Long Pauses

Tag: Author: Mailer

  • The Same as It Ever Was

    So I just finished writing this paragraph, and it occurs to me that at some point I stopped writing about the past.

    Mailer captures something of this revolutionary sensibility early in The Armies of the Night, when during his drunken speech he incites roars of applause by describing the American bureaucrat’s heart as “full of shit.” “He was off into obscenity,” Mailer writes, and what follows is a three-page meditation on profanity as a defining characteristic of American life. For Mailer, the aesthetic of obscenity is profoundly democratic and egalitarian, a by-product of story-telling traditions in small towns and city streets. But within the context of the Cold War, profane language — like the profane acts it represents — serves as a necessary corrective to the hypocrisies and injustices of modernization and the permanent war economy. “The American corporation executive,” Mailer writes, “who was after all the foremost representative of Man in the world today, was perfectly capable of burning unseen women and children in the Vietnamese jungles, yet felt a large displeasure and fairly final disapproval at the generous use of obscenity in literature and in public” (49). That Mailer’s opinion of the corporate executive echoes exactly D.J. Jethroe’s is no coincidence, for this selective amnesia — this sense that all is permissible so long as it is state-sanctioned, to the benefit of American markets, and hidden from plain view — is, according to Mailer, precisely why America was in Vietnam.

    D.J. Jethroe, by the way, is the narrator of Why Are We in Vietnam?, the novel Mailer published just months before the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. Yeah, so that’s me engaging in some word play in that last sentence.

  • Ten Years Gone (and other things)

    Ten Years Gone (and other things)

    I’m afraid that Long Pauses is fast becoming an outlet for end-of-the-week rambles, written while I drink away a Friday afternoon. The following is an incomplete list of topics I would cover at much greater length and with much greater insight given the time, energy, and inclination.

    Radical Liberalism. I’ve spent all day, every day this week sitting in the library, chugging through my Norman Mailer chapter. In the true spirit of “writing as discovery,” I’ve realized in the last day or two that my chapter is really about trying to define the term “New Left,” which is actually a good bit more difficult than you might imagine. One of the Right’s great rhetorical victories over the last three decades, I think, is their collapsing of fifteen years of socio-political history (roughly 1960-1975) down to a single pejorative. “New Left” has become synonymous with the countercultural excesses and lame pseudo-Maoist ramblings of the late-60s and early-70s. I’m trying to complicate that (as they say in the trade) by reading the larger narrative of the Cold War Left and by looking more closely at the various stages of the life (and death) of the New Left.

    Two years ago, when I first pitched my dissertation idea to a faculty member in hopes that she would agree to join my committee, she listened patiently as I rambled and rambled, then she interrupted me to ask, “Okay, so what’s the point?” I told her the truth — that I had no idea what my point was but that I hoped to find my own politics during the writing process. Dramatic pause. “Great,” she said. “Your project will have a voice. Count me in.”

    I can’t say that I’ve necessarily found my politics yet, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to discover much that is worth salvaging amongst the wreckage of the New Left, especially among the group of intellectuals who, through their work in the 1950s, were instrumental in shaping the theories of the Free Speech Movement and the early ventures of Students for a Democratic Society. In that regard, Kevin Mattson’s book, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970, has been a great resource, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I’ve been using it to the point of plagiarism.

    Summer Reading. I would also probably write about this article in which Michael Chabon describes the months he spent sitting in a crawlspace, producing what would eventually become his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I haven’t read Pittsburgh since, oh, 1994 or so, but, coincidentally, it’s been on my mind lately. As have Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, both of which Chabon mentions as direct inspirations. Actually, I knew they were his inspirations already. He and I talked about it when I was writing my Master’s thesis — and by “talked” I mean “exchanged emails for a week or two.”

    The main reason I’ve been thinking about Pittsburgh and Columbus is that my summer is settling into a pleasant but oddly-disciplined routine. I get to the library at 8:30 and spend an hour or so drinking coffee while checking email and reading blogs. At 9:30 I reread everything I’ve already written and spend 30 minutes or so editing. At 10, a woman sits down at the table four chairs to my left (did I mention I always sit in the same place?), and she studies there while I write. Just before noon, we both get up and leave. I take a walk and get some lunch. I don’t know where she goes. After lunch I grab a cup of coffee, return to my table on the 4th floor, and write until 4:30.

    As Chabon mentions in that piece, both his and Roth’s novels (and Fitzgerald’s) are built around a simple, 3-act structure: June, July, August. Both also feature protagonists who work in a library. Get the connection? Sidebar: I’m about to begin rereading E.L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel, which features a protagonist who is trying to complete his doctoral dissertation, a study of the Cold War Left.

    Life. Art. Life. Art. My daughter. My sister. My daughter. My sister.

    Oops. Beer’s empty.

    Trouble Every Day. I would definitely write about Claire Denis’s film, which I watched for the first time a few days ago and which was every bit as beautiful and every bit as disturbing as I expected. (See new title image.) In the process, I would also unleash a breathless diatribe against the shameful lack of curiosity that characterizes so much of American culture, from the White House — and especially the White House — on down. I would rant about Bush’s sickly, starved imagination and about evangelicalism’s fear of metaphors, and it would all be inspired by Mick LaSalle’s mind-numbing review of Trouble Every Day in the San Francisco Chronicle. Stuff like this wouldn’t piss me off nearly so much if critical response didn’t directly impact our ability to see these films. Is it any wonder that L’Intrus, the best new film I saw last year, can’t find American distribution when a critic for the major newspaper of America’s most progressive city won’t give even five minutes of thought to Denis’s work?

    The Song of the Moment. A week or two ago I had one of those “sit down cross-legged in front of the CD collection and pull out stuff you haven’t listened to for years” kind of nights. Without really meaning to, I found myself distracted by a mood. Every song I cued up would have sounded better coming out of a record — you know, with the breath and hiss and pops of a turntable. They also would have sounded better coming out of a car stereo, if the car were being driven with the windows down on a warm spring evening. I’m still thinking of putting together a mix CD. Let me know if you’re interested.

    “Ten Years Gone” was the first song I hit that made me turn out the lights and close my eyes. What I really wanted to listen to, I discovered, was side 3 of Physicial Graffiti. (I had to make do with “disc 2.”) I love how Bonham drives that album by always staying at the very back of the beat. His drum fills actually make me anxious. I always worry that he won’t get there in time.

    And Other Stuff. Like how excited I am about the prospect of buying new Sufjan Stevens and Pernice Brothers albums in the next few weeks. And how much I enjoyed Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise, which I also saw for the first time this week. And how it feels to live without a kitchen for going-on-six-weeks-now because the contractor and subcontractors are having issues. And how that damn wooden chair at the library is giving my back fits.

    And so on.

  • When (My) Worlds Collide

    “He just sits there drinking iced tea, never ordering a thing to eat. So he was married to Marilyn Monroe. Big deal.”

    “Um, that was Arthur Miller. Not Norman Mailer.”

    It’s a common mistake.

    I only watch one network television show — Gilmore Girls — and I watch it every damned week. Tonight’s episode, by my reckoning, counted officially as dissertation work. Norman Mailer was actually in the episode. Many, many times. And at one point Sookie yelled at him while waving about a paperback copy of Armies of the Night — the same edition, I might add, that I have meticulously underlined and annotated. I feel a bit dizzy.

  • My Dissertation (in the News)

    “A World in Which Everything Hurts,” a profile of Arthur Miller in The Forward, gets bonus points for mentioning, in a single paragraph, three of the authors I’m writing about in my dissertation:

    In contrast, for example, to Tony Kushner, whose humanism seems to spring from a secular engagement with Jewish religion and history, Miller seems to come to his universalism only through the abandonment of the Jewish tradition. And in his rejectionism, he fails to display the depth or nuance of Philip Roth, whose own critique of Jewish life — however damning — reflects an intense, intimate confrontation with his subject.

    Another key figure from my project, Norman Mailer, shows up in The New York Metro, discussing the upcoming Republican Convention with his son, John Buffalo Mailer. Apparently I’m right on track in looking back to the fall of the New Left (and books like Mailer’s Armies of the Night) in trying to make sense of the contemporary Left’s problems:

    The march on the Pentagon even ended up having a final effect that was impressive. I think it was the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam, and for a very simple reason: Lyndon Johnson saw 50,000 mostly middle-class people come to Washington to stage a set of demonstrations that were going to be opposed by troops and police. LBJ knew people well. From his point of view, most middle-class people were hardly full of physical bravery. If they were going to pay their own money and come by car or bus or train to march into the possibility of being hit over the head with a cop’s club, then there had to be millions of people behind them.

     

  • Head Trip

    I woke up this morning dreaming of Philip Roth and Norman Mailer. The details are sketchy. I know that I was in a mall of some sort and that one or both of them were there for a bookstore signing. Other than that, I just remember being really excited to see those two curmudgeons sitting together, sharing lunch, and then being equally horrified when both ran away from me rather than answer my few, simple questions about the American Left and the Problems of History in Cold War Literature. Rereading four Roth novels in two weeks will do that to a guy, I guess. And writing a dissertation. I think I need a vacation.

    A Joyous Occasion. In a household where human reproduction is highly unlikely, announcements just don’t get any bigger than this: Long Pauses is proud to welcome Elessar (“Ace”) into the fold. (Bonus points if you can identify the source of his name.)

  • God Bless Norman Mailer

    My wife is convinced that I’m the only person in America who is grateful that C-Span 2: Book TV comes standard with basic cable service. (If the shoe fits . . .) On Saturday night, I flipped it on and was pleased to find Norman Mailer answering questions from a large audience, doing so with his typical blend of blustery arrogance and spot-on insight. He was there to discuss The Spooky Art, his latest collection of essays, but I tuned in too late and only caught the last few questions. Two of them caught my attention.

    First, a man near the back of the room stood up and told Mailer that he felt “cheated.” His comment was something along the lines of, “While I’ve enjoyed your latest turn toward novels, I hate that I’ll never get to read Mailer on Clinton or Mailer on Bush, because I really cherish Mailer on Kennedy and Mailer on Nixon.” The second question-asker was more to the point: “Mr. Mailer, what is your opinion of American fascism?” I was pleasantly surprised by Mailer’s response. After first pointing out that he had, in fact, written about Clinton — and after taking several well-deserved jabs at the former President for the despicable connections between his policy in Kosovo and a certain Oval Office blowjob — Mailer suggested that, instead of addressing the issue with less care and time than it obviously deserved, he would defer to a speech he had recently delivered, which would soon be published in The New York Review of Books. From the shift of tone in his voice, it was obvious that Mailer was genuinely troubled by recent events, that he had paid them considerable attention, and that he was generally satisfied with the resulting speech.

    Only in America is now available online, and it is the best piece on Bush, Iraq, religion, and America’s political troubles that I’ve read. As I’ve mentioned around here often, I’ve been a champion of Mailer’s political commentary since first reading Armies of the Night and gasping at his prescient analysis of the Cold War. Sure, he can be as subtle as a sledgehammer, but the combined weight of his experience, intelligence, and confidence strike me with a welcomed force. (As an Onion headline put it this week, “Fox News Reporter Asks The Questions Others Are Too Smart To Ask.”) Man, I’d love to see an 80-year-old Mailer hand Bill O’Reilly his ass.

    One of that remarkable generation of Jewish-American authors (along with Miller, Malamud, Salinger, Bellow, and Roth, among others), and as its most explicitly political member, Mailer is, of course, intimately familiar with the long-standing and oft-troubling relationship between America’s faiths in God and country. Bush’s triumphalism has not gone unnoticed. For Mailer, Bush’s brand of “Flag Conservatism” is a natural and deeply disturbing by-product of America’s schizophrenia.

    And, of course, we were not in shape to feel free of guilt about September 11. The manic money-grab excitement of the Nineties had never been altogether free of our pervasive American guilt. We were happy to be prosperous but we still felt guilty. We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is a grace note. We are a Christian nation. The supposition of a great many good Christians in America is that you were not meant to be all that rich. God didn’t necessarily want it. For certain, Jesus did not. You weren’t supposed to pile up a mountain of moolah. You were obligated to spend your life in altruistic acts. That was still one half of the good Christian psyche. The other half, pure American, was, as always: beat everybody. One can offer a cruel, but conceivably accurate, remark: To be a mainstream American is to live as an oxymoron. You are a good Christian, but you strain to remain dynamically competitive. Of course, Jesus and Evel Knievel don’t consort too well in one psyche. Human rage and guilt do take on their uniquely American forms.

    I love Mailer because of moments like this — blunt-force observations with remarkable consequences. Here’s another, where he takes a cliched symbol — in this case, plastic, which has been neutered of its metaphoric value at least since The Graduate — and wrestles from it more significance and poetic delight than I imagined possible:

    Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void; and, beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant’s tactile senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor— only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.

    The current tenor in D.C. seems to reflect a more general suspicion of intellectualism that is seeping across the country (much to the delight of cable news architects). Well, I’m going to say something that will sound terribly elitist to many: phrases like “that sat on the soul like jail” matter — and not just because of their content. Mailer knows precisely what effect that 64-word sentence — the one that begins “One has only to cite” — will have on his readers, just as he knows precisely how much dramatic weight will be carried by each of those seven monosyllabic words that end the paragraph. As do all good readers and writers. Despite the claims to the contrary made by Bush’s defenders, a love of and attention to words cannot be so easily divorced from a love of and attention to ideas, which is why I choke on my fist every time I hear America’s most public evangelical reduce the complex machinations of foreign policy, morality, and theology (most of all) down to good and evil. Is his world really so simple? Is his mind?

    Mailer continues (and in a manner that makes me think he’d enjoy Long Pauses):

    “Flag conservatives” like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn’t give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like “evil.” One of Bush’s worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Of course, as he sees it, he is doing it because he believes America is good. He certainly does, he believes this country is the only hope of the world. He also fears that the country is rapidly growing more dissolute, and the only solution may be—fell, mighty, and near-holy words—the only solution may be to strive for World Empire. . . .

    From a militant Christian point of view, America is close to rotten. The entertainment media are loose. Bare belly-buttons pop onto every TV screen, as open in their statement as wild animals’ eyes. The kids are getting to the point where they can’t read, but they sure can screw. So one perk for the White House, should America become an international military machine huge enough to conquer all adversaries, is that American sexual freedom, all that gay, feminist, lesbian, transvestite hullabaloo, will be seen as too much of a luxury and will be put back into the closet again. Commitment, patriotism, and dedication will become all-pervasive national values once more (with all the hypocrisy attendant). Once we become a twenty-first-century embodiment of the old Roman Empire, moral reform can stride right back into the picture. . . .

    More directly (even if it is not at all direct) a war with Iraq will gratify our need to avenge September 11. It does not matter that Iraq is not the culprit. Bush needs only to ignore the evidence. Which he does with all the power of a man who has never been embarrassed by himself. Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher. September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.

    I feel obliged to comment on those snippets, but mostly I just want them to be read. Mailer slips so easily into flag conservative “logic” here — coloring it all with much needed irony — which makes his moments of genuine outrage all the more powerful. Mailer on post-war Iraq (as an aside, it’s good to see that he still holds impotent liberalism in such high contempt):

    Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate structure. There’s nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can’t play with it. You can’t assume we’re going to go over to show them what a great system we have. This is monstrous arrogance.

    “This is monstrous arrogance.” Consonance. I love it. I wonder if we’ll ever again have a president who values the life of the mind, one who can recognize or even define consonance. Take it home, Norman:

    The need for powerful theory can fall into many an abyss of error. I could, for example, be entirely wrong about the deeper motives of the administration. Perhaps they are not interested in Empire so much as in trying in true good faith to save the world. We can be certain Bush and his Bushites believe this. By the time they are in church each Sunday, they believe it so powerfully that tears come to their eyes. Of course, it is the actions of men and not their sentiments that make history. Our sentiments can be loaded with love within, but our actions can turn into the opposite. Perversity is always ready to consort with human nature.

  • Strange Bedfellows

    After twenty-three straight days of precipitation, the sun is finally shining again on East Tennessee. It’s the type of day that demands grilled something-or-other for dinner. And beer. Not a lot of beer, mind you, but definitely some beer. Cold beer.

    Mmmmmmmm . . . cold beer . . .

    In Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer calls himself a member of the “Conservative Left,” which makes more and more sense to me as I spend more and more time arguing with friends about this unnecessary, but apparently inevitable, war. The cable news networks would like for us to believe that America’s political dialogue can be reduce to a simple dichotomy: conservative versus liberal. That sure would make things easier, wouldn’t it? Right/wrong. Black/white. Good/evil. Problems solved.

    In fact, we’re being led by a cabal of neo-conservatives in the White House (who trade in a strange language that melds religious fundamentalism with liberal interventionism), aided by a sad lot of liberal moderates in Congress (both Republicans and Democrats alike), who cower under the political pressures applied so efficiently by the administration. As a result, the only American politicians who are making any sense right now are those at the extreme ends of the spectrum, those who actuallystand for something. I can’t decide which side is making the stronger anti-war argument at the moment, but I applaud them both. John Duncan, my traditionally conservative Representative to the House, gave a great speech earlier this week that had him quoting Robert Byrd of all people.

    It is a traditional conservative position to be in favor of a strong national defense, not one that turns our soldiers into international social workers, and to believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy, rather than in globalism or internationalism. We should be friends with all nations, but we will weaken our own Nation, maybe irreversibly, unless we follow the more humble foreign policy the President advocated in his campaign.

    Finally, Mr. Speaker, it is very much against every conservative tradition to support preemptive war. Another member of the other body, the Senator from West Virginia, not a conservative but certainly one with great knowledge of and respect for history and tradition, said recently, “This is no simple attempt to defang a villain. No. This upcoming battle, if it materializes, represents a turning point in U.S. foreign policy and possibly a turning point in the recent history of the world.”

    If only the anti-war movement could manage to unite those two poles. That would be a fun march.

  • That Old Bitch, Hipocrisy

    Norman Mailer has quite the way with words: “Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia.” (Armies of the Night, if you’re curious.) And with that I somewhat reluctantly offer this link.

    I heard about Oxfam America’s new report, “Mugged: Poverty in Your Coffee Cup,” on Morning Edition during my drive into work today. This one hit me where it hurts: right in my stained, 16-ounce coffee mug — the one I fill and drain every morning or risk the consequences (first a headache, followed by pronounced napishness). America’s coffee industry, it seems, is one of the few bright spots in our sagging economy, thanks in part to 30-year lows in coffee bean prices (which translate into dire poverty for third world farmers) and to the continued trendiness of designer brands (you can now buy your $3 iced mocha latte in 5,688 Starbucks locations worldwide). I like my coffee strong and black, by the way.

    I say all of that so that I can ask this: So what the hell do I do about it? As someone whose political convictions have allowed me to justify the time I waste each day on this blog, I find myself teetering between self-pity and self-righteousness, desperate to stave off the melancholia that lingers nearby. I mean, I’m not going to stop drinking coffee, right?

    About a year and a half ago, Eric Alterman found himself engaged in a similar ethical battle. After considering the exploitive practices that resulted, finally, in his favorite meal, along with the humanitarian good that could be accomplished by the price of that meal, he finally came to the conclusion that so many of us are loathe to admit:

    “Here’s the problem. I can’t answer any of these arguments, but I can ignore them. At least I intend to (except for the $200 one–I did stop in the middle of writing this article to fork over $200 to Oxfam). The trouble seems to be that I’m a massive hypocrite. I make sacrifices for my principles but not, apparently, ones involving hamburgers and steaks. I like them too much, torture or no torture, starving kids or no starving kids, E. coli risk or no E. coli risk.”

    Mailer at least could take comfort from the burgeoning radicalism of his day. Marching on the Pentagon in protest of Vietnam, assuming that he would finally be arrested for a “real cause,” he could write, “some drabness had quit [liberals] since the fifties, some sense of power had touched them with subtle concomitants of power — a hint of elegance.” But that comfort is lost to me. I’m cursed with hindsight, with the failures of the New Left and the reemergence— the institutionalization, even — of banal drabness. In the immortal, irony-soaked words of the late, great Phil Hartman, “Good times. Good times.”