"In his book 'The Paradox of Choice,' psychologist Barry Schwartz popularized the idea that too many choices produce paralysis and then often discontent."

"Here, instead of choice, we had constraint. And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom.... It was one of the last times I fully got into a book, in this case Norman Mailer’s 1,056-page masterwork 'The Executioner’s Song,' so immersed that I forgot there was a pandemic in the first place. I mostly ignored dating apps, which are as awful as they are necessary because everyone else is on them. But now, for a moment, there was no real shame in being alone. For the first time, I didn’t feel guilty about feeling lonely.... I thought more deeply about my life, and how I wanted to live. But I also did things I always said I wanted to do but — short of a natural disaster — knew I never would. Like watch the films of the Swedish existentialist director Ingmar Bergman.... Yes, it was a bit masochistic, but watching 12 of his films in rapid succession ended up being an unusual highlight of an unusual year. I also live-tweeted the experience, perhaps as a way to make a solitary adventure less so...."

Writes Shadi Hamid, in "Missing the solitude of covid," one essay in a WaPo collection of 5 essays looking back on the lockdown — free access link.

1. "And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom" — reminds me of the line in The Book of Common Prayer, "whose service is perfect freedom." The "who" is, of course, God. The service is chosen. The lockdown was imposed from the outside and it wasn't anything like God. But it's interesting to contemplate the difference... and to ask Grok to sketch out an "Ingmar Bergman" screenplay on the subject. 

2. "The Paradox of Choice" — yay! Glad to see that come up again. I've got a tag for it. I made that unusually specific tag because I could see this is what "they" have in store for us: a world without choice and with an induced and cultivated belief that the constriction of choice is the key to happiness. We practiced within the lockdown and "they" got to see how well we did.

3. "The Executioner’s Song" — I wrote a law review article about it long ago: "Standing, In Fluffy Slippers." That was back in 1991 when I believed I could find a new way to write within the genre of law review articles. Mailer's book is about Gary Gilmore, who, condemned to death, chose the firing squad. How's that for a "Paradox of Choice"? Oddly enough, just last Thursday a man was executed — in South Carolina — by firing squad. Could have picked lethal injection. Picked firing squad.

4. I like that the essay writer, locked down, eschewed dating apps but embraced live-tweeting. He didn't want to feel so all alone. 

Congressman Al Green is censured — for yelling and waving his cane at Trump — and House Democrats respond by singing "We Shall Overcome."

“Democrats burst out singing “We Shall Overcome” after Rep Al Green was censured pic.twitter.com/bCJ0SWWm7U

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) March 6, 2025

ADDED: I remember when Democrats sang "We Shall Overcome" to protest the pro-war platform at the National Convention in 1968. Here's Norman Mailer's description, from "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" (commission earned):

"There is also a peculiar effect whereby different books read by the same narrator can seem to agglutinate into a single mongrel super-book."

"The audiobooks of Norman Mailer’s 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago,' Steven Pinker’s 'The Sense of Style,' and Nabokov’s epic 'Ada' are all read by Arthur Morey, and I’ve begun to hear his circumspect and world-weary enunciation meld into an imaginary work in which the 1968 Republican convention is satirized between bouts of hectoring the reader about sentence construction, all in Nabokov’s wildly over-frosted late prose. Many of my beloved science-fiction audiobooks are read by Robertson Dean, whose voice sounds like a glob of pomegranate molasses falling off the edge of a spoon. It’s a good fit for techy near-future dystopias, at once hal-ishly flat and resonantly mellow, saying things like, '[she] lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche' (that’s from William Gibson’s 'Zero History')."

Writes Paul Grimstad, in "Confessions of an Audiobook Addict/It’s both strange and enlightening to move through the world with an author’s voice filling your ears" (The New Yorker).

"It has often been suggested that as [Bob] Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak..."

"... from [Bob] Neuwirth. 'The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,' Bob Spitz wrote in 'Dylan: A Biography' (1989). 'So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.' Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame. 'Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,' he wrote, 'a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.' Mr. Dylan, in his book 'Chronicles: Volume One' (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth: 'Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.'"

From "Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82/He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin" (NYT). 

Neuwirth, we're told, taught Janis Joplin the Kris Kristofferson song "Me & Bobby McGee," and he co-wrote "Mercedes Benz" with her. 

ADDED: Spitz's use of the words "hipster shuck and jive" undercuts the argument that Neuwirth created this style of personal presentation. This obituary shows the New York Times carrying on the long tradition of making black people invisible.

From the Wikipedia article "Shuckin' and jivin'":

Shuckin' and jivin' (or shucking and jiving) is African-American slang for joking and acting evasively in the presence of an authoritative figure. It usually involves clever lies and impromptu storytelling, to one-up an opponent or avoid punishment.... 

According to the linguist Barbara Ann Kipfer, the origins of the phrase may be traced to when "black slaves sang and shouted gleefully during corn-shucking season, and this behavior, along with lying and teasing, became a part of the protective and evasive behavior normally adopted toward white people."... 

In 2008, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo said of the Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama, who was running against Hillary Clinton, the candidate Cuomo supported: "You can't shuck and jive at a press conference." Cuomo received criticism from some for his use of the phrase. Roland Martin of CNN said that "'Shucking and jiving' have long been words used as a negative assessment of African Americans, along the lines of a 'foot-shufflin' Negro.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Hipster (1940s subculture)": 

In 1938, the word hepster was used by bandleader Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which defines hep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive"... 

In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk".... Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class European American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely African-American jazz musicians they followed....

In The Jazz Scene (1959), the British historian and social theorist Eric Hobsbawm... described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders"....

The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. In 1957, the American writer and adventurer Jack Kerouac described hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality." Toward the beginning of his poem Howl, the Jewish-American Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essay The White Negro, the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by the atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".

"To take aim at J.K. Rowling, Dave Chappelle or even Dr. Seuss shows real censorious ambition. But to cancel [Norman] Mailer at this moment would be an act of superfluity..."

"... like canceling Booth Tarkington or James Whitcomb Riley — a pointless kick to a fundamentally anachronistic character.... [Mailer's] reputational decline is so overdetermined, his persona so intensely out of step with our own era — the brawling macho solipsist who stabbed his own wife with a penknife — as to make him a comically easy and therefore pointless target for cancellation.... You want to impress me? You want to flex some cultural muscle? Let’s see you cancel Joan Didion.... In the recent obituaries you could see it enfolded into a larger narrative of her career, in which the conservative aspect of her writing... was something she gradually questioned and then transcended.... This narrative, in which Didion (to quote Hilton Als of The New Yorker) inherited a mythology and then 'began to see the cracks, and to wonder what those cracks meant,' is part of her protection against contemporary cancellation...."

From "Joan Didion, Conservative" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

For background on the current talk of cancelling Norman Mailer, see "Michael Wolff on Random House's Cancellation of Norman Mailer/Exclusive: The author's 'White Negro' essay helps sink a book set for 2023."

I remember when Norman Mailer was cancelled in 1971. Cancellation — and feminism — was so much more exciting and alive back then (not this dreary business we've got going today):

These days, Germaine Greer is cancelled.

It's been a while since I've stumbled across a sentence that called out to me to challenge you to diagram it.

But I ran into one today:

One could pass from heavy-set young men with a full chop of beard and a fifty-pound pack on their back to young adolescent poetesses, pale as Ophelia, prim as Florence Nightingale, from college boys in sweaters with hints of Hippie allegiance, to Madison Avenue types in sideburns, straw hats, and a species of pill-taking panache; through decent, mildly fanatic ranks of middle-class professionals—suggestion of vitiated blood in their complexion—to that part of theater and show biz which dependably would take up cause with the cleaner cadres of the Left.

That's from Norman Mailer's "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968," which I'm reading again, not because the conventions are coming up but because — as you can see from the previous post — I've been thinking about journalism in relation to violent protests. I've been asking for better investigative journalism and thinking about how much the journalism we're seeing today is a devolution of the "new journalism" that Mailer participated in creating. I had a long off-blog conversation this morning about how the article discussed in the previous post compared to Mailer's writing about the riot outside the Democratic convention in 1968 (and how today's riots aspire to attain the reputation of the 1968 riot, which is that it was the police who rioted).

Anyway, that long sentence — which my readability calculator tells me is on the 20.4 grade level — comes from a description of the crowd that had gathered to welcome Eugene McCarthy:

[T]he crowd of 5,000 at Midway waiting for Gene McCarthy were remarkably homogeneous, young for the most part, too young to vote, a disproportionate number of babies in mother’s arms—sly hint of middle-class Left mentality here at work! (The middle-class Left would never learn that workingmen in greasy dungarees make a point of voting against the mother who carries the babe—the righteous face of any such mother reminds them of schoolteachers they used to hate!) 

"Too young to vote" back then meant under 21.

"A sense of crisis enveloped the capital of Virginia on Thursday, with the police on heightened alert and Richmond bracing for possible violence ahead of a gun rally next week..."

"... that is expected to draw white supremacists and other anti-government extremists. Members of numerous armed militias and white power proponents vowed to converge on the city despite the state of emergency declared by Gov. Ralph Northam, who temporarily banned weapons from the grounds of the State Capitol. The potential for an armed confrontation prompted fears of a rerun of the 2017 far-right rally that left one person dead and some two dozen injured in Charlottesville, about an hour’s drive from Monday’s rally. The unease increased after the F.B.I. announced the arrest on Thursday of three armed men suspected of being members of a neo-Nazi hate group, including a former Canadian Army reservist, who had obtained weapons and discussed participating in the Richmond rally. The men were linked to the Base, a group that aims to create a white ethnostate, according to the F.B.I. For weeks, discussions about the rally have lit up Facebook pages and chat rooms frequented by militia members and white supremacists. Various extremist organizations or their adherents are calling Monday’s rally the 'boogaloo.' In the lexicon of white supremacists, that is an event that will accelerate the race war they have anticipated for decades."

From "Virginia Capital on Edge as F.B.I. Arrests Suspected Neo-Nazis Before Gun Rally/The three men had obtained guns and discussed traveling to Virginia for protests against new gun control measures, officials said" (NYT).

From a week ago, at NPR, "'Boogaloo' Is The New Far-Right Slang For Civil War" (audio & transcript). "Boogaloo" was originally a song and dance, then a reference to a famously bad movie ("Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo"), and then slang for "any unwanted sequel." Then it got attached to the idea of another civil war — "Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo." The NPR reporter, Hannah Allam says the word is used by "anarchists and others on the far left" as well as "right-wing militias and self-described patriot groups." We hear an audio montage of unidentified persons:

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: So many people are saying that the boogaloo is about to kick off in Virginia.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: When the boogaloo happens, these are the people that you're going to have to watch out for.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Do not think for one second that there aren't people that would love to see this thing to get started, that would love to see this boogaloo start rolling. Personally, I do not want to see that. I don't want it to come to that....

Interesting that all 3 of those persons were talking about those other people over there.

Next we hear from Oren Segal of the Anti-Defamation League, who tells us that pop culture references are "weaponized" to spread an extremist message. Then the NPR reporter, Hannah Allam wraps it up:

ALLAM: For a subset of the far-right, the fringe of the fringe, civil war isn't enough. They're spoiling for a race war. Decades later, boogaloo is no longer about music, but about menace - a word coined by black and brown people now used by some who envision a country without them.

Here's the Urban Dictionary page for the word. There's a graph showing a big spike in May 2019:

Here's the Ringo song from 1971, "Back Off Boogaloo" — "Back off boogaloo/What do you think I'm going to do?/I got a flash right from the start/Wake up, meat head/Don't pretend that you are dead." Get it? The walrus was Paul, and "Boogaloo" was Paul. No. Wait. That's the rumor...

Several commentators have interpreted the lyrics as an attack on Paul McCartney, reflecting Starr's disdain.... Ringo Starr identified his initial inspiration for "Back Off Boogaloo" as having come from Marc Bolan... Over dinner one evening at Starr's home... Bolan had used the word "boogaloo"...  "[Bolan] was an energised guy. He used to speak: 'Back off, boogaloo ... ooh you, boogaloo.' 'Do you want some potatoes?' 'Ooh you, boogaloo!'"

ADDED: It's funny that Ringo's story has Marc Bolan saying "Ooh you, boogaloo." I'd say that reinforces the theory that the Boogaloo was Paul, because one year before that pass-the-potatoes conversation between Ringo and Marc Bolan, Paul put out a song, "Oo, You":



ALSO: There are also Antifa plans to attend that Richmond rally, and not to oppose the conservative gun-rights people, Vice reports:

"I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them..."

"... as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."

From "Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies ‘aren’t cinema,’ they’re ‘theme parks.'"

Of course, literally, these things are cinema. Scorsese is making a witticism in the tradition of Truman Capote's "That’s not writing, that’s typing" (disrespecting Jack Kerouac's "On the Road").

Did Capote actually say that? Here's Quote Investigator on the subject. Truman Capote used various versions of the witticism — against Kerouac and others:

"Anyone old enough to remember the moon landing, fifty years ago today, is also old enough to remember what was said about the moon landing while it was happening."

"At the time—the very height of the Vietnam War, when the establishment that had sent up the rocket faced a kind of daily full-court-press rebellion, from what had only just been dubbed the 'counterculture'—the act of sending three very white guys to the moon seemed, as Norman Mailer wrote at the time, like the final, futile triumph of Wasp culture... Mailer’s book on the topic, 'Of a Fire on the Moon'... was the usual mid-period Mailer mix of eight parts bullshit to two parts very shrewd observation... The Apollo 11 mission was, he insisted, chilling in its self-evident futility, its enormous orchestrated energy, and its ultimate pointlessness. We went there because we could go there, with the strong implication that this was also, to borrow the title of another Mailer book, why we were in Vietnam; the Wasp establishment had been restless since it got off the Mayflower, and was always seeking new worlds to conquer for no reason. What is easy to forget now is that it was a summer balanced between two equally potent national events: the Wasp triumph of the moon landing, answered, almost exactly a month later, by the counterculture triumph of Woodstock...."

From "Between the Moon and Woodstock" by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

I'm old enough to remember the moon landing and not only do I remember what was said about the moon landing while it was happening, I remember having the same opinion as Norman Mailer.



From a review by Steven Achilles Brown (at Medium):

Throughout ["Of a Fire on the Moon,"] Mailer returns to a recurring question: is the moon landing a good and noble achievement of America, or is it an errand of the Devil?... ... Mailer seems ambivalent until the very end, when he writes

the expedition to the moon was finally a venture which might help to disclose the nature of the Lord and the Lucifer who warred for us . . . probably we had to explore into outer space, for technology had penetrated the modern mind to such a depth that voyages in space might have become the last way to discover the metaphysical pits of that world of technique which choked the pores of modern consciousness — yes, we might have to go out into space until the mystery of new discovery would force us to regard the world once again as poets, behold it as savages who know that if the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure.

This quotation discloses much about Norman Mailer. He had a degree from Harvard in aeronautical engineering, yet as a writer in this technological age, had roots in 19th-century romanticism; he wished that all men, including astronauts, be poets and philosophers. Throughout the book, indeed throughout most of his career, Mailer was preoccupied with one central theme, that God was an embattled vision: good and evil fight each other for possession of the souls of humankind....

"Politics has its virtues, all too many of them — it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things — but..."

"... one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one’s life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made."

Wrote Norman Mailer in "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" (1960). I've quoted that before, but it's jumping out at me today as I'm looking at all my old posts about Mailer's 1968 book "Miami and the Siege of Chicago." The 1968 book — about the Republican convention (nominating Nixon in Miami) and the Democratic Convention (nominating Humphrey in Chicago, with rioting in the streets) — is something I read in 2016 to prime myself to write about that year's conventions, which were so much tamer than what happened in 1968.

I'm thinking of the book today because I'm reading a New Yorker article about it, "A Great Writer at the 1968 Democratic Disaster," by David Denby. The crazy 1968 Democratic Convention took place exactly 50 years ago this week (August 26th to 29th). Denby writes:

"If, in a spirit of free intellectual and imaginative inquiry, you dared to suggest that a man who masturbated in front of a woman he barely knew without her consent..."

"... might have been acting out, in an attitude of aggressive contempt, his own shame and emasculation — if you tried to understand his actions, without justifying them — you would be shouted down and vilified. Imagine the outcry if you went further and speculated about why Harvey Weinstein allegedly manipulated some actresses dependent on his power into watching him while he was naked. Could it be that Mr. Weinstein, who reportedly had often been mocked for his appearance, wanted to dehumanize these women as well, while at the same time turning himself into a person who is watched and admired, like a person of beauty?... [I]n the realm of the free operation of intellect and imagination that is culture, let there bloom the suspension of moral judgment for the sake of a better understanding of our moral natures. It’s not because we owe anything to the likes of Harvey Weinstein; it’s because of what we owe ourselves."

Writes Lee Siegel in the NYT in "Whatever Happened to Moral Rigor?" — remembering the old days when James Baldwin, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer engaged in the "imaginative inhabiting" of evildoers.

ADDED: Siegel writes:

Closer to our own time and place, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas accidentally kills a white woman in the novel “Native Son,” and then rapes and murders a black woman; Gore Vidal wrote with sympathy about Timothy McVeigh; and David Mamet composed “Oleanna,” a prescient play about sexual harassment, accusation, guilt and innocence that, famously, had no clear resolution.

But he seems to have missed the news (last February) that David Mamet says he's written a play about Harvey Weinstein.

The New Yorker introduces a crossword puzzle.

David Remnick describes it like this:

Five constructors will take turns crafting the puzzles; they are crossword experts whose answers and clues exhibit the same qualities we aim for in all of our writing: wit, intelligence, a wide-ranging interest in the world, and a love of language....

The great Richard Wilbur, who died last fall, once published a poem in The New Yorker about doing a crossword—“a ghostly grille / Through which, as often, we begin to see / The confluence of the Oka and the Aare”—on a train. “It is a rite / Of finitude,” he wrote, “a picture in whose frame / Roc, oast, and Inca decompose at once / Into the ABCs of every day.” Even if you find that you have to look up a few words (oast: “a usually conical kiln used for drying hops, malt, or tobacco”), we hope that the ritual provides you with some pleasurable procrastination.

Oh! He's giving us the go-ahead to look up words. Well, I did the puzzle, and I didn't look anything up to complete it, though I'd have to look up 42 down to know what it referred to. I'm not doing any spoilers here, but having looked it up, I see why I couldn't read what I had.

It's only a weekly puzzle, so there won't be the kind of predictable changing levels of difficulty that you see in a week of NYT puzzles. But it took me about as long as my average for a NYT Friday puzzle, so I'm going to say it's at what we NYT puzzle-solvers call the Friday level. Friday is my favorite level of NYT difficulty, so I'm happy with the New Yorker puzzle so far.

It was nicely literary in a few places: "'Champion Literary Phallocrat,' per Foster Wallace" (which took me a few crosses to see was not Mailer, though DFW names Mailer as one of the "famous phallocrats of his generation" in the "Champion Literary Phallocrat" essay). And "1928 Virginia Wolf 'biography'" (which I got right on first guess, though I doubted myself for a while).

I liked seeing Camille Paglia ("Group that embodied 'a new kind of feminism,' per Camille Paglia”). And Germaine Greer is in there too ("'A ludicrous invention,' per Germaine Greer").

Anyway, nice start for the New Yorker crossword!

"Virtually perfect Orwellian ambivalences—(War is Peace, Love is Hate, Ignorance is Knowledge)."

That's second quotation the Oxford English Dictionary gives us for the word "Orwellian." It doesn't have the distinction of being historically first, like the Mary McCarthy quote I talk about here, but it's helpful in understanding the development of this now too-common pejorative. It's from Norman Mailer's 1959 book "Advertisements for Myself":

Gah! I feel like I'm taking the SAT. It's hard to read, and what meaning does jump out on first scan seems not worth the trouble. Yes, if this were the SAT, I'd have to read it for the extrinsic reward, but I read only for intrinsic reward now — unless I'm doing our taxes or heeding warning labels. So I had to stop. I only saw one word that I liked, "twigs." Too dry!

I switched to a review at the Amazon link (above):

If there's one human characteristic I've never been fond of it is the super egotistical one. The chest thumping, endzone dancing just kind of ruins it for me, regardless of the accomplishment.... 

Ha, I thought: Trump. Not that the guy was thinking of Trump. He wasn't. He was writing in 2015 and just happened to prefigure Trump. For no reason, I clicked on Amazon's "Look inside," and the first thing I see — it's before the title page — is this Mailer quote:

Mailer never ran for President. He wasn't that super-egotistical. But he did run for Mayor of NYC.

Here's that time I sat under a Normal Mailer for Mayor poster when I was 19:

PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Cohen.

And here's George Orwell, "1984": "I’m due back at nineteen-thirty. I’ve got to put in two hours for the Junior Anti-Sex League, handing out leaflets, or something. Isn’t it bloody? Give me a brush-down, would you. Have I got any twigs in my hair? Are you sure? Then good-by, my love, good-by!"

"What remains enthralling, though, are Millett’s close readings, her exposés of the naked emperors of the literary left."

"'After receiving his servant’s congratulations on his dazzling performance, Rojack proceeds calmly to the next floor and throws his wife’s body out of the window,' is Millett’s deadpan description of the aftermath of the hero’s sodomization of a maid in Mailer’s An American Dream. Millett then observes, 'The reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a "man."'"

Writes Judith Shulevitz in "Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values" (New York Review of Books):

For a glorious moment, this very bookish literary critic was the face of American feminism. The New York Times called her the “high priestess.” After “Prisoner of Sex” became the talk of the town—and the revered Harper’s editor Willie Morris was fired for publishing it—Mailer organized a riotous debate known as “Town Bloody Hall,” which was filmed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker and is now streamable. It was a circus, and it was Millett who set it in motion, even though she refused to show up. Mailer aimed a torrent of insults at the feminists who did agree to take the stage or appear in the audience, among them Greer, Diana Trilling, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, and Cynthia Ozick. They rolled their eyes and gave as good as they got—much better, in most cases—and the crowd roared with delight. Try to imagine a public clash of ideas being so joyously gladiatorial today.

Here it is:



ADDED: The word "bugger" (for anal sex) is rare these days. Did you know the word is related to "Bulgarian"? From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

bugger (n.) "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c. Compare Old French bougre "Bulgarian," also "heretic; sodomite."

bugger (v.) "to commit buggery with," 1590s, from bugger (n.)...

The earliest use of "bugger" to express "annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc.," is, according to the OED, in the diary John Adams, in 1779: "Dr. W[inship] told me of Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marble-head man."

AND: Here's a William Safire column (from 1995) on the word "bugger," written after some Congressman said "We're here to nail the little bugger down" (and the "little bugger" was Bill Clinton). How disrespectful was it?

"It’s surprising how little contemporary fiction has emerged from American prisons. More than two million people in the United States are incarcerated..."

"... and many prisons have writing programs. PEN America runs a writing program that reaches more than 20,000 prisoners. But very little contemporary prison literature is released by major publishing houses, which seldom consider writers who are not represented by agents and which may be wary of the logistical and ethical pitfalls of working with convicts. In 1981, Random House published 'In the Belly of the Beast,' a collection of writing by Jack Henry Abbott, a convict who served time for bank robbery and other crimes. He was befriended by Norman Mailer, who lobbied for Mr. Abbott to go free. Shortly after his release, Mr. Abbott was arrested in New York for stabbing a waiter to death...."

From "An Addict, a Confessed Killer and Now a Debut Author," a NYT book review of a book of stories by Curtis Dawkins called "The Graybar Hotel."

What we learned from Jack Henry Abbott is, don't let your admiration for someone's writing blur your thinking about the character of the person. It's especially absurd to think that if the writing is good the person is good. There's more likely to be an inverse relationship between the goodness of fiction writing and the goodness of a person.

It's one thing to publish Jack Henry Abbott and Curtis Dawkins, quite another to let them loose on the world. Keep them in prison along with the other duly convicted persons, the ones who can't or don't wow us with writing.

Here's a sample of the writing in "The Graybar Hotel":

Goodbye to Jimmy Breslin.

"Jimmy Breslin, Legendary New York City Newspaper Columnist, Dies at 88," the NYT reports.

With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively simple and poorly imitated, Mr. Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the hurly-burly music of newspapers. Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated Herald Tribune column from 1963 that sent legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”:

“Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.”

And here is how he described what motivated Breslin the writer: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

This is me, in 1970, sitting under a Mailer/Breslin poster:


PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Cohen.

The NYT obit makes no mention of the political frolic with Mailer, but here's an earlier article, from when Mailer died (2007), "Mailer’s Nonfiction Legacy: His 1969 Race for Mayor":

His running mate for City Council president was the columnist Jimmy Breslin, who suspected the worst from the very beginning: that Mr. Mailer was serious....

Mr. Breslin recently recalled Mr. Mailer’s arguing brilliantly at Brooklyn College that the minds of white and black children would grow best if they were together in the same classrooms. One student interrupted: “We had a lot of snow in Queens last year and it didn’t get removed,” he said. “What would you do about it?” To which Mr. Mailer, abruptly dislodged from his lofty oratorical perch, replied that he would melt the snow by urinating on it.

Mr. Mailer’s political nadir was a campaign rally at the Village Gate nightclub where he vilified his own supporters as “spoiled pigs.” Mr. Breslin left the rally early. He later told a friend, “I found out I was running with Ezra Pound.” Mr. Breslin was referring not to Pound’s poetry, but to his insanity.

Mr. Mailer’s “left-conservative” platform called for a monorail, a ban on private cars in Manhattan and a monthly “Sweet Sunday” on which vehicles would be barred from city streets, rails or airspace altogether. He championed self-determination — the city itself would secede and become the 51st state. Individual neighborhoods would be empowered to govern according to their own prerogatives, which could range from compulsory free love to mandatory church attendance. 

I love the random resonances of blogging: Ezra Pound just came up 2 days ago. Poets. Poetry. I love it all. Even the "lofty oratorical perch." Reminds me of that famous Samuel Johnson line: "Sir, a fish's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

And I love that poster.



New York City — the 51st State. Makes me think of that old song:

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right....
How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again....

But it's all lost to the distant past. I'm not 19 anymore. Norman's gone. Jimmy's gone. The is-he-insane blustery assemblage of masculinity isn't a satirical mayoral candidate but President of the United States. And there's no newspaper columnist to give a damn about.

"Of course, Republicans might yet prove frightening, and were much, if not three-quarters, to blame for every ill insight, they did not deserve the Presidency, never, and yet..."

"... if democracy was the free and fair play of human forces then perhaps the Wasp must now hold the game in his direction for a time. The Left was not ready, the Left was years away from a vision sufficiently complex to give life to the land, the Left had not yet learned to talk across the rugged individualism of the more rugged in America, the Left was still too full of kicks and pot and the freakings of sodium amytol and orgy, the howls of electronics and LSD. The Left could also find room to grow up. If the Left had to live through a species of political exile for four or eight or twelve good years, it might even be right. They might be forced to study what was alive in the conservative dream. For certain the world could not be saved by technology or government or genetics, and much of the Left had that still to learn. So the reporter stood in the center of the American Scene— how the little dramas of America, like birds, seemed to find themselves always in the right nest— and realized he was going through no more than the rearrangement of some intellectual luggage (which indeed every good citizen might be supposed to perform) during these worthy operations of the democratic soul when getting ready to vote."

Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968."

"The cop tries to solve his violence by blanketing it with a uniform. That is virtually a commonplace..."

"... but it explains why cops will put up with poor salary, public dislike, uncomfortable working conditions and a general sense of bad conscience. They know they are lucky; they know they are getting away with a successful solution to the criminality they can taste in their blood. This taste is practically in the forefront of a cop’s brain; he is in a stink of perspiration whenever he goes into action; he can tolerate little in the way of insult, and virtually no contradiction; he lies with a simplicity and quick confidence which will stifle the breath of any upright citizen who encounters it innocently for the first time. The difference between a good cop and a bad cop is that the good cop will at least do no more than give his own salted version of events— the bad cop will make up his version."

Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968" (pages 181-182).

"Miami and the Siege of Chicago" was the book Meade and I listened to as we drove to Vail, Colorado and back over the past week. We're preparing for the present-day conventions coming up, and I wanted to get some grounding in the events that I remember from when I was 17, finishing high school, and thinking what a radical I would need to be when I got to college.



That's the 5th time I've put that picture on the blog. (Previously: "The 51st State," "Norman Mailer died," "Althouse in 1970," and "It would be obscene to pine for the urban agony that fomented [Norman] Mailer’s run [for Mayor of NYC].")

PHOTO CREDIT: Stephen Cohen.

In search of a Free Society.

Here's a list of 17 demands presented in a leaflet that was distributed at the protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, as reported by Norman Mailer in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968." Boldface mine:

1. An immediate end to the War in Vietnam….

2. Immediate freedom for Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and all other black people. Adoption of the community control concept in our ghetto areas….

3. The legalization of marihuana and all other psychedelic drugs….

4. A prison system based on the concept of rehabilitation rather than punishment.

5.…abolition of all laws related to crimes without victims. That is, retention only of laws relating to crimes in which there is an unwilling injured party, i.e. murder, rape, assault.

6. The total disarmament of all the people beginning with the police. This includes not only guns, but such brutal devices as tear gas, MACE, electric prods, blackjacks, billy clubs, and the like.

7. The Abolition of Money. The abolition of pay housing, pay media, pay transportation, pay food, pay education, pay clothing, pay medical help, and pay toilets.

8. A society which works toward and actively promotes the concept of “full unemployment.” A society in which people are free from the drudgery of work. Adoption of the concept “Let the Machines do it.”

9.…elimination of pollution from our air and water.

10.…incentives for the decentralization of our crowded cities…encourage rural living.

11.…free birth control information…abortions when desired.

12. A restructured educational system which provides the student power to determine his course of study and allows for student participation in over-all policy planning….

13. Open and free use of media…cable television as a method of increasing the selection of channels available to the viewer.

14. An end to all censorship. We are sick of a society which has no hesitation about showing people committing violence and refuses to show a couple fucking.

15. We believe that people should fuck all the time, anytime, whomever they wish. This is not a program to demand but a simple recognition of the reality around us.

16.…a national referendum system conducted via television or a telephone voting system…a decentralization of power and authority with many varied tribal groups. Groups in which people exist in a state of basic trust and are free to choose their tribe.

17. A program that encourages and promotes the arts. However, we feel that if the Free Society we envision were to be fought for and achieved, all of us would actualize the creativity within us. In a very real sense we would have a society in which every man would be an artist.

ADDED: Googling some text, I find testimony from Abbie Hoffman (at the Chicago 7 trial) claiming authorship of the list:

I will read it in the order that I wrote it. "Revolution toward a free society, Yippie, by A. Yippie.

There was a #18 on the list:

And eighteen was left blank for anybody to fill in what they wanted. "It was for these reasons that we had come to Chicago, it was for these reasons that many of us may fight and die here. We recognize this as the vision of the founders of this nation. We recognize that we are America; we recognize that we are free men. The present-day politicians and their armies of automatons have selfishly robbed us of our birthright. The evilness they stand for will go unchallenged no longer. Political pigs, your days are numbered. We are the second American Revolution. We shall win."

"I have always felt that a man cannot seek the Presidency and get it simply because he wants it."

"I think that he can seek the Presidency and obtain it only when the Presidency requires what he may have to offer (the Presidency was then a mystical seat, mystical as the choice of a woman’s womb) and I have had the feeling (comfortably pleasant and modest again—no phony Nixon here) and it may be a presumptuous feeling, that because of the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party, because of the need for leadership particularly qualified in foreign affairs, because I have known not only the country, but the world as a result of my travels, that now time (historical-time—the very beast of the mystic!) requires that I re-enter the arena. (Then he brought out some humor. It was not great humor, but for Nixon it was curious and not indelicate.) And incidentally, I have been very willing to do so. (Re-enter the arena.) I am not being drafted. I want to make that very clear. I am very willing to do so. There has never been a draft in Miami in August anyway. (Nice laughter from the Press—he has won them by a degree. Now he is on to finish the point.)…I believe that if my judgment—and my intuition, my 'gut feelings' so to speak, about America and American political tradition—is right, this is the year that I will win."

Said Richard Nixon at a press conference just before the GOP convention nominated him for President in 1968, quoted in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968," by Norman Mailer, whose commentary appears in the parentheticals.

Reporters had challenged Nixon to explain why he was running for President again, and he said "this is the time I think when the man and the moment in history come together," and here's what Mailer said about that:

An extraordinary admission for a Republican, with their Protestant detestation of philosophical deeps or any personification of history. With one remark, Nixon had walked into the oceans of Marx, Spengler, Heidegger, and Tolstoy; and Dostoevski and Kierkegaard were in the wings. Yes, Richard Nixon’s mind had entered the torture chambers of the modern consciousness!)

By the way, mystical as the choice of a woman’s womb is not a reference to the right to choose an abortion.



AND: I've added boldface to the quote. That was the line that jumped out at me as I was listening to the audiobook yesterday. I had to pause and think about this year's presidential election. I assume Nixon was bullshitting when he claimed to believe that the Presidency requires what he may have to offer, but I thought about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Imagine the 2 of them in a debate, presented with the Nixon quote and asked to say why the presidency requires what you may have to offer. It's easy to think of what Trump would say. Terrible deals have been made, and he had to come forward and offer his master dealmaking services. But what would Hillary say? What can she do that we need right now?