Norman Mailer

Yeah.

Norman Mailer, Baldwin, all sorts of famous writers have dabbled it.

It's kind of like, I think it's like, you know, painting a still life or something.

It's just like a test of your craft.

like he's in the

title it's norman mailer and i i loved hearing who talked about that stan zimmerman when he was on the podcast i guess it was last summer summer before i forget exactly he explained more about the process of getting two summers ago it was 2024 yeah and how that came about so you can go back and listen to him talk about it But I just feel like so iconic.

Norman Mailer.

I feel like we would get an applause for that if it was a sitcom, but more in the sense that like they're flashing the applause, you know, because everyone's like, and this man is Norman Mailer.

And then when they tell you, they're like, oh, that is Norman Mailer.

But I don't think that he's identifiable necessarily online.

on site i feel like he's a he'd be an on name like they're like norman mailer's walking on and everyone'd be like oh my gosh what it's norman mailer i think seeing his face everyone would be like and there's that man you know

what i mean but i do think people would applaud because certain people would know and then other people would be educated on who this man i know

Amos spoke first, I followed.

At one point, I asked the audience how many of them had read a book by Norman Mailer during the preceding year.

I had also said to Martin before going on stage, the rub of time, Martin, you and Mailer, After a while, one or two hands in the audience went up tentatively at the back, and frankly, I did not believe them.

Mailer had been dead for only a decade, yet the culture that had made him, in some sense, unavoidable had also changed so radically that he was almost unread.

Have you ever seen Maidstone? I don't know if I've seen that, no.

So it's a film that Norman Mailer wrote and directed.

It's a mess.

Yeah.

Molly was called M.

And before Mary Oliver was making a living as a poet, M was the assistant to Norman Mailer.

And Mary Oliver used to type his novels.

And they were tomes.

E.E. Cumming.

And we start off in the book with the introduction and an anecdote about Norman Mailer talking about the assassination of the 60s and 70s.

Then he goes through Challenger explosion.

and we get this line resignation haunts our present civilization across human history the most dynamic and creative societies have always been almost inevitably that almost is actually quite interesting expansionary going outward from tribes and cities and nations that put their stamp on a larger world sometimes this is meant settlement and sometimes conquest sometimes isn't missionaries ill sometimes simply exploration for the sake of commerce and curiosity the case in the modern west the first the first world civilization and it meant all of them god and gold and glory settler societies and far from imperial rules races to the poles into the peaks the sprawls of roads and railroads and seam ships and airline routes and communication networks that have bound the world's peripheries into a universal web now i could put that beginning with the trans-historical generalization and the second sentence removed in almost any damn book written by a Marxist.