nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/The Writer in Opposition

When the future writer, Norman Mailer, was seven years old, the famous novelist, Sinclair Lewis, spoke about American writing of that era.
Generous praise for young Hemingway, for Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward, Angel. For Dos Passos, Wilder, Faulkner, and others. Young writers, he said, “who refuse to be genteel and traditional and dull.”
These writers gave to America, he said, “a literature worthy of her vastness.”
Mailer would become such a writer, of course. In his case the vastness wasn’t “mountains and endless prairies and enormous cities,” in Lewis’ words, but the great spill of the culture itself — the rich, crazed, spacious and dangerous times in which he lived and wrote.
A novelist is supposed to be an individual alone in a room. But Mailer seemed to be everywhere, writing everything — novels, poems, plays, stories, essays, journalism, movies, and advertisements for himself.
He was the writer in opposition, the individual who confronts power, and in his case reaches for a handful himself — “running for President,” he said, “in the privacy of my mind.” And of course running for Mayor as well, not so privately, a spectacle in three dimensions, or maybe four or five.
In those converging tides of war, politics, protest, liberation, assassination, conspiracy, sex and death, God and the Devil, Mailer was not just a voice but a force — chronicler, participant, and provocateur.
But finally a novelist. A novelist of history as lived and imagined. And one of the interesting things about his later fiction is the way in which it expanded — grew and deepened in subject and conviction. He wrote novels of sweeping range, books that overwhelm the pale gaze of readers not fully prepared for the breadth and intensity of this work.
And he engineered, at the end, a kind of reverse chronology. From World War II, the first novel, he built an epic career that draws to a close with the birth of Hitler, roughly thirty-five books later.
Here’s the first one — The Naked and the Dead. I’ve had this book, hard to believe, for fifty years. A Signet book. Complete and Unabridged. Seventy-five cents. “Over two million copies sold.” “Now a major motion picture.”
America’s vastness, now diminished — America and beyond — here was the challenge that Mailer had no choice but to accept. This was his pulse beat, a great novelist working his themes, figuring out the world, sentence by sentence.
This is what gives a writer something to do after breakfast every morning.
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Tributes to Norman Mailer

* Lynn AndrianiNorman Mailer: A Prolific Life to the End
* Robert J. BegiebingMailer on the Eve of Ancient Evenings: A Memory in Six Parts
* Mashey BernsteinMy Friend, Norman
* John BowersMailer
* Jackson R. BryerA Generous Man
* Christopher BusaThis Is a Town Worth Digging In and Fighting For
* Ezra CappellNorman Mailer: A Man of Letters Inspired by the People of the Book
* E. L. DoctorowTwo Notes on Mailer
* Laura Adams DunhamEntangled Minds: Forty Years of Encountering Norman Mailer
* Dick FontaineThe Time of His-Our Time: Chance Meetings with Norman Mailer
* Richard Lee FulghamA Grasshopper’s Lament
* Michael K. GlendayAbove All, He Was Never Afraid
* Lawrence GrobelNobel Worthy Norman Mailer
* Alexander HicksA 25th Anniversary Toast
* Eugene Cullen KennedyAnother Look at Norman Mailer, Fascinated with God and Religion
* Barry H. LeedsThe Death of Norman Mailer; The Birth of The Norman Mailer Society
* Donna Pedro LennonLosing My Voice
* Peter LevendaIn Memoriam
* David LightFrom a Novelist in Waiting
* Deborah MartinsonDespite Our Differences
* Michael MillgateNorman Mailer: A Memorial Gesture
* Stephan MorrowNorman Mailer: A Requiem
* Julian Newman1972: Norman Mailer Parties with Offbeat Tampans
* Mark OlshakerLet Me Now Praise Famous Men
* Kathrin PerutzAfter Mailer: Some Recollections
* Tom PiazzaNorman Mailer: A Remembrance
* Dotson RaderThe Bishop and Norman Mailer
* Lee SiegelValentine’s Day
* Phillip Sipiora Jr.Norman Mailer, Baseball Man
* Barbara Probst SolomonA Long Friendship
* Richard StrattonLiving Mailer
* Gay TaleseChronicler of the Century Did It All
* Marc S. TriplettThe Passing of Aquarius
* John Whalen-BridgeQ&A in 1984 with Norman Mailer
* Veronica WindholzReading Mailer in Brooklyn
Category:Contents (MR)
Category:Tributes (MR)
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Tributes to Norman Mailer/A Grasshopper’s Lament

What happens to a grasshopper when his master dies?
I can’t speak for all grasshoppers but when my master died someone asked me to write a tribute.
At first I refused because so many other grasshoppers had been physically closer to him than I. Norman Mailer and I were pen pals for thirty-six years, from 1971 to 2007. Only then was I invited to the manor. Did I have the right to write a tribute in a literary journal devoted to him?
But then a light flickered in the gloomy grottoes of my gutted green grasshopper’s mind — (forgive me that indulgence. I couldn’t resist.) — and I thought to myself, “Asking me to write a tribute is not without reason, though there must have been ten thousand grasshoppers who also studied at the Master’s feet and who also aspired to become masterful writers.
“Nevertheless, there is only one grasshopper today that has the courage to take a truly awful and over-used metaphor like ‘grasshopper’ and carry it this far without embarrassment — and that grasshopper is me. Only this grasshopper could deliberately be that bad.
“And who but me would have the courage to write, ‘gloomy grottoes of my gutted green grasshopper’s mind’? Mailer would be proud! Not of my ability but of my utter gall. Who but this grasshopper would have the brass it takes to intentionally make his readers go ‘awwwwww . . . ?’
“Who but I — and Norman Mailer!”
At this point I am going to stop being silly and tell you how huge was Norman Mailer’s heart. He was being magnanimous and generous when he chose to correspond with me as his literary apprentice for thirty-seven years. I shall always remember the swapping of long letters about the things we loved in common: writing, writers, how to write, living, life and how to live.
I want to tell you also of the encouraging words that kept me literarily alive and hopeful through some truly awful times. There were heartgrabbing mystical sparks that often erupted in our odd-fellow, pen-pal relationship. Believe that and you will have a small, slight understanding of the spiritual phenomena that cemented our souls together.
There were times long ago that I thought perhaps all these things were in my imagination and I was silly indeed to believe Norman Mailer was the near giant I believed — or had indeed created. I no longer have such doubts for reasons I cannot yet divulge. He really was a giant among us.
So I ask again, what does the grasshopper do when his master dies? I can tell you, my friends, I can tell you. You try your best to meet your master’s expectations of you. You try your best to understand that you were not special to him; you were merely one segment of the great “All and Everything,” which he so deeply loved and was part of.
And last, you blow his horn. You trumpet to the world that, yes! I knew this man!
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Tributes to Norman Mailer/Chronicler of the Century Did It All

I have never known a contemporary writer who was more famous and who seemed to be less affected by his fame than Norman Mailer.
He was never part of a social class. Yes, he went to Harvard; yes, he was an intellectual, but he transcended that. He moved up and down the classes like a great oboist playing all the notes.
He knew the underclass and he knew the upper class and he was not enchanted with either so much, but he was comfortable with both.
He had friends who were prizefighters, who were stevedores, who were hookers. They weren’t all people who were of the academy. He felt that being a good writer required knowing a large array of people.
I first met him 50 years ago and I knew him right through the final year of his life. I never knew all the friends he had because there was so much about him that was unknown to those of us that thought we knew him.
He had these dimensions, these depths of interest. He was never an authority on anything but he knew about everything. He wrote about Picasso, he wrote about Marilyn Monroe, he wrote about marching on the Pentagon. He knew about women — he had six wives, he had God knows how many lovers.
He was a man who never said no. He never said no to anything. I saw him quoted in some hardcore porno magazine 20 years ago and I thought, “God, there’s nobody he won’t talk to” — there’s Norman Mailer in Hustler magazine, Penthouse magazine, as well as The Paris Review.
He had no social insecurity. There are people who are well known and respected and that is the end of them. When they are respected it causes them to become rigid and fearful of what the public will think. Mailer, on the contrary, didn’t care. He didn’t care what you thought. I don’t mean he was arrogant. He was approachable.
Mailer had what few writers had. He was both a great fiction and nonfiction writer. He was an essayist and a journalist and, as much as any historian, he caught the middle of the 20th century. He wrote about all the great disasters and all the great wonderments of the mid-20th century.
He wrote about space, he wrote about astronauts, he wrote about the political forces from the Kennedy years on through. He wrote about war and peace and sex and feminism.
He was a chronicler of the chaos and the great orgasmic climax of the whole half-century in which he thrived as a writer.
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Tributes to Norman Mailer/Despite Our Differences

Mailer’s literature is powerful, confrontational — awe-inspiring, really. He had great power and craft as a storyteller. I didn’t always agree with Mailer, especially his views on women, but I will always respect his relentless interrogation of accepted truths. He needled the smug, and rightly so. Unlike many, Mailer fearlessly exposed his thinking, consequences be damned. When reading Mailer, I know what at least one man really thinks about sex, really thinks about politics — scary, but oh so enlightening. Knowing Norman personally was a delight — good listener, straight talk, generosity of spirit, great humor. He would dive right in to the topic at hand, and we’d explore together. Despite our differences, this feminist reverently mourns the passing of Norman Mailer — literary legend, political intellectual, man.
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Tributes to Norman Mailer/From a Novelist in Waiting

I first met Norman Mailer in 1961. I was in Grade 7, and I loved to read war stories and novels. I picked up a paperback copy of The Naked and the Dead in a department store, and, after reading it, I decided I wanted to become a writer, just like Norman Mailer. I had written several short horror stories in grades 6 and 7. So I decided to write a novel. I started by copying The Naked and the Dead from page 1, to get a feel for vocabulary, which I knew I would need for the novel. I never got beyond page 3. But I wanted to write a war novel — just like Mr. Mailer.
I met Norman Mailer again when I was in college, Why Are We in Vietnam? and The Armies of the Night. I took a few writing courses and tried writing the novel again. Instead of becoming a writer, I became a teacher. No novel was written.
The next time I met Norman Mailer was in 1973, when my wife gave me a copy of Marilyn as a second anniversary gift. I still hadn’t written the novel. For the next twenty-four years, I was both a teacher and a principal of a high school. My wife and I raised a family. Still, no novel was written.
I really met Norman Mailer in April 1997. My wife and I went to Boston to see him at Borders Books, where he was going to speak about The Gospel According to the Son and sign copies of the book. We arrived four hours before he spoke. I sat in the second row, dead center. It was a small crowd. I asked him two questions. He answered them with interest and enthusiasm. And he signed my books. And he shook my hand. What a thrill. A gentleman, indeed. I was in the presence of greatness.
Then I met Mike Lennon, Barry Leeds, and John Whalen-Bridge. We created The Norman Mailer Society, which had its first conference and meeting in 2003. I became the treasurer of The Norman Mailer Society. Me. And I really met Norman Mailer — again and again and again.
Here it is, 2008. And Norman Mailer has passed on. And I still haven’t written the novel. And I have retired from thirty-eight years in education.
I will write that novel, Mr. Mailer. And I will dedicate it to you.
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Tributes to Norman Mailer/Norman Mailer, Baseball Man

In February of 2004 my parents had a reception at our house for Norman Mailer, who was speaking at the University of South Florida. I had never met Mr. Mailer before the party, but felt that I knew a little about him since my Dad talked about him all the time. I was pretty excited that Norman Mailer would be at my house. My eighth-grade English teacher thought it was a big deal when I told him about it.
I was thirteen years old at the time and most of my life was baseball. I was a pitcher and played on two teams, two seasons a year for a total of nearly 100 games a year. The day of the party our team won and I had pitched.
It was about 9 o’clock when my coach dropped me off at home. I was still sweaty in my uniform. The house was crowded, about forty people, and everyone was standing around Mr. Mailer, who was sitting on our couch talking to a guest. When my Dad saw me, he called me over and took me up to meet Mr. Mailer. I had never met someone of his stature before and I was pretty nervous. I was also embarrassed that I had my uniform on, but my Dad insisted that Mr. Mailer wouldn’t care. “Just don’t say anything bad about the Red Sox,” he warned me. “Mr. Mailer lives in Massachusetts.” (My family has been rabid Chicago White Sox fans for generations.)
Mr. Mailer and I shook hands. I didn’t know what to say but it didn’t make any difference. Mr. Mailer looked carefully at my uniform and said that he had been a Brooklyn Dodgers fan growing up. He never liked the Yankees, he said, so we hit it off with something important in common. Mr. Mailer asked me what I liked about baseball, what position I played, and how the game went. I was amazed that someone at his level would direct all of his attention to a kid, especially one in a dirty, smelly uniform. Mr. Mailer then said to me, “A picture would be good.” He stood up and put his arm around me for two pictures, which I have and cherish very much. I thought that I was done, but then Mr. Mailer asked me, “Do you have a baseball?” I ran to get one. Mr. Mailer signed it: “To Phillip, I’m a Red Sox fan, Cheers, Norman Mailer.” Then Mr. Mailer said something I will never forget: “Phillip, I have never signed a baseball before. You now have the only one.”
Those precious minutes with Norman Mailer will stay with me the rest of my life.
I thought of my meeting with Mr. Mailer when I went with my Dad to New York for the Carnegie Hall Memorial to Mr. Mailer in April. As I listened to Mr. Mailer’s family and friends tell many touching stories of his kindnesses and ability to relate so personally to so many people, I thought of how he related to a kid in a grubby uniform that night in Tampa. And how he made that kid feel very important. Mr. Mailer, I will never forget you.
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Tributes to Norman Mailer/Valentine’s Day

When Norman died, I felt ontologically heartbroken. It was as if a category of existence itself had become defunct. I had two things to console me: the fact that I had been able to publish an essay celebrating Norman’s splendor as a writer while he was still alive; and my subsequent meeting with Norman, when he invited me to his house in Brooklyn Heights for lunch. He invited me on Valentine’s Day, which was perhaps his gracious, impish way of telling how much he appreciated what I had written about him. As for me, Valentine’s Day was entirely appropriate because I fell in love with him.
They say that Goethe could feel an earthquake hundreds of miles away, and Norman had that kind of primeval intensity. I did not understand his writing better upon meeting him. What I suddenly understood was the source of his work in his force as a man. Energy is pure delight, said Blake, and Norman’s writing, even at its darkest and most anguished, filled you with a vicarious sense of his own creative power.
In its essence, genius is generosity. Norman’s warmth toward me that snowy day — me, who had merely written about him what everyone not too mediocre or envious to admit it knew to be true — was one little tributary flowing out from his oceanic being. We ate tunafish sandwiches made by the brave and beautiful Norris (it was quite a day for me — I fell in love with her, too) drank red wine and Norman, despite his ailments, set about entertaining me. He knew that meeting Norman Mailer was a great and rare occasion, and he set about living up to it, as though he were not Norman Mailer at all, but an emissary sent by Norman Mailer to present me with a day that I would never forget. Yes, genius is generosity, I realize it now; it is the fulfillment of one’s destiny in the world by lavishing oneself on the world. There are days that stand out from the rest of life, like sudden flowers in a drab field. Norman gave me one of those days. I barely knew him. And I will always miss him.
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009

===/Reflections/===
==Articles, Interviews, Miscellany==
* Norman Mailer/The Big Bite/
* Norman Mailer/The Hazards and Sources of Writing/
* J. Michael Lennon/Long Legs, the American Tolstoy, Oswald and the KGB: A Conversation with Lawrence Schiller/
* Wayne Worcester/A Favor for the Ages/
* Mark Olshaker/The Crime of His Time/
* Robert Stone/The Loser’s Loser/
* Tracy Dahlby/Examining Mailer in a Time of Split-focus — or, What the Internet Cannot Do for Us/
* Barrie BalterSecret Agency: American Individualism in Oswald’s Tale and Libra
* Victor Peppard/Norman Mailer in the Light of Russian Literature/
* John Whalen-Bridge and Angela Oon/Washed by the Swells of Time: Reading Mailer, 1998–2008/
* Deborah Martinson/It Takes a Thief to Know a Thief: Biographies of Norman Mailer/
* Morris Dickstein/The Time of His Time/
* Kermit Moyer/Meeting Mailer/
* Christopher Busa/Norman’s Crystals/
* Donald L. Kaufmann/Courtly Mailer: The Legacy Derby/
* Linda Patterson Miller/Woman Redux: de Kooning, Mailer, and American Abstract Expression/
* Jason MosserGenre-Bending in The Armies of the Night
* Randy LaistAn American Dream: American Existentialism
* Michael MeloyTales of the “Great Bitch”: Murder and the Release of Virile Desire An American Dream
* Raymond M. Vince/Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, and Memory in Norman Mailer/
* James R. Fleming/The Faith of Romanticism: Dialectical Synthesis and Norman Mailer’s English Romantic Vision/
* Alexander Hicks/The Mailerian Dynasty: Narrative in a Structural Poetics of Mailer’s Fiction/
* Allen Ahern/Collecting Mailer/
==Mailer and Film==
* Norman Mailer/Some Dirt in the Talk/
* Norman Mailer/A Course in Film Making/
* Michael Chaiken/Editing Mailer: A Conversation with Jan Welt and Lana Jokel/
* Daniel KramerMailer, Maidstone, and Me
* Griselda SteinerMaidstone: A Sign of the Times
* D. A. Pennebaker/Norman Mailer at First Light/
* Phillip Sipiora/Perspectives on Cinema: A Conversation with Tom Luddy/
* Gary D. Rhodes/Commando Raids on the Nature of Reality/
* Hugh S. ManonHeading Off Satisfaction in Tough Guys Don’t Dance
* Stephan MorrowTough Guys Do Dance
* Mashey BernsteinMaidstone, Mailer, and Mashey: A Night at the Movies
==Classic Interpretation==
* Robert J. Begiebing/Norman Mailer: The Magician as Tragic Hero/
==Book Reviews==
* Norman Mailer: An American AestheticBarry Leeds/A British View: Mailer’s American Language/
* Mornings with MailerMichael Shuman/The Blue Hour/
==Creative Works==
* John Buffalo Mailer/It’ll Pass, It Always Does/
* Nicholas Samaras/A Psalm for Norman Mailer/
* Riccardo Duranti/The Prisoner’s Dream/
==Bibliography==
* Constance E. Holmes and Shannon L. Zinck/Norman Mailer Bibliography: 2008/
Category:2009 Vol. 3 (MR)
Category:Contents (MR)
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/A Psalm for Norman Mailer

Let there be one who wanted to lend God
a hand and bench-pressed the world,
the one whose hair refused to turn white
until the very end, who waved his canes
skyward, saying, come on, come on, then—
ready to box even with God. Who will right
our conditions but the man who explains
our conditions? Like an Old Testament prophet 
in the modern world, one man hurled
words as salve and conscience, hooks
into our flesh. When he left us, this world
became impoverished by one, as loss portends.
But let this man’s vision remain in his books.
Let there be one and let there be one again.
Category:Poetry (MR)
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Maidstone, Mailer, and Mashey: A Night at the Movies

from the University of California in Santa Barbara where I was teaching, Norman, whom I had known since 1978 when I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on Jewish aspects of his work, invited me to dinner at his home in Brooklyn Heights. As we sat around the dinner table, I said to Norman, in a moment of bravado, that I would love to see, Maidstone (1970) especially the notorious scene where Rip Torn, starring in the movie, suddenly attacks Mailer with a hammer. With blood streaming down his face, Mailer continues the scene. At the time, the movie had been out of circulation for years and there were no copies of it available. (In a sign of the times, that infamous moment can now be viewed on YouTube!)
I was not sure how Norman would react to my act of chutzpah as it was obviously a rather painful memory, in more ways than one. To my surprise, he took my request in stride, only admonishing me that the scene had to be viewed in the context of the whole movie. He paused for a moment and stood up: “You know it’s been ages since I last saw it” and he went to his library and got the tape. He then made some calls to his children who were scattered over the city and got them to come over and we had an impromptu viewing. Norman and all present laughed at the shenanigans on screen. I was especially taken by Norris’s sangfroid, as on-screen were two of his ex-wives in various stages of undress and attitude. At one point, I turned to Norman and said that I was so glad to see that he was such a “liberated feminist.” Norman laughed at my comment. It gave me an insight into the family dynamics that I had never seen before: the rapport of his whole extended family and the ease with which they communicated with one another and tolerated their respective personalities and quirks. As I left he signed one of his books for me with the inscription: “after one more good evening.” That it certainly was.
Category:Miscellany (MR)
The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Prisoner’s Dream

Caught in some Guantanamo of the mind
he dove down his own soul
and conjured up a secret alphabet
from which he managed to fashion
four different keys
guaranteed to unlock
any door
anywhere . . .
Exhausted, he fell asleep
before realizing
the keyhole was
on the other side
of his door ...
Category:Poetry (MR)