Mention of a piece on Liston reminds me that Norman Mailer
has done some
nice work on boxers (as well as murderers), but not sure I'd
call him HB,
though _Armies of the Night_ (March on Pentagon) had some
passages as
good as any Chandler "rants." What used to be called the New
Journalists,
early Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Ed Abbey, and some of the
underground
press writers (Paul Krassner, editor of _The Realist_), had
moments of
hard-edged lucidity -- along with the posturing.
A writer I've read occasionally, Marcelle Clements, did (and
may still do)
interesting interview-features in the 80s. I'm looking back
at "What
Happens to Pretty Girls" (collected in _The Dog Is Us_) at
her cynical view
of folks in the modeling business: "Some tell the truth, most
lie. You
promise them that you won't use their names, but still they
lie. They're
used to it; they do it well."
While we're thinking nonfiction, we might consider what older
nonfiction
writers--journalists especially--helped create the "style" of
HB. For
instance, go back and read H.L. Mencken who so impressed
young Richard
Wright with the way words could be used as weapons.
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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