Mailer Riposte

(from Studies in Classic American Literature)

by Joel Lipman

Beginning with what might be an obvious pun on RIP, this homage rearranges and isolates language from the letters of Norman Mailer, specifically from the group of them republished in the New Yorker [October 6, 2008]. The first image announces the sequence with funereal imagery, arrangement & text. The remaining eight visual poems are a gallery of work that might be rearranged in any sequence. The found papers are varied, with a couple overprinting the anatomical drawing text that many of the pieces in Pathology also utilize. While I've not read all of Mailer's books, I'm familiar with many of them and appreciate many of his novels, essays and forays into popular culture subjects. I think the first Mailer that mattered to me was "The White Negro," followed by various novels and the seminal 60s "new journalism." I view this run of work as celebratory and cautionary, which is how I read much of Mailer over his lifetime.

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