A few weeks back I found a small but blatant error in the New Yorker, when author Daniel Mendelsohn managed to confuse “turbine” with “cylinder” when describing the engines of the ill-fated Titanic. In this week’s NY, Joan Acocella has a rather rambling article on dictionaries. In the midst of a discussion on slang, she…
Tag: Norman Mailer
More Shit You Don’t Want to Know About Henry James
Henry James is the classic writer’s writer for the English language. If you don’t like Henry, you aren’t really a writer. That’s not to say that Henry didn’t go overboard, a lot. The fuss and feathers quotient in his work was always high, but I’m a huge fan of The Bostonians, not to mention classic…
Norman Mailer, RIP
The most important thing to remember about Norman Mailer is that he wasn’t very smart. When he hit the big time in 1948 with The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s heart and soul was stuffed with big, fat American novels like An American Tragedy, USA, and Look Homeward, Angel. He arrived at the party to…