Monday 11 November 2013

Norman Mailer's House

Cerebus #207 (June 1996)
Art by Dave Sim & Gerhard
TOM WARD:
(from I Stayed In Norman Mailer's House..., Vice.com, May 2013)
I didn't really know why I'd been invited to stay at Norman Mailer's house. My knowledge of the late writer was limited to what I'd gleaned from a quick skim through The Fight (Mailer's excellent account of Muhammad Ali and George Foreman's Rumble in the Jungle) and the obligatory Wikipedia scan. 

Even going on these limited preconceptions, there were certain things I didn't expect to find in Mailer's former home. For example, an attic study full of hundreds of books on Hitler, the Forrest Gump soundtrack on cassette and the complete set of Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark graphic novels all seemed like unusual cultural touchstones... 

(Submitted by Sandeep Atwal)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cool. I'll bet Dave would love that.

Also, funny Guys excerpt. I'd swear that I bought Guys and read it, but maybe I didn't because I don't recall that particular sequence.

-Reginald P.

Michael Grabowski said...

I remember reading Dave having written somewhere (Collected Letters?) that he had sent Mailer a full set of the books. Who knows what Mailer thought of them, if anything, but it's certainly interesting that he kept them.

Jeff Seiler said...

From one observer of human nature to another, I think that Dave sending the books and Norman keeping them says a lot about the human condition.