Well, not stabbing one of his six wives would have been a start.

JNagarya wrote:

As for the religio/cottage industry notion that JFK was killed by a conspiracy: where, after all these years, is the "evidence" for that which can withstand analysis for intellectual honesty and logic?

The evidence is there - in spades and abundance. Read my other Salon letters to do with it, as I recommended. If you did, you wouldn't have to ask such a daft question.

Go to "read droogoy's other letters" and read at will. I have almost 77 Salon page contributions on the evidence and how it meets ALL logical and other standards.

This is not a "cottage industry" though a lot of the "lone nut" purveyors, like that moron Gerald Posner, have tried to make it so.

To see where PR shills like Posner go wrong, check out the Posnerisms below:

http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/19th_Issue/posner_dozen.html

READ AND MAKE YOURSELF AWARE!

For a guy who was addicted to controversy, Mailer did pretty good for himself, and he even wrote a book or two that's worth a read. Sadly, also a fair amount of dreck. BTW, of the two of them, if anyone knew how to fuck, I'd wager it was Tallulah - and she pretty much wrote his epitaph.

I met Mailer at a party and he tries to punch you in the stomach To see how tough you are ...... he's pathetic, you know

Come on man, say what?

You gotta be kiddin', somebody step on it man, go write a bible.

From "Walk on the Wild Side," Take No Prisoners.

Are from people who are nearly as ego maniacal as Mailer was. Never let it be said that Brando and Gore Vidal didn't first and foremost rub their self professed genius in everyone and anyone's face.

Mailer did an unusual appearence at where I worked in 1996, at DG Wills Books in San Diego, "unusual" for the fact that he waived his high fee and made a showing for his book "Oswald's Tale." It helped that store owner Dennis Wills and I both wrote especially well crafter letters of inquiry to Mailer directly; the missives were interesting enough that Judith McNally, his long time personal assistant, gave us a call and informed me that Mr.Mailer found the letters intriguing. We offered him a one thousand dollar honorarium, to which we would charge a ten dollar admission fee into the store for the rare chance to see a great American writer. Ms.McNally informed me that Mr.Mailer recieves much more than the one thousand dollars we offered, but informed us that if we waived the cost of admission, he in turn would do the event gratis. All told , it was a fine and brilliant evening, Mailer fielded questions from the crowd of four hundred, and responded with spontaneous and self contained essays of fluid thinking. He was a pip, he was grand, he was as classy as any writer I've ever met.

There's a fascinating interview with Norman Mailer in this month's Playboy (I only get it for the articles.....) where he talks about his evolving spiritual beliefs, from atheism to a belief in a God who is NOT all-powerful but who learns from his creation, humanity.

It was the first thing of Mailer's I've read, and stirred up some curiosity.

I thought the editor's byline said Dane Cook at first. Shudder.

And like any artist with prodigious output, of course he was uneven. But his courage to be himself, and to take risks in so many different directions, is something many of today's so-called "artists" might pay attention to.

I'll never forget sitting in the Ancient Egypt section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reading the last chapter of "Ancient of Evenings"...

Sorry, that should have been "Ancient Evenings"... must have gotten it twisted in my brain with William Blake's "Ancient of Days"!

-Norman Mailer (from "On God")

Mailer released his final book, a conversation about good and evil and the hereafter, three weeks before he passed. Way to meet a deadline, Norm.

I, for one, have lost soemthing valuable to me.

and i didn't know him from anything other than TV. he didn't mind being Wrong.

smiley_creek suggested reading On God in Playboy - but all i got was smut sites on my computer. so i did a better search and came up with an except,
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/excerpts/2007-11-04-on-god_N.htm
it's by Michael Lennon, his official biographer, whatever that means.
Mailer's secret of success (as a jew in america) was to put on a Christface and play the mistrel. if you can read his [Michael Lennon's] last paragraph's smug uberchristian ideals without understanding why we hate you, don't write back - i already know where you stand.

Writers have the same obligations to be decent humans as other people do. Time will not and should not, Auden to the contrary, "forgive [them] for writing well."

That said, as a writer who never met Mailer, my primary evaluation of him stems from his writing. I found The Naked and the Dead clumsy and dull, American Dream frighteningly unhinged, and Tough Guys Don't Dance preposterous. I read the self-promotion about his participation in the 1968 Washington protests, and while we agreed about the war, I wondered why I was reading about Mailer in the bathroom. After that I quit reading him because I felt he had little to offer.

Have always found it amusing that the people who love the sound of their own voices thought he was such a big talent. Just goes to show how far bluster will carry you among the insecure.

I admire a good deal of what he did, though not his macho posturing and his writing. I enjoyed his theatrical "pot-stirring" (as another poster called it).

Courage, however, has little to do with belligerence.

He's dead,yet instead of offering sympathies to those he left behind...you deride him.

Very enlightened of you all.