Norman Mailer

I won't pretend that I'm some Norman Mailer fan wearing a black armband, but I did appreciate a couple of quotes from an AP article I read.

"The Pulitzer-Prize winning Mailer, the eminent literary journalist, drama king and gentleman, eternal striver for the Great American Novel, seemed to embody in recent years not just one writer, but a generation for whom the printed word was a noble and endangered way of life."

Yes... I like that... eternal striver for the Great American Novel. I feel like some day I'll take the time (have the balls?) to really sit down and write a real novel... all the pieces of the puzzle together at once, every page, every paragraph...

"Some part of me knew that I had more emotion than most," Mailer, who married six times and stabbed one of his wives, once wrote. He cautioned himself not to "exhaust the emotions of others."

More emotion than most... wow... yeah... married six times... stabbed one of his wives... she probably made a suggestion after doing a first read... tried to off the bitch.... I can relate... cautioned himself not to exhaust the emotion of others... hmmm.... I can still relate...

...
"His hero was the authentic, autonomous man — the boxer, or graffiti artist, or maestro of jazz, or the "Norman Mailer" who starred in "The Armies of the Night" and other works of journalism. The bureaucratic mind was his enemy, from the military leaders of "The Naked and the Dead" to the Kleenex box-like skyscrapers that appalled him when looking out from his Brooklyn town house, to the processed presidency of Richard Nixon.
...
Again, I'm ashamed to admit that I couldn't name a Norman Mailer novel if you stuck a gun to my head, but I like what this writer said about Mailer's hero... authentic and autonomous... the bureaucractic mind being his enemy...

Sounds like he fought the fight... and sounds like he kept his butt in his seat, a lot... I betcha he had a good circle of writer friends who encouraged him to keep going with his thousand words a day... even if he'd occasionally try to stab them... betcha he knocked a few back with Hemingway, too...