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Entry: Requiem for a Tough Guy Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/requiem_for_a_tough_guy#9200 Post contents: Oh for God's sake (agreeing with John Gillis), cut the recently departed soul of Norman Mailer some slack, yeah? At least he knew how to throw a good punch, AND he knew when and how to pull his punches - and that's an exquistitely rare quality among American writers (and among ALL Americans!) in these times. Better an honourable pugilist than a dishonourable publicity-hound. Mr Mailer: WHOOSH! Here's a left-hook from me to you, and eternal draughts of drinks of your choice, where you now keep company with Poe and Whitman and Fitzgerald, and please invite Hemingway too, please invite Hemingway out of his purgatorial state after his suicide, because (as one of my best teachers, a Catholic Brother of the Order of St John Baptiste de la Salle, said to me at a time when I almost destroyed my life when I was a very young man of age 22): "Good men, like you, are hard to find." And that is a fitting epitaph for the late Norman Mailer. "Good men are hard to find." And all men are sinners, but only very rare, scarce men have any goodness in them at all, and Norman Mailer was one. Sent at: 2008 07 06