November 13, 2006 • 11:57 pm
the Original “White Negro.”
I have been staring at this blank screen for two days, and this is all I have come up with:
In his oft-cited essay of the same name, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer — several years before he tried to bite off Rip Torn’s ear — characterized the psychopath as someone who is “trying to create a new nervous system” for his or herself.
Generally we are obliged to act with a nervous system which has been formed from infancy, and which carries in the style of its circuits the very contradictions of our parents and our early milieu…. It is … not only the ‘dead weight of the institutions of the past’ but indeed the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past which strangle our potentiality for responding to new possibilities.
(from “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (1957))
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Filed under: Reading Is FUN-damental!, cool Jews, not strictly Myspace related, superficial reflections
November 10, 2006 • 4:48 pm
No, I didn’t say that I was the most important writer of our generation, I said that I might be.
And it is a possibility that we ought to start taking seriously.
Filed under: muy importante, not strictly Myspace related, superficial reflections
November 5, 2006 • 3:09 am
[This one is for the book nerdlings... I'm looking at you, Laura June...]
from subcin:
Norman Mailer created a film in the late 60s called MAIDSTONE. He played the part of a famous movie director who is considering a run for the presidency. Rip Torn played his potential assassin. At the end of filming, Rip appeared to get a little too far into his role, and he attacked Mailer on camera with a hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by viciously biting into Torn’s ear, drawing even more blood. This is the fight.
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Filed under: cool Jews, superficial reflections
