Sheptalk

Forum Topic
"Excelsior You Fathead"

Subject	Message	Replies
Shepherd and Mailer Date: 09-16-2005 By: lump516	If Shepherd said that he cleaned Mailer's clock, he might very well have been telling the truth--I still remember an episode of The Dick Cavett Show where he got into contremps with Gore Vidal and the latter almost did the same thing, while Cavett and New Yorker writer Janet Flanner looked on, obviously wishing they were somewhere far, far away--Dismal Seepage, OH, perhaps. As for literary legacy, I put my money on Shepherd--Mailer's novels may have vast ambitions and be large enough to double as doorstops, but the only thing of his I've read that didn't make me flat-out giggle was an essay he wrote for The New Republic about the 1992 Republican convention--and even there, he didn't make any observation that a half-decent journalist wouldn't have. Shepherd's pieces, both for the radio and print, may seem "smaller," but in his quiet and allusive fashion, he gets closer to the painful realities and small joys of life than anything that Mailer has ever written. Also, Shepherd managed to be a writer and broadcaster for some 40 years without once mentioning anal sex, which is not a claim that Mailer can make . . .	4

Replies

Date	Member	Message
09-17-2005 ( Reply#: 78 )	fudge	I can barely get thru a forum posting without mentioning anal sex[:p] but yeah, mailer is way over rated-will probably read 'the naked and the dead' someday, but mostly he's just alot of hot air and self importance-shep's work will live forever because it's universal-it has heart...
09-20-2005 ( Reply#: 88 )	lump516	Don't bother with The Naked and The Dead--inspite of the setting in the South Pacific, it isn't really about WWII--it's about a p**ing contest between a junior officer and a NonCom (my dad rose to the rank of a NonCom before he left the Navy--junior officers were one of the banes of his existence). Good, dark novel about combat during WWII? Read James Jones' The Thin Red Line*; it's blood-curdling and hilarious at the same time. But avoid the recent film version--it's just a series of picture postcards interrupted with occasional exploisions of bloodshed.
09-22-2005 ( Reply#: 95 )	fudge	thanx for the heads up-i see mailers getting a lifetime achievement award-well, live long enuf... people like shep who really deserve awards for their work never get them
10-07-2005 ( Reply#: 112 )	ebruceb	I greatly admire both Shepherd and Mailer. Both were/are huge egomaniacs, but Mailer is, I believe, unjustly criticized for inserting himself into his non-fiction books such as THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT. The self-evident truth about virtually all writing is that the author is always present in some way. Mailer uses this consciously in his writing. Most of his non-fiction writing is not about the surface subject, but about how Mailer perceives and transmits his ideas and feelings about the subject. I find his mind and most of his writing style extraordinary. Even if I have absolutely no interest in a subject, I find Mailer's writing about it fascinating and worthwhile. For his high-level body of work, I believe he should have already received the Nobel Prize in literature.