The Art of Facts

I found The Earl of Louisiana by A. J. Liebling to be detailed. I enjoyed his flow of words in structure and description. I like how he wrote to embed himself within. It was easy to read. I liked his comedy and character choices. He knew how to rope in the audience with his style. He doesn’t leave any information out to confuse the reader. It was a fun read and I wanted to read more. I liked the Governor and his speech. He spoke with broken English but was simple to understand. I liked when Liebling inched forward and made eye contact with Earl and the way the Governor responded. The Governor’s story, with the mechanical brain and the ‘blam-blams’ was attractive and funny. I liked Uncle Earl’s qualities and the written recount by Liebling.

I didn’t enjoy the excerpt from The Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer. He wrote in third person, which confuses me and other readers. I don’t know why a reporter would be comfortable in that voice, but it doesn’t feel right to me. I also noticed his long sentences which look more like paragraphs. The long drawn out descriptions confuse me. Mailer might have used this method of description to draw out his reader’s interest. But the way he had to them sum up his thoughts confused me. Here is an example:

“Mailer would not have known what to do with such young ladies-he had spent the first forty-four years of his life in an intimate dialogue, a veritable dialectic with the swoops, spooks, starts, the masks and snarls, the calm lucid abilities of sin, sin was his favorite fellow, his tonic, his jailer, his horse, his sword, say he was not inclined to flirt for an hour with one bright seventeen-year-old or another when they conceived of lust as no more than the gymnasium of love.” THAT IS ONE SENTENCE. Oh