Long Pauses

Tag: Author: Mailer

  • The Same as It Ever Was

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.”

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • God Bless Norman Mailer

    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.

  • Strange Bedfellows

    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.

  • That Old Bitch, Hipocrisy

    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?