Some days are better than none

I don’t know if you remember where you were when you heard that Norman Mailer had been murdered but it happened twenty years ago this month. I remember it well because the next thing I learned was he was murdered by my colleague chi chi –

whose death in prison I reported on a few weeks ago. We’ll remember this now by looking back at how it was reported at the time so that I don’t have to do any extra work while I continue to recover from my recent cosplay injuries.

From Friday April 29, 2005 (You can read the original at the link if you prefer and I suggest) Reported at the time by

The Obliterati
https://theobliterati.blogspot.com/2005/04/norman-mailers-killer-implicates.html

Also here is the Write This msn community version with comments in which Sputnik’s writing rightfully gets raked over the wet coals. I recommend this for hysterical porpoises.

Norman Mailer’s killer implicates pretendGenius Press

 



PORTLAND Ore.-- The man accused of killing Norman Mailer shouted to a crowded courtroom that he "(killed) him as a publicity stunt" for the book publishing company, pretendGenius Press. He also yelled "I am Matt Drudge". The self-admitted assassin, Chi Chi, a native Patagonian now of New York City, has served on pGp's board of directors since its founding in 2003. The prisoner was immediately hushed by his council and admonished by the judge. District Court Judge Thornton Meeler remanded Mr. Chi to psychiatric evaluation without a plea being entered.

In a statement read by PretendGenius Press Books Division spokesperson, Nathanial Lantz, pGp denied that any persons in its organization had prior knowlege of the gruesome execution of the famed literary figure. The statement reads in part "During the past several months we have been watching helplessly while Chi Chi has become increasingly erratic. The last few weeks his behavior had reached the dangerously unpredictable. We, as an organization, and as humanbeings, have taken great pains to encourage our former friend to seek help. [Let me be clear about this] In no way did pretendGenius have prior knowlege of, authorize, approve, or give express written permission to kill Norman Mailer."

The Dissociated Press has learned that on at least two occasions Mr. Chi documented his desire to kill Mr. Mailer. We have obtained an internal pGp memo dated April 20 and signed by Chi Chi that covers some particulars of the upcoming book festival and then states "On Sunday pretendGenius Press will kill Norman Mailer..." On a public bulletin board on April 21 he is attributed to have scribed "i will have a good time... right up to the point they arrest me for the useful and timely death of norman mailer". Phone calls to pGp have remained unanswered at the time this story went to press.

Eye witness accounts describe an agitated man, who, was asked on at least two occasions to remove his hat, possibly a fedora, but indignantly refused, was seated in the first row of the auditoreum at Portland's Keller Hall last Saturday where a near sellout crowd had gathered to hear Mr. Mailer. The suspect, apparently drunk, grew increasingly boorish as the evening drew on. The first speaker was Yuvi Zalkow of South East Portland who had placed first in a writing challenge sponsored by the Wordstock Book Event. While reading a selection from his winning entry the unfortunate Mr. Zalkow was heckled by the suspect. Receiving laughter from some in attendence appears to have emboldened the fedora wearing man and his catcalls became increasingly belligerant and obscure. Many of the witnesses have confirmed the phrase "I wrote bunnies" was strangely repeated.

The man was warned by security personnel that any further outbursts would cause him to be removed and he slumped into his chair until some forty five minutes later when Mr. Mailer had been speaking for twenty minutes he leaped onto the stage with a chair in his hands and used it to repeatedly beat the writer about the head and trunk. The horrified audience sat stunned and it was some moments before one unidentified woman wearing a white dress bravely crawled onto the proscenium to grasp the assassin around the ankle. At this moment the room went dark.

The electrical outage, apparently caused by a utility truck striking a power pole some blocks away, was unrelated to the murder. But one witness, Randy Quaard of Salem, described the scene as surreal, A murmer in the crowd indicated that most people weren't sure if what they had witnessed was real or theater. Some in the audience chanted for the lights to be turned on. The suspect apparently took advantage of this distraction to secrete Mr. Mailer away on the victim's own wheelchair through a rear exit and escape.

Police say he drove his car to the Rose Quarter Convention Center gaining entrance through an unlocked door on the loading dock and took the body to the display table pretendGenius Press had rented for the Book Festival. He posed the deceased body into various positions at this table and began taking photographs. The police report states he was able to take more than one hundred photos with a digital camera before they found him at this location approximately an hour after the murder. Mr Chi was reportedely crying but was arrested without incident.

Norman Kingsley Mailer was born January 31, 1923. It is open to argument whether Mr. Mailer was one of the major novelists of his generation, but he was certainly one of the greatest writers and was arguably the most singular literary figure of his generation.

Mr. Mailer, who was described by most to have appeared frail but forceful and, indeed, "in rare form", was heard to cry out even as the first blow fell, "Adele", a possible reference to the second wife he once famously stabbed with a penknife; though some report he cried "Adieu". Adele or adieu, these were the last words he is known to have spoken.

For more hysterical porpoises I recommend these remnants of the now defunct news rag Hysterical Porpoises original reporting that I found by using the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050829102440/http://www.hystericalporpoises.com

Details emerge from last week’s murder of Norman Mailer


Woman in white dress identified


pretendGenius under growing scrutiny

Internal documents obtained by Hysterical Porpoise suggest the killing of Norman Mailer was one of a number of options discussed by company executives in response to a diminishing bottom line. Items discussed included discretely creating crop circles in the shape of the company’s logo, distributing free helium at designated book selling locations, and “somehow marketing in bars to drunk people”.

On April 7 an electronic mail was — possibly inadvertently — sent to everyone in the company that hinted at a plan to capitalize on a tragic or sensational event such as a “celebrity writer’s death”. This e-mail was immediately followed by a second that characterized it as a joke by then CFO Armstrong Strident. Mr. Strident resigned last Tuesday and has been unavailable to the media.

During this time frame a joke circulated with the employees that company co-founder — currently holding the position of “At Large” — Chi Chi was going to “hump Norman Mailer till he died”. This might have been concurrent with an incident in the commissary that reportedly had Mr. Chi suddenly jumping up from a quiet lunch and, flinging his food into the air, shouting, “I’ve got it. We’ll shoot the f— and burn his liver”. But why Norman Mailer?

We have learned Mailer earlier rebuffed advances by pretendGenius to have him pen a twenty or thirty page children’s story. Mailer apparently showed some initial interest but after studying the offer declined. This did not deter at least one person. On March 23 Mr. Chi showed up uninvited at Mailer’s Long Island estate and accosted the writer. It took some minutes and earnest negotiating before guests could convince the agitated man to depart. Two days later Mr. Chi found himself served by the New York Police Department with a restraining order. The complaint signed by Mailer stated in part “I thought we were being entertained by a trained monkey when in horror we all realized it was foaming at the mouth much like its prose.”

The whereabouts of the killer are sketchy in the days leading up to the murder. We do know that he and the author Amy Tuckerdoon took the same flight from New York to Portland three days before Mr. Mailer was to make his ill-fated appearance. It was Ms Tuckerdoon who, right before the lights went out, was seen crawling onto the stage. Most witnesses remembered that as an attempt to assist Mr. Mailer. However there have since been at least two to come forward and dispute that view. Ms Tuckerdoon has stated that she was “as shocked as anyone at what took place”. She did not specifically comment on questions posed regarding her knowledge of the memos in the weeks before the murder.

Company Vice President of Screeative Ackspecs– a purposely ironic registered corporate title meaning Creative Aspects– Bloog Mandrake has been the most forthcoming. Appearing with Larry King on CNN and either feeling well at ease or putting on a brave face he twice laughed about the incident to the incredulous on-looking King. Mandrake denied owning more than casual familiarity with Mr. Chi and said “I wasn’t even sure he was real. I thought they hired someone’s drunken cousin… to occasionally parade around in that straw sombrero thing and tell everyone he was Chi Chi from Central America… [Chi Chi said he] dealt in guns for the contras and sold [Reagan’s] CIA fake coke for a half million dollars… as if I was supposed to have heard of him.” When prodded by King about this he insisted his relationship was “not an iota more extensive than that”. We’ve learned that Bloog Mandrake and Chi Chi are second cousins.

pretendGenius is probably best known for its unlikely and explosive early success. Once called “the little press that would make wood if a little press could” by the influential trade magazine Inyerspine, it surprised the industry when its stable of, then, mostly unknown authors lassoed the writing calf and wrestled more than a million sales out of their first year of operation. By the end of the second year the “cabal” had increased sales to over fifty million. The first book they released was Sean Brijbasi’s seminal One Nut’s Sympathy. It tells the story of a man obsessed with guinea pigs due to a childhood incident who seeks solace in a park in Amsterdam. He discovers within himself an environment that observes the existence of man as only a tiny part of the total experience. “Forced to look at mankind with the point of view that discards its importance, the reader is faced with a dilemma about his own personal importance that only the highest form of art can accomplish”, the critic Jurgid Wuntzover wrote.

pretendGenius Press’ second book was by the former army interrogator J. Tyler Blue. When Shadenfreude at the Zeitgeist Motel was released there were some raised eye brows at the title. “Pretentious” was one of the kinder barbs. Snickers faded with every turned page unless purposely evoked by its author. With an overwhelming comprehensive voice its multi-headed protagonists “seem to pull vigorously on the strings of the philosophers, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, you name them, who in turn meekly held onto the lifeline of human experience”, wrote Wuntzover. Blue has said “I wanted to take the heart of Camus, fuse it with Nietzsche’s spine, and give it Shelly’s shin bones”. The book was the second phenomenal success for pGp.

Next up was Band Time. Stephen Moran chronicles the most volatile days of the Irish Republican Army and surrounding events through the eyes of a Belfast bar band from 1965 to the 1990s. It won the prestigious Choking Lassie award for Contribution to the Arts of Ireland. Former winners include James Joyce (posthumously) and John Wayne who in 1952 played an Irishman in The Quiet Man with Maureen O’Hara. It sold more copies quicker in Ireland and UK than any other book except The Git’s Knickers by Anonymous who is rumored to be Moran himself.

Now the buzz was electric whenever it was near the time for a scheduled pretendGenius book to be released and the company exploited that by keeping an iron fist on any information about the title of the next book or the name of its author. It was, however, never company policy to not grease rumors that they were holding onto something big. It might be 20/20 hindsight to say that it was apparent by their glee-ridden manner that their Sergeant Pepper was about to premier. By the time the name Blem Vide was known to the world his book had already run up a million pre-sale editions of what turned out to be Sizzle Stick of Temptaria. Billed as first-copy signed editions, that idea was quickly scotched when two thousand were sold in the first hour. An intensely sound-driven intertwining of language was the gristle in a book so influential its full effect is yet to be experienced. “Evoking a linguistic collage of color and light… is being much compared to the Beatle’s finest hour of rock and roll psychedelia, Sizzle Stick of Temptaria is imbued throughout with a strain of objet d’vide”, gushed the critic Debartolo Simpid.

The only flop of the first-runs was the next book, Dean Strom’s Nothing Will Save It. Advance publicity barked, “Nothing will save it but it will save you”. A fourteen hundred-page tome to the independence of the penis. Critic Zeb Filler – “The author presumably believes this is a tumescent idea and not one exhausted by a million strokes. After twenty pages it is clear that this tendentious book posing as historical record will pump ad nauseam repetition even while it hangs sadly limp.” This so-called flop still had two million pre-sales but was a critical bust. pretendGenius quickly cut the print run short and is still embroiled in a law suit with the estate of the author. Mr. Strom was found dead last February at a beach on Maui, the victim of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The company dispensed with pre-sales for its next book while making a solemn promise to not disappoint again. But the vultures were already circling. Conventional wisdom bet on the best days having been seen and if anyone was going to save–so to speak– the lofty reputation of pretendGenius it would need to be at least one of its first four authors. At this time, in a move seen as an attempt to bolster a suddenly shaky behemoth, they announced a deal with Amy Tuckerdoon, the best-selling erotic mystery writer — Tuckerdoon immediately began a three year sabbatical and her first book “as finally a real writer” is scheduled to be released by pGp later this year. It’s unknown if present legal troubles will effect these plans. — Then came the company’s savior.

Josh Davis’ book Burning Grandfather’s Clock in the Ashtray saw the critics rushing back in droves and established Davis as the preeminent ‘cigarette writer’ as the genre is now called. Drawing heavily on Brijbasi and Blue in style combined with more than a zany dash of his own it “drove the highbrow down Main Street and turned Republicans onto fine wine” scribed Wuntzover. Sales were initially hampered by the hangover from the previous Strom debacle but what began slowly is still running strong and is one of those books that sells regularly into its seventh, eighth, and ninth printings. A movie version of this book won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2004.

When it was time for Brijbasi’s second novel to be released the bloom was back on pGp. The Five Boll Weevils, as Brijbasi, Blue, Moran, Vide, and Davis were called — a name started by a Hotel’s staff — and Tuckerdoon, took over the famed Algonquin and began to reestablish its (brand new) round table as a literati destination. The parties were many and legendary, pretendGenius authors dropping a good portion of their considerable bankrolls. Recently the parties have been fewer and farther between.– Brijbasi’s A Time For Bicycles and Bullet Trains was not treated well by the critics. While sales have been average by industry standards it fell with a thud compared to the blockbuster of One Nut’s Sympathy.

Blem Vide also failed with Band Aids on a Baffled Blonde. His third book Babble on to Babylon was a creditable effort but Band Aids on a Baffled Blonde seemed to baffle more than blondes and set another low watermark for pGp sales. The London Silence by Stephen Moran faired a little better both critically and commercially but there was just not the same excitement surrounding it as was the case with everything pretendGenius touched merely two years prior. By the time J. Tyler Blue came out with his The Baltimore Years the critics were kicking, saying “once Blue wrote about the universe but now he’s been reduced to Baltimore”. Josh Davis pulled the book he had apparently completed and began to work on a mysterious project that has involved him for two years. He did release a nonfiction account of the 60’s television show Green Acres. It sold little.

Tomorrow. A company plots a return to prominence.

Friday. Can Tuckerdoon give pretendGenius a third life with Beyond The Pale?

Next week. Byron Creely with Norman Mailer’s ghost on Norman Mailer today.