Funny how we keep hearing about the deaths of actors, 91, 92, sometimes 95. Must be old wise men. You know who all has died recently. Love to see their blank old eyes. They never were anybody. Must be a great empty way to live, pretending to be the ones who were somebody. When your own time comes, you still have your cheekbones.
Or maybe not. Poets die very young. In the twentieth century, the most talented writers teeeend to die quite young, are the ones who don’t live on and on like Michener and Herman Wouk to become tendentious bores.
Not to mention all the dirty minded Philip Roths of the world. Takes a professional Manhattan masturbator to think a literary reject can be saved by contemplating the flushing of a shiksa toilet on the upper east side. Literature? No. Trash lives forever.
i asked my wife to do the math. Mostly, great poets die in their twenties. Great fiction writers die iin their forties and fifties. She’s got the who’s who and the when’s whens. Ask her. I can barely get off the couch.
Abe Vigoda had that gleam in his eye to the last moment, as did Jake Lamotta. Manhattan sucks, and these days Brooklyn sucks, but the Bronx and Brooklyn used to be great forges for talent and character.
Wouk looks like fungus in recent photos (sort of like Sheldon Adelson, one giant liver spot). At least Mailer’s dead, though, so thank God for small mercies. I’d rather beat my scrotum with a phone book that try to read anything he’s written again. He was crap at the beginning (“The Naked and the Dead”) and crap he remained until he drew his final breath (“The Castle in the Forest”).