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

I would like to share with you a seminal work of nonfiction by my father: until now, a hidden literary gem, and one that helped me get started in my career as an artist.
I was fifteen, spending the summer in Provincetown with my father, Norris, and my eight siblings. Privacy was scarce, but somehow, a two-week stretch emerged in which I had my own room.
As an only child living with my mother the rest of the year, I was well equipped psychologically to spread out. I decided to tackle a sculpture that I’d been thinking about for some time. As any serious contemplative will do, I began by collecting driftwood. Soon, buckets of sand, and seaweed appeared on the floor. The carpeted floor.
From the Army Navy store in town came more buckets, filled with brass buttons and machine gun bullets, rusted ones, which looked to me like beads for a necklace.
All the while, in my artistic fervor, clothes and wet bathing suits and towels were strewn across the room. I think, subconsciously, I was recreating scenes from The Naked and the Dead. Even though, I hadn’t read it yet.
At fifteen I was still too shy to speak easily with my father. Days might pass without conversing, but we would always exchange meaningful looks. We were both absorbed in our work, and I felt we shared the unspoken understanding of artists. I was sure, too, that he recognized in me a fellow genius. So I was not surprised the day when, returning to my room, I found a note from Dad, placed at the entrance, so as not to disturb. “He must be really impressed to put it in writing,” I thought, and eagerly read his assessment of my work:
My father was always superstitious about giving compliments. And I knew this. Nonetheless, I was devastated. But, only partially. Because I realized, with real happiness, that my habits mattered to my father. And on some level, he had stopped being Norman Mailer and become just my father. I cleaned up my room.
Dad had a great generosity whereby, if he felt you were serious or excited about something, he would forget his anger, and give you his full attention. He found me a little later and said, “Listen, I didn’t realize you were up to something in there. I took another look, and I’m pleased. I think you may be an artist. Finish the sculpture, I’d like to live with it a while. Maybe we’ll put it in the Living Room.”
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/Norman Mailer: Ambush at the Center

Raymond Chandler said it best, I think:
If the mediating factor between Gesture and Reality is the Symbol, then the mediating factor between Values and Culture is Art.
Provincetown Arts magazine explored that proposition in 1999 celebrating one hundred years of Provincetown as an art colony. In it the painter Hans Hofmann asked, What is an artist? He concluded: “The life’s work of an artist is ‘the work of art.’ . . . It is the life’s work of an artist that creates a new dimension of the spirit.”
On the role of the artist, Norman Mailer said:
In that same one-hundreth anniversary issue he said,
Eager to lend God a hand he gave us a world where
He hyped us with grandiose imagery and just when we were ready to call him on his hyperbole he yanked the play away from us with genius self-deprecation hauling us through the metaphysical storm grinning all the way.
But, of course, that wasn’t all. Scarcely pausing, now that our critical fists were lowered, he counterpunched with a startling hypothesis or two punching holes through the murk. We were sandbagged on the primrose path of curiosity with a verbal timing that would do credit to Richard Pryor.
It was next to impossible to resist ribbing Norman’s seeming pretensions, if only as relief from the weightiness. Everything was always so HEAVY! But, his pronouncements had a way of being so intriguing.
You found yourself practically racing through the words to see how he was going to bring it off — whether he could bring it off. More times than not, upon completion of the argument you went back to the beginning, carefully searching out the key phrases not so much seeking to refute but to absorb the flow of language — letting the rush of words — so often ideas in cosmic contention — arrive in compelling metaphor seizing your imagination.
To the last he was the Mailer of paradox, of contradiction. To the last ready to enter the camp of the enemy seeking confrontation and conversion.
His work is the culmination of a lifetime of agonizing, which has served to bring him to his ultimate conception that God is an Embattled Vision.
The odor of time and mortality has summoned Norman to the end of the course he set so bravely — his vision of God and Humankind made manifest in a searing bond with his artist’s blood.
There’s a whiff to bring us up to the mark of history.
His work now ends as it began seeking to sniff out roots of the past and intimations of the future and in this heady fusion, Norman, I remember you said:
And I thought of Jack London and The Call of the Wild:
Norman
Norman
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/Norman at the Table

We are in Carnegie Hall and we are celebrating a great man. And in that context, would you please make sure your cell phones are off. Or we’ll ask Norman to think of something to make you sorry. Let me start this evening, this afternoon, evening, early evening, with two words — Norris Church. She has seen the morning and the evening, the fear and the pride, and she has seen the applause and the attacks, and I know that she has felt it all. And I’ll bet you this — she knew how much Norman loved her.
I’ll never forget one night after Norman came to my table. We had finished the conversation and I said, “Where are you going?” Norman said, “To the hospital.” He looked at me with soft fear in his eyes, and he said, “I don’t know how Norris is doing, but I know she’s a fighter.”
In one of my “brilliant questions,” I once said to Norman, “What about the novel?” He said, “It’s the finest moral judgment that can be made, moral judgment not to be found in science, in psychoanalysis, in social work, or in the clergy.” I said, “Or in journalism or whatever.” I asked, “Why a novel? Take me back to the novel.” Norman said, “It offers the highest challenge for moral inquiry. Writing a book is like being married to a woman you’re not too happy with. You’re worried about it all the time. You want the marriage to be better. Being married right now for me is much easier than writing a book.”
“Because you are married to a woman you want to be with?” I said. “Yes,” Norman said, “but when I’m writing a book it’s like I’m married to a woman who I’ve got to improve now. I’ve got to tell you, any man who thinks he can improve his wife is a fool.”
The words of Norman Mailer.
I loved him for so many reasons. I loved the way he was obsessed about fame and the famous, Marilyn Monroe and Jesus, Adolf Hitler, and Lee Harvey Oswald, Gary Gilmore, and Jack Abbott, and people he loved, like Muhammad Ali. I loved him for his ambitions and his obsessions, like war in The Naked and the Dead; like fame, Marilyn; like crime, The Executioner’s Song; like revolution, The Armies of the Night; like secrets, Harlot's Ghost; like history, Ancient Evenings; like sex, everything.
He obsessed about all of this and he also obsessed about his favorite topic — himself. That’s the topic that I explored in twelve conversations, it was so much fun to be there because he was so many people, and there were so many people to explore, and he was there to tell you everything that was on his mind, and every opinion he had in a thousand ways.
Category:Tributes (MR)
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/One More for the Road

While he was writing The Fight, his account of the epic boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire, my uncle discovered a book of Bantu philosophy that excited him because it articulated an idea he had always held but never expressed that people were not so much beings as they were forces.
I thought of that when he was in the hospital at the end of his life, in a weakened state, voice muted by the tube in his trachea, because his force, or what the African tribesmen called muntu, was still so powerful. On what would turn out to be the last day of his life, the whole family gathered in his hospital room. The doctors had warned us that his organs were failing, but when we saw the light in his blue eyes along with the return of some of that irrepressible energy, none of us could believe they were right. Don’t read too much into it, they said. A dying man sometimes receives a last gift of clarity and energy before the end.
Our own energy, by contrast, seemed to ebb and flow, and go up and down, and so we took turns and spelled each other, and people went out and people came back. At one point, several of us were in the room, and my phone rang. It was Michael Mailer. He was out having lunch with some of the others. He said, “Do you think Dad would like a last drink?” This immediately struck me as a great idea. I leaned in close to the bed and said, “Norm, Michael wants to know if you’d like him to bring back a drink for you….” My uncle’s eyes did a veritable jig. “What’ll it be?” I asked him. “Scotch? Vodka tonic? Rum and OJ?”
Waiting for Michael to get back with the booze, Norman began to get impatient. Twice, he mouthed the words, “Dammit, where’s that drink?”
Michael finally returned with a bottle of rum and a container of orange juice. But all we had was a plastic cup which, if you knew my uncle, was worse than no cup at all. So Michael went to the nurses’ station and managed to get a real glass, and we started to mix the drink. Norman took over at this point, indicating the correct proportions for water, orange juice, and rum. One last problem: how to give it to him. Because of the breathing tube in his throat, he wasn’t supposed to drink; he could choke. Sacrilege, but we had to give him the drink with one of those lollipop-shaped sponge-on-a-stick thingies. I dipped the sponge in the glass then put it in his mouth. He gave a look of utter exasperation. Then he grabbed the glass out of my hand. I looked to Michael. He shrugged. We all watched as Norman put the glass to his lips and took a nice long sip. Then another. He was going to drink that drink the way it was supposed to be drunk even if killed him.
After a few sips, he allowed himself a smile. We all did. Norman held up the drink and pointed at each of us. He wanted us all to share the drink with him. So we passed the glass around and we each took a sip, drinking in the Mailer muntu and the sweet taste of the rum.
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/Oysters

Despite my father’s impatience with the language of pop culture, I would venture, albeit timidly, to call him, a “Foodie.” From his pot roast fixation to his jelly omelet, his tastes were nothing if not eccentric. His love for Hershey’s chocolate, his distrust of garlic, he carried to the end. But in his last months, nothing gave him more culinary pleasure than the unlikely delicacy, the oyster.
Holding tightly to his family, a handful of friends, and his poker game, his decline had turned his days uncomplicated. Often he would sit for hours, a dark silhouette against the backdrop of the sea, studying the social hierarchy of the seagulls. His movie star blue eyes were now more reminiscent of the pale color of the Provincetown bay. His body, grown thin, was camouflaged just barely by what had become his attire for every occasion: Uggs, blue sweats, and a polar fleece vest. My husband, Peter, and I would make the long trip to visit and were rewarded with his pure delight, and a promise for an oyster dinner.
Navigating the terrain from house to restaurant all but did him in. Thankfully though, cocooned in a corner booth, revived by a whiskey sour and a bosomy waitress, he found his second wind. We spoke of politics, family gossip, and his work. When the oysters arrived, my husband and father conspiratorially downed the slippery creatures extolling their virtues, as aphrodisiac, perfect protein, brain food. As the meal ended, we watched with amusement as my father carefully examined each shell. He placed a few reverently in his takeaway box. “If you’re lucky,” he said with quiet authority, “you’ll find that the shells reveal the most remarkable faces.” With that, enlivened by the good company, flanked by my beautiful stepmother, Norris, he gripped his canes and made ready to go. Sadly, as I watched him exit, his bent over form, part hermit crab, part king, I sensed his end was near.
The morning of my father’s funeral, I stepped out on the deck to take in the Provincetown light. Sheltered from the elements, his collection of shells caught my eye. Hundreds of these invertebrates lay neatly placed, their bone white shape exquisitely offset by the grey splintered wood. In honor of my dad, I peered down to take a careful look. Their craggy faces stared back, ghoulish and wizened like bereft old souls. But they were fantastical, too, with wild expressions running across the topography of their surfaces. And it came to me then that these creatures of the sea were a gift: A testimony of a man who was not afraid to claim the extraordinary in the ordinary, and to hold and finally to pass on a small but enduring piece of the cosmos.
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/Taking Leave of Norman

His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was one of the books I devoured as a young man soon after World War II. Later on I admired Norman as one of the few courageous writers, for he knew that our literary profession is, at the same time, a political task.
As writers of the same generation, writing in our beginnings about similar experiences, Norman and I were often named in one breath. The last time we met was in June 2007 for a joint appearance in the New York Public Library. When Norman came, escorted in his wheelchair and well protected by his beautiful wife Norris, he looked frail. But as soon as he, walking on crutches, had entered the stage, he looked young, vivid, and his eyes flashed when he addressed the huge audience saying in a stunningly serene way that this would be probably his last appearance in public.
Then we spoke. Norman found good and understanding words about what he had read from my recently published autobiographical book, pages dealing with World War II — the beginnings of our lives as grown-ups. We discussed in an open way writing about personal experiences, stories often difficult to tell, and Norman proved to be a sympathetic, extremely generous colleague and friend. In the end we stood together in the limelight in front of the enthusiastic audience.
At the reception after this event Norman was sitting again in his wheelchair. Taking leave, we looked each other, both knowing that we would never meet again.
I will never forget this moment.
Category:Tributes (MR)
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/Tapestry

A couple of months before dad died, my husband and I went to Provincetown to visit him. The morning we left I went up to his bedroom to say goodbye. He looked at me with his very blue eyes and said “Susie, our family is a fine tapestry, you must take care it doesn’t unravel.” I panicked! I felt that as the oldest, he had left me the legacy of keeping the family together. On second thought, I realized or perhaps hoped, that he had meant it was a job for all of us: his nine children, Norris our stepmother for thirty years, aunt Barbara, and Peter our cousin.
I got to thinking about how this tapestry was woven and went back to the time I was three or four years old, living in Mexico with my mother. Dad would drive down with Adele, put me in the 1950’s version of a child’s seat and then drive back to New York on a voyage that took eight days. I used to take this for granted until I had children of my own and realized the amount of energy and devotion such an endeavor demanded.
Later on, as the family grew larger, he repeated this kind of emotional involvement in different ways with all his children. We would spend one month of every summer with him, usually in Maine. We were not allowed to invite friends and, as a result, we learned to be a family. Dad would coax us, sometimes bully us into activities from plays to games to sports, which not all of us appreciated. It could have been a disaster, but in spite of the grumbling and groaning that went on, we enjoyed each other’s company immensely.
As my own children were born, we traveled every year from Chile to Provincetown gathering at Dad and Norris’s home. Many times there were more than twenty of us around the dinner table; everyone speaking and laughing at once, with stories streaming up and down the room; a zany and unruly group. In twenty-five years I think that I only missed one summer.
And now … the tapestry has a life of its own. It tightens and grows without the master’s direction. Each one of us has an email list of 22 members called “family” which keeps the threads of the fabric strong and vibrant.
Most people think of Dad as a great writer. I like to think of him as a master weaver.
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/The Mystery of Norman Mailer

As an amateur pianist, I’ve always liked the story about Vladimir Horowitz, perhaps apocryphal, that when asked by someone how to get to the stage of Carnegie Hall, he said, “Practice, practice, practice.” However, he didn’t have it quite right. It turns out you can also get here by being related to Norman Mailer.
People sometimes ask me what it was like to be Norman’s sister. Some of them are delighted and some dismayed when I say that, mostly, it was wonderful. He was loving and supportive, and he was certainly exciting to be with. Not only did he include me in much of what went on in his life, he always made me feel that he really liked having me around.
Since we had grown up in the same household with the same parents, he was in some ways just my brother. But as time went on, he began to evoke in me a strange mixture of familiarity and astonishment. Where, really, had he come from? I never bought into his belief in reincarnation, but I’ve often thought that he was his own best argument for it. Indeed, I think Ancient Evenings is his most autobiographical novel, although whether he was Rameses or Menenhetop, I really couldn’t say.
One day last summer, we were talking and I had a small epiphany. I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I told him that I had just decided that the reason I always found him interesting was that I never knew what he was going to say next. He laughed and said, “Neither do I.”
So, perhaps he was a mystery even to himself….
Shortly after Norman died, I received a letter from my good friend, Jillen Lowe. She had not seen him for a number of years, but she wrote that when she heard the news, color faded from her world. I thought yes, that is the way it feels, and the way it is going to be. But for those of us for whom the world seems grayer now, there is comfort in all that Norman has left — his books, of course, memories, ideas, the sense of his spirit. And, to use one of his favorite expressions, most agreeably, his large, wonderful family, Norris and all the kids. Now his children, all nine of them, talented, interesting individuals, imbued with his élan, along with my son and our cousin, will talk and reminisce.
Category:Tributes (MR)
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/The Time of His Time: A Celebration of the Life of Norman Mailer/The Towering and the Dead

The last and — and certainly most significant time that I spent with Norman — was a few weeks before he passed. I was with Richard Stratton and Norris and John Buffalo at the Brooklyn pad. Over the last couple of nights, I’ve tried to close my eyes in a dark room and reconnect with those eyes of his that have been so discussed tonight and ask him what I should say here. In a voice from the cosmos, I heard his voice say, “Whatever it is Penn, write it on a Blackberry, that way you’ll know when it says ‘full field’ it will be brief enough.” Well, that’s not really true but it is true in relationship to Norman, because he understood unpredictable women, and I was forced to write it on a Blackberry, due to some such unpredictable circumstances in the last twenty hours or so. So, here it is, a bit less than a “full field.”
Norman Mailer had a deep and very personal respect for what was earned. The boxer, a warrior in the ring whose prowess comes only with years of lonely warfare with his own mind and heart, the early morning runs, foot work, trunk work, bag work, punishing years of sparring, and collecting a refinement of his instincts in the brutal competition of the game. He respected the ambitious politician, who began forming their goals and hungers and cutting their trails at University, then slogging through the bureaucratic quagmires to hone his or her D.C. navigational skills. Norman himself was both a natural of the highest order, and an earner — one who has left us with a literary legacy that can only be observed as towering.
And now, Norman Mailer is dead. He has earned something unique. This one sentence, “Norman Mailer is dead,” is itself a literary line for our times of contest winners, and poseur dolls and dolts. “Norman Mailer is dead” is a lament of what greatness once was, and a bold reminder of what greatness should be aspired to. Thank you, Norman Mailer.
Category:Carnegie Hall Memorial