Unlike many contributors here, I usually like and agree with Christopher Hitchens. I find him inciteful and darkly funny -- a trait shared with my late father.

The reason my father appears in the paragraph above is that my father had a sharp incite into people, and an alcoholically ascerbic tongue to go with it. He once told me, "A smart and interesting asshole is an asshole."

This is largely how I feel about Norman Mailer. Mailer won a Pulitzer against every rule of journalism -- brevity, clarity, objectivity played no role in the way Mailer wrote. He was capable of employing magical language, heroic bombast and utter bullshit to obscure the light of his accurate critics. If he was truly libertarian as Hitchens claims, he certainly didn't direct his concern for liberty to women, conservatives or a host of other people or ideologies that were anathema to him. There was scarcely a farce in the second half of the 20th century that could take place without the presence of this bombastic, malevolent troll.

I don't wish death upon any human, although it comes to all. I will say that Mailer wasn't fit to change the ribbon in Vonnegut's typewriter, and that Mailer would have been better served if he'd spent less time in the public eye, and more time at his own typewriter.En pace resquiat

What is that? Esperanto? I believe the phrase you're looking for is, "requiescat in pace."

Just doing my part to forestall the day when Idiocracy becomes a documentary.

Well, hell, I misspelled in Latin again -- there's something about Latin that turns me in to a dyslexic.

While "resquiat" is not proper Classical Latin, it is apparently a medieval corruption of "requiescat," and found in a lot of ecclesiastical Latin. Guess I know almost everything.

*blush* :(

The way I see it, a smart and interesting asshole is smart (and interesting). Very charitable of you not to wish death on the guy, though!

I actually don't care ablut Trappy's latin. His repeated use of an apparently invented word, "inciteful," bothers me a little.

Melvyl -- honestly, I'd had a few beers with some friends before I wrote this -- drunk writing is probably a bad habit, but it has a long tradition behind it practiced by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, H.S. Thompson and indeed Mailer himself from time to time. I meant "insightful," of course.

Drinking and posting may be a bad habit, but it beats the hell out of drinking and e-mailing your ex, which i've done. The model for Mailer's sometime boozy loquacity is the great Irish Literary drinker, who could be Behan, or Kavanagh, but shows up here as Miller and Mailer and Micheline and Bukowski. America is the land of opportunity, so here, anybody can be Irish. It's an oral tradition: talkers, more than writers. But they all rewrote when sober.

Honestly, I still wish "the Fray" had an edit function -- I'm used to doing a re-write (I was a newspaper reporter for 10 years), but I like to type directly into "the Fray" -- frequently I catch an error too late to do anything about it. Oh well, we live and learn, or we do neither <grin>.

You actually can recall and rewrite as long as nobody's replied yet. I've done it a couple of times, when my typos were so bad it looked like I was typing in mittens.

I really like the reviewing utility in Amazon, BTW. It allows you to rewrite your reviews as many times as you want. I rewrote a review every day for a couple of weeks, once, as a kind of goof.

What would be nice would be a Preview button, so we could see our submissions in large type, and then rethink.

But every time they change the Fray they do something odd, so maybe minimalism is best.

Melvyl:

I actually don't care ablut Trappy's latin. His repeated use of an apparently invented word, "inciteful," bothers me a little.

I dunno. I kind of like the neologism "inciteful." In this case, it seems to sum up an attribute of the original poster's father more accurately than "insightful" does, given the piece of wisdom attributed to the poster's father.

Well, Dad could be something of an intelligent and charming a-hole himself, from time to time, so I assume he knew whereof he spoke.

Perhaps I should have left Dad out of the piece, the point of which was really, "I didn't like Norman Mailer very much, and I didn't like his writing -- or his touting of causes that I believed were foolish."

I would have had the same opinion about Mailer drunk or sober, and whether or not the late author was among the living. I would not, however, have created any new words like "inciteful" had I been sober.

Not the creation of new words is a bad thing. Shakespeare did it, apparently, with "incarnadine," and Asimov certainly did it with "robotics." The real trouble is I can't htinkup a useful meaning with which to define "inciteful." Perhaps it could be used to describe a master's thesis that relies too heavily on its footnotes; "It's not a bad piece, but it's too inciteful -- I'd rather have seen more of those ideas expressed in the author's text."

I'll have to think about it.

I think what KenRock was after was that your Dad sounded, from your description, like someone who liked picking a fight now and then, like Mailer. Using your insights to incite people is a waste of good material.

Ah, but look who's talking.

Karel Capek, the great Czech science fiction novelist, invented the word "robot." it's a corruption of a czech word for "worker." But by all means give Asimov credit. the man wrote what, five thousand or so books, on every topic but stamp collecting, and I could be wrong about stamp collecting.

Asimov acknowledge Capek as the creator of "robot" but claimed for himself creation of the term "robotics" as the word for the science of operating robots, as opposed to "robotology" or something similar.

My Dad did indeed enjoy a good argument -- but also is the one who told me "Never turn down a piece of ass -- you may be with the same woman another 500 times, but you'll never get that piece back."

At the time, I was 21, and thought he was wrong. Now I'm 45, and I'm less certain.

In my experience, the years between 45 and 65 are a feast of regrets. You regret, in turn, every reckless thing you ever did, and the ones you didn't do. The ones you did (the ones I did) were vastly more damaging, but the ones you didn't do (again,speaking striclty for myself) haunt you anyway. It may be that all this proves is that age only sharpens and refines narcissism. Beats me.

I see Asimov's point: I was wrong, there.