A tale of extraordinary madness

Forget about your Dillons and your Rourkes, today's entertainment news reminds me once again that this is the bloke who should have played Bukowski/Chinaski on the big screen.

Though he was quite dapper looking as a young man, a decade or three of hell raising and high alcohol consumption ensured that his face fell into that lived in cragginess look that Bukowski was lumbered with for most of his life. Torn didn't just look the part, he lived the part.

It's official: poetry panini football strickers Vblogging Rip Torn was the new rock and roll.

Town Bloody Hall (1979)

Norman Mailer: Communist?

. . . . seems to be the question that people are asking themselves today in Arizona and Portugal.

Aaah, the weird unpredictability of the google search engine. May you never change.

Surely with Mailer's articles for Irving Howe's Dissent magazine in the 50s and his role in founding the Village Voice, he would have fallen more into the category of being a 'Debsian' Socialist? (Btw, it's been a bad year for 'Debsian' Socialism in the world of American Literature.)

But for the record: There's not much point in typing the words "Norman Mailer" + "Socialist" into the google search engine. You've guessed it . . . "Aah, the weird unpredictability of the google search engine. May you never change."

Norman Mailer 1923-2007

And so it goes . . Wait up, that was the other bloke.

Never read Mailer to the best of my knowledge, so I'm heading over to the New York Times and the Guardian to tell me why he was important and why I should read his stuff.