I'm up in the middle of the night discharging some persisitent ideas out of my head and I see some news has come in. Also, If you read yesterday's post early, you may not have seen a couple of pictures I added.

NY Times- Nov 10- Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters died Saturday, his literary executor said.

He was 84. Mailer died of acute renal failure at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author's official biographer. From his classic debut novel, The Naked and the Dead, to such masterworks of literary journalism as The Armies of the Night, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.

After his last thing I read I figured he'd lost his marbles anyway: The Rise of Mailerism

Norman Mailer’s God, not surprisingly, is a great artist, who created mankind and all the plants and other animals, and could reincarnate them according to his whim. But he was not all-powerful. Because there was the Devil—and the Devil had technology. And lately, the Devil seems to be winning…
Some of his creations work, and some need improvement—Mailer believes in a highly modified version of Intelligent Design.
"I see God, rather, as a Creator, as the greatest artist. I see human beings as His most developed artworks. I also see animals as His artworks. When I think of evolution, what stands out most is the drama that went on in God as an artist. Successes were also marred by failures. I think of all the errors He made in evolution as well as of the successes. In marine life, for example, some fish have hideous eyes—they protrude from the head in tubes many inches long. Think of all those animals of the past with their peculiar ugliness, their misshapen bodies, worm life, frog life, vermin life, that myriad of insects—so many unsuccessful experiments. These were also modes the Artist was trying—this great artist, this divine artist—to express something incredible, and it was not, for certain, an easy process. Sometimes a young artist has to make large errors before he or she can go further.

(link thanks to Bob Morales)

One of God's better efforts is shooting horses this week:

MORE than 10,000 brumbies will be slaughtered in Queensland in a massive cull the State Government has tried to hide. Documents obtained by The Courier-Mail show fears of a public outcry led to high-level talks on how to conceal one of the world's largest animal culls. But the kill to help the environment - including shooting horses in the state's southeast - is already drawing international condemnation from animal rights groups and criticism of the RSPCA for condoning it.

Sterilise, don't cull brumbies: RSPCA

Spokesman Michael Beatty says sterility programs - where the drug is administered through a dart - have worked in the US and should have been introduced years ago.

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Washington University launches Modern Graphic History Library with two exhibitions beginning Nov. 16 -Nov. 8, 2007 --

"Popular art delivers the ultra-now, the super-here," Dowd notes in a brochure accompanying the Highlights exhibition. "Often, over-exposure or simple datedness follows, and such works are consigned to the garage, literally and figuratively. But later, reconnected with lost contexts and seen afresh, they provide the frisson of frozen history."
The event will focus on illustration, cartoons, comics and other images that are not traditionally addressed by art history ...

(link via Heidi)