Norman Mailer died today

ROS did a show on Mailer a while back and I wrote a little about him:

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”
-Oscar Wilde

For me, all of Mailer’s moves coalesce into a lived life of art. Guys like him and Hemingway, and even Muhammad Ali, were all carrying on a tradition of the Aesthetic movement, one of its tenets being to make an art of life. Yet if the coin is the Aesthetic movement and Oscar Wilde is on one side, then our American men of men are certainly on the other. In the same way that Wilde’s homosexual flamboyancy expressed his individualism to those Victorians, our American machos expressed their individualism by flamboyantly displaying their masculinity.

Our man Whitman might be the tie that binds here -

WHEN I PERUSE THE CONQUER’D FAME

“When I peruse the conquer’d fame of heroes and the victories
of mighty generals, I do not envy the generals,
Nor the President in his Presidency, nor the rich in his great
house,
But when I hear of the brotherhood of lovers, how it was
with them,
How together through life, through dangers, odium, un-
changing, long and long,
Through youth and through middle and old age, how un-
faltering, how affectionate and faithful they were,
Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill’d with the bitter-
est envy.”: