THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader More Sontags This week's Susan Sontag Certificate—The Standard Reader's way of acknowledging inanity by artists and intellectuals—goes to the Columbia University faculty...
...But even that isn't enough to make him a good read...
...You don't mind so much that his solution to male Communists is to cut them into pieces with a Tommy gun...
...It was worth a shot...
...The famous prose isn't as clean as its parodies...
...As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, this is the same Columbia that disinvited John Leo and Dinesh D'Souza because they were, well, not leftists...
...Unfortunately, sex and violence are the novels...
...It's finally just too creepy and silly to be worth the effort...
...But the senate just wanted unanimously to get on record that students should feel free to do so...
...But there are enough lines like "The guy was dead as hell" to keep you going...
...Spillane His Guts It was easy...
...Sure, Spillane was hated by Commies, eggheads, and all the rest of the self-satisfied prigs of the 1950s...
...How c-could you?' she gasped...
...But your skin starts to crawl when his solution to a female Communist is to rip off her dress and beat her, drooling over the sight of "a naked woman and a leather belt...
...Who could object to that...
...In the meanwhile, we'll simply point out that the worst result of evil is the corruption of something good...
...His 1949 I, the Jury sold five million copies in its first paperback edition—and ended with detective Mike Hammer shooting the love of his life because she had killed his partner...
...When Columbia doesn't just mean freedom for approved causes, the school will deserve applause for upholding free speech...
...The Standard Reader More Sontags This week's Susan Sontag Certificate—The Standard Reader's way of acknowledging inanity by artists and intellectuals—goes to the Columbia University faculty senate, which voted 46 to 0 to "reaffirm open discourse as a prime value in our community...
...It was easy,' I said...
...The only objectionable parts are the sex and violence...
...Almost anywhere else, we'd applaud this affirmation of free speech...
...One Lonely Night and Kiss Me, Deadly are more thrillers than mysteries, but they're fast-moving, hard-boiled, and—un-like most noir—make moral distinctions between good guys and bad guys...
...11 attacks...
...She had already been converted to democratic capitalism by her first encounter with Hammer—on a bearskin rug, no less...
...It's not that Hammer lives in a world in which beautiful women tear off their blouses and moan "Make me" fifteen minutes after meeting him...
...Your first impulse will be to like Mickey Spillane...
...It's unnecessary effort...
...But the senate did it because, it claimed, "some student members of the Columbia community have felt pressure to curtail their opinions of the national response to the Sept...
...The problem is that they have to punch him in the jaw and get punched back before tearing off their blouses...
...And I'd just as soon not know exactly what is going on with the transvestite Juno, the homme fatale of Vengeance is Mine...
...to write low-class lines is a high-class art, and Spillane is the kind of writer who says "utilize" when he means "use...
...It didn't cite any examples of students who had been stopped from denouncing the United States, primarily because there don't seem to be any examples...
...I only had a moment before talking to a corpse, but I got it in...
...Long out of print—missing even from the Library of America's volumes canonizing pulp noir—Spil-lane's first six Mike Hammer novels have been reissued in one last effort to claim for him the fame that has enhaloed Hammett and Chandler...
...He hated communism, organized crime, and district attorneys...
...Here's a guy who was loathed by the 1950s literary establishment...
...The same Columbia where Ward Connerly's speech against affirmative action was howled down by students shouting "bigot" and "Uncle Tom...
...BY J. BOTTUM The Mike Hammer Collection, in 2 vols., by Mickey Spillane (New American Library, 513 pp...
...517 pp., $15 each...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 10
