan in Hell, in October 2002.

Mailer’s Desk

As he left it. Photos by Donna Pedro Lennon.

The 10 Best Norman Mailer Books

There has been debate on whether Mailer’s greatest achievements are in fiction or nonfiction, but it is clear that he was ambidextrous, so to speak, excelling in both. I lean slightly toward his nonfiction in my picks.

Mike on Mailer

Featured in Shelf-Awareness.

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