What righties don't get about Manny Castro and graffiti.

Twitchy thinks it's leading a righteous fight, stirring up outrage about the "Tastes Like Hate" graffiti, spray painted on a Chick-fil-A by "Hollywood artist Manny Castro," who stepped forward to do an interview at HuffPo.

Castro said he vandalized the restaurant because Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day was “the same thing” as “Christians protesting blacks marrying whites” 40 years ago.

Uh huh. Thanks, genius, we’ve seen the photos of those intolerant hatemongers enjoying chicken with their families.

Castro also told HuffPo, “It’s paint on a wall. It got removed in less than an hour. It’s not that much of a crime — it’s a protest.”

Not “that much of a crime”?...

Uh huh, thanks, genius to you, Twitchy... and to all the deaf-to-pop-culture dupes who run with this meme. Do you think there is any way that Castro can be hurt by this? You've put photographs of his artwork out there, you've planted his slogan "Tastes Like Hate" in our minds, you've promoted him as the bad boy he wants to be, and the more outrage that's expressed the more successful he is on his own terms.

You're quoting the police as saying they hadn't heard about it, but will look into it, which doesn't make it sound as though Castro's in a whole lot of trouble with the criminal law, and you're slavering with hope that you can change that, but you don't get it that an arrest would only further promote the art career of this erstwhile nonentity.

The most-liked comment over there, from one "lazypadawan," is: "When I last checked, tagging and other sorts of vandalism are crimes. Should we do a #arrestMannyCastroNOW hashtag until the PD locks him up?" Uh, genius, do you have any idea how stupid that is? Or is lazypadawan really Manny Castro or one of his "Hollywood artist" friends?

If you don't know about the various artists who have used graffiti to leverage a career, look it up. Here's a book called "The Faith of Graffiti." It was written by Norman Mailer. In 1973. But that was a long time ago. Maybe you remember this.

Please don't use the comments to instruct me about the scrumptiousness of bait.

Althouse in 1970.

Yes, it's me, age 19, sitting under a Norman-Mailer-for-Mayor poster:


(Enlarge.)

Just something I ran across as I work on restoring that photo archive. And yes, do the math. I'll be 60 soon. In less than 2 months. I can't think of anything to do about that.

Exiting through the door marked 2007.

The NYT Magazine has its annual "Lives They Lived" issue, with short essays on a wide range of individuals who died in the past year.

A blogger gets a farewell essay this year. Steve Gilliard:

Though Gilliard, unlike many bloggers, always used his real name, few readers knew much about him. They didn’t know, for instance, that at age 39 he had open-heart surgery to repair an infected valve. They didn’t know he lived alone in a small apartment in East Harlem. And, although Gilliard often wrote about race and alluded to his own perspective, a lot of readers never realized he was black....

The paradox of Gilliard’s existence is a familiar story on the blogs, where people often adapt avatars that are more like the selves they imagine being. Online, he was vicious and uncompromising. In person, Gilly, as his close friends called him, was reserved and enigmatic.... He lamented that he didn’t know what it was to “wake up naked in a strange bed,” but, he wrote, “at 35, I’ve figured out that this is it, at least for now. Anything I do, any life I make, is going to revolve around words and computers and strange, bright people.”

[T]he few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off.

There was Brett Somers, one of "The Match Game" celebrities:

She wasn’t Mae West, 80 trying to act 20, or an embalmed Gabor, but rather, with her Elton John glasses and Toni Tennille hairdo and saucy answers, an average-looking menopausal woman with a healthy regard for sex. In one of the most memorable broadcasts, Somers’s husband, Jack Klugman, was on the panel and seemed to be rushing the host, Gene Rayburn, along, as if to say that he and Somers had something better to do.

There was Mary Crisp:

Crisp testified before a Congressional committee on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1973 without really thinking about it much supporting the E.R.A. had been a Republican Party position for nearly 35 years. (The Democrats had been more split, some worrying that the amendment would wipe out hard-won but ultimately counterproductive laws protecting women from things like working overtime or lifting heavy objects.) But in 1978, Crisp ran head-on into the new insurgent right, which had built its grass-roots strength on issues like opposition to the E.R.A. and abortion. Once it became clear that Reagan was going to be the party nominee, she knew her time was just about up...

The Republican Party made Crisp nonexistent at the convention she had helped organize. Her name vanished from the program. She left her Detroit hotel clutching a big pink stuffed elephant inscribed, “Go Mary!” which, alas, she could not fit into the airport taxi.

There was Robert Adler, the guy who invented the object some people hold in their hand more than any other object.

Two animals got recognized — a parrot and a chimpanzee — because they almost, maybe, cared about talking to us.

And here's a list of the famous people who died in 2007. As usual, it's a diverse group of people thrown together by the happenstance of death occurring around the same time. It excludes those who died too close to the publication date — but Benazir Bhutto made it — and those — it could be you or I — who die in the last few days of the year. We do have 3 days left. The new list starts with January, so, the spiffy look of the list is more important than acknowledging those who slipped into eternity through the closing door of the previous year.

Denny Doherty, 66, Mamas and Papas singer....

Frankie Laine, 93, hit-making crooner....

Anna Nicole Smith, 39, famous for being famous....

Kurt Vonnegut, 84, novelist who caught the imagination of his age.....

Don Herbert, 89, "Mr. Wizard" to science buffs....

Tammy Faye Bakker, 65, emotive evangelist....

Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, Italian movie auteur.

Ingmar Bergman, 89, master filmmaker....

Luciano Pavarotti, 71, tenor of his generation....

Joey Bishop, 89, last of the Rat Pack....

Norman Mailer, 84, towering writer with matching ego...

Evel Knievel, 69, legendary daredevil...

Ike Turner, 76, R&B singer and former husband of Tina Turner.

Don't you picture them traveling together into the afterlife? Didn't I see a movie with a diverse group of recently dead persons making the passage? I remember them in black and white, on a small boat, and arguing. Let's check this list:

1. Between Two Worlds (1944)... passengers on a shrouded luxury liner visit with The Examiner, who hears their cases and tickets them for their next destination, depending on who they were and how they died....

Close. It's a boat, but it sounds too large.

2. A Matter Of Life And Death... (1946).... the differences between Brits and Yanks—when the latter arrive in heaven, they stampede straight to the Coke machine....

I'm sure I never saw that, judging from the clip at the link, with David Niven sitting on the escalator to heaven.

3. Black Orpheus (1959)... following the rhythm of Carnival and the belief that the barrier between life and death can be easily, almost playfully circumnavigated, for those with the right attitude and the right paperwork.

This is one of those classics I always felt I should see back in the days when I was fulfilling the obligation of seeing all the classics. But I've never seen it.

4. Defending Your Life (1991)... After dying, mortals go to a big, bland city full of big, bland courtrooms, where their lives are examined to see whether they've conquered fear enough to be ready for the next stage of existence....

This is a pretty good Albert Brooks movie with Meryl Streep that got many viewings chez Althouse in the 1990s. It always irritated me that getting into heaven was an entirely 1990s American idea of self-actualization. "Self-actualization" isn't the right word, though, is it? People stopped saying "self-actualization" more than 15 years ago, I think. It sounds self-indulgent, but nevertheless more challenging than "self-fulfillment," which is what we'd say now. Imagine access to heaven depending on whether you'd fulfilled yourself on earth.

5. Afterlife (1998)... government workers... operate out of a run-down rural facility where the newly dead spend a week among peeling paint and bargain-basement furniture, selecting the memory from life that means the most to them. Then the facility staff recreates those memories on film for the dearly departed, who take nothing but that memory when they move on to whatever comes next.

This is an elegant movie, focusing on what is being left behind and not the arrival in the next world. We see a strange little place of transition.

6. Corpse Bride (2005)... the dead seem to hang out in skeletal or zombie form in a big Burtony goth-tinged paradise full of aggressively animated "inanimate" objects and spontaneous song-and-dance routines.

Not what I'm trying to think of, but it sounds cool.

7. Beetlejuice (1988)... recently dead couple Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis wind up haunting their old house... Davis and Baldwin have to acclimate via a handbook titled Handbook For The Recently Deceased, and because they’re held in place by an apathetic, overworked, hostile bureaucracy full of people whose bodies clearly and comically display the marks of their ugly deaths.

Excellent. I've seen this one many times. But it's not the one I'm trying to remember. Perhaps I'm thinking of an old "Twilight Zone."

8. The Rapture (1991)... Michael Tolkin’s oddball meditation on apocalypticism. After Mimi Rogers, suffering in the desert waiting for the second coming, performs a mercy killing on her daughter, she winds up on a featureless, vaguely otherworldly plain.

I remember Siskel and Ebert raving over this one back then.

9. Carousel (1956)... starts off with Gordon MacRae already dead and reaping his eternal reward, as part of a crew hanging up glittering stars in a space that might represent the sky, but which more resembles the auditorium in a particularly well-funded high school during a “Starlight Express”-themed prom.

That's not it.

10. Flatliners (1990).... the afterlife is a terrific place, full of Elysian fields or giant naked boobs, depending on the proclivities of the people who go there.

Fine-tune your fantasies, people, before it's too late. Make sure it's something you won't find tedious after a billion years.

11. What Dreams May Come (1998)... heaven ... has kindly guides to help newcomers adapt and understand the next phase of their existences, and it even adapts itself to its inhabitants' personal interests and tastes....

This was an early CGI film that was enough to make me never want to see another CGI film. And I only saw the trailer for it.

12. Don't Tempt Me (2001)... Heaven is a deserted, black-and-white version of vintage Paris where everyone speaks French, and a deserving soul like Victoria Abril gets her own private ’30s nightclub where hundreds of illusory patrons hang on every note she sings and beg for more...

In the audience, perhaps, Denny Doherty, Frankie Lane, Ike Turner, and Luciano Pavarotti.

"Ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety."

Norman Mailer wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

The idea of the award is "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." But I do think they confuse good writing about bad sex with bad writing. Mailer was writing about Adolf Hitler, so he must have meant the act to seem ugly. This conflation of bad sex and bad writing was really obvious in 2004 when they gave the award to Tom Wolfe a passage in "I Am Charlotte Simmons":

Wolfe's third novel is set in an imaginary elite Ivy League university and is seen through the eyes of his eponymous heroine - a shy, virginal country girl who is initially shocked by the decadence and excess she encounters. Wolfe spent four years roaming the campuses of America's top universities researching the novel and claimed in a Guardian interview that "I have tried to make the sex un-erotic. I will have failed if anyone gets the least bit excited. So much of modern sex is un-erotic, if erotic means flight of fancy or romantic build-up."

I've read that book, and Wolfe did exactly what he says he meant to do.

Nevertheless, bad sex or bad writing, the chosen passages are quite hilarious.

Bloggingheads!

Check it out. I'm back... with a vengeance.

ADDED: Topics:

Norman Mailer on women

The subliminal seduction of Mr. Whipple

Living and loving with Alzheimer's

"Leave me alone to have my guns"

Huckabee and Obama: pragmatic idealists

Is Hillary man enough to be president?

Judith Regan's secret dirt on Giuliani

Eric Clapton's autobiography.

I've been listening to the audiobook of Eric Clapton's autobiography. It's my current "walking around" book — as I take my walks. I'm enjoying the book, especially the deadpan retelling of horrible dissolution brought on by drugs and drink. I was listening last night as I walked over to the Barnes & Noble on Court Street.

(I wanted to buy Norman Mailer's "Advertisements for Myself." Sadly enough, they didn't seem to have a single book by Norman Mailer in the store, here in this neighborhood where Norman Mailer lived for many years. You'd think they would have had a huge display table, with all of his books, just at the entrance of the store. But I looked everywhere I could think, including alphabetically on the fiction shelves, where there was nothing)

It's not a long walk, but I heard Clapton's descriptions of the following:

1. Getting up in the middle of the night on Christmas and opening his presents alone — as a grown, married man, then hiding in the basement. Pattie Boyd had to try to salvage the family Christmas by locking him in a room for the day.

2. Driving home at night after getting drunk in a bar, he would stop and pick up homeless men and bring them to his mansion. He wanted to hang out with them, because he thought they were more real than other people, even though most of them talked utter madness.

3. He thought about suicide, but what stopped him was the realization that if he were dead, he would not be able to drink.

4. Until he went to a rehab clinic in Minnesota, he didn't realize that alcoholism could be considered a disease. He had always considered it degeneracy and resisted thinking of himself that way (even though he was drinking bottles of vodka or brandy a day and going to great lengths to hide it).

"Something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign..."

It's Camille Paglia (who admits she's "leaning" toward Obama). She's got her sights set on Hillary Clinton, and it's going to get ugly, with the hurling of dangerous words like viragos and cathexis and — my personal favorite — "sycophantish":

Aside from the stylish Huma [Abedin], there's definitely something weird and cultish in the sycophantish cathexis onto Hillary of the many nerds, geeks and vengeful viragos who run her campaign -- sometimes to her detriment, as with the recent ham-handed playing of the clichéd gender card. I suspect the latter dumb move, which has backfired badly, came from Ann Lewis (Barney Frank's sister), a fanatical Hillary true believer who has been spouting beatific feminist bromides about her for the past 15 years.... Hillary seems to have acolytes rather than friends...

Paglia goes on to lavish compliments on Dianne Feinstein — she's "shrewd" and "steady" — why can't she be the first woman President? Feinstein speaks with "silky ease" and has "true gravitas." Paglia also strokes Nancy Pelosi, who has a "relaxed, resonant realism" and speaks in a "low purr." Pelosi purrs but Hillary's got that "tight-wound, self-righteous attack voice" and that "flat, practical, real-life voice."

But there are no big conclusions here about Hillary. Just an expression of that vague irritation we all feel. (Don't we?) But I wonder if this is the reaction we would have to any woman who got realistically close to the presidency. And I'll bet that's the sort of thing Ann Lewis says behind the scenes, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Paglia lights into Ellen DeGeneres for her "cringe-making on-air meltdown over a dog":

Following Rosie O'Donnell's professional collapse amid lunatic rants and operatic kvetching, this has been a terrible year for Hollywood lesbians' public image. It's as if when the butch mask drops, there's nothing inside but a boiling candy kettle of infantile rage and self-pity.

Butch up, girls, says Camille. But don't forget to keep that voice at a low purr.

She's got this on global warming:

This facile attribution of climate change to human agency is an act of hubris. Good stewardship of the environment is an ethical imperative for every nation. But breast-beating hysteria merely betrays impious tunnel vision. Thousands of factors, minute and grand, are at work in cyclic climate change, whose long-term outcomes we cannot possibly predict. Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity.

That's a nice twist. Our arrogance lies not in thinking we can indulge ourselves in our carbon-spewing ways — as we're commonly told — but in thinking we move Nature. It's impious to think of ourselves that way.

On Norman Mailer:

I didn't care about his novels -- I don't care about any novels published after World War II (Tennessee Williams is my main man) -- but I was impressed by Mailer's visionary and sometimes hallucinatory first-person journalism. And I was directly inspired by his eclectic "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), which I took as a blueprint after my first books were attacked by the feminist establishment in the 1990s.

I will immediately go read "Advertisements for Myself"!

Mailer's "The Prisoner of Sex" (the original 1971 Harper's essay, not the book) was an important statement about men's sexual fears and desires. His jousting with Germaine Greer at the notorious Town Hall debate in New York that same year was a pivotal moment in the sex wars. I loved Greer and still do. And I also thought Jill Johnston (who disrupted the debate with lesbo stunts) was a cutting-edge thinker: I was devouring her Village Voice columns, which had evolved from dance reportage into provocative cultural commentary.

Ah, yes, I remember. How we hated Norman Mailer in those days. From this distance, I rather admire him for making himself as a vortex for feminist hate. He got into the center of things the only way he could.

[O]ne of the lousiest things Mailer ever wrote was his flimsy cover-story screed on her for Esquire in 1994. It was obvious Mailer knew absolutely nothing about Madonna and was just blowing smoke.

Because he neglected to read Paglia's musings on the subject, no doubt.

Guess what -- Esquire's original proposal was for me to interview Madonna. Mailer was the sub!

Ha ha. What a transcendent brag! I especially like the use of the word "sub," with its insinuation of phallic gigantism. Paglia has the bigger... writing talent.

Next, Paglia has a reference to my favorite movie:

Penthouse magazine had similarly tried to bring Madonna and me together, as had HBO, which proposed filming a "My Dinner with André" scenario of the two of us chatting in a restaurant.

Camille is the André, of course. Madonna would have to be the Wally.

But Madonna, no conversationalist, always refused.

Damn! Madonna just needed instruction on how to play the listener, like Wallace Shawn. "My Dinner with André" begins Wally's voiced-over anxiety about he is about sitting through a whole dinner with André Gregory. He resolves to get through the experience by, essentially, interviewing him. But Madonna's problem was not — I suspect — that she wasn't good enough at talking, but that she didn't fancy herself enduring a long outpouring of Paglia's thoughts about everything. To be a good Wally in a "My Dinner With André"-format movie, you have to wait while the other person has most of the lines, then finally, when the audience can't take it anymore, say "You want to know what I think of all this." And then charm us to the core with a few lines that we will remember for decades.

Hey, remember the time Camille Paglia refused to have dinner with me? I wrote a post about it called — of all things! — "My Dinner With Camille."

It's Kurt Vonnegut's birthday, the first since his death.

So let's read this 1992 Playboy Interview with him and Joseph Heller, who is also dead. There's some talk of Norman Mailer, and he's dead now too.

PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?

VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn't you find it a full-time job?...

VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.

HELLER: It's in Something Happened: ''I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.''

VONNEGUT: Norman Mailer has what--five divorces now?...

PLAYBOY: Do either of you read any contemporary writers?

VONNEGUT: Well, it's not like the medical profession where you have to find out the latest treatments. I've been reading Nietzsche.

HELLER: And I've been reading Thomas Mann....

PLAYBOY: What about Norman Mailer's?

VONNEGUT: That's none of your business. Norman's a friend of mine.

HELLER: I intend to read it at one sitting....

PLAYBOY: Why don't you guys write more explicitly about sex and its emotional trappings?

HELLER: More explicitly than what? You keep projecting. You keep attaching emotional reactions to sexual reactions. Earlier you used the words ''love'' and ''sex'' and now you're suggesting emotional reactions to sex. By emotional I'm sure you mean something different from the sensory responses.

PLAYBOY: Well, emotions are different from senses.

HELLER: I don't think there is a necessary correlation between emotional responses and sex.

PLAYBOY: Didn't D. H. Lawrence write about emotions?

HELLER: That was the content of his artistic or literary consciousness. I don't think writers have a choice, by the way. I think we discover a field in which we can be proficient and that's our imagination. My imagination cannot work like Kurt's and I don't think his can work like mine. Neither of us could write like Philip Roth or Norman Mailer. I know John Updike has a lot of tales of the sexual encounter. And I suppose there are writers who can do it and will do it and want to do it.

PLAYBOY: Henry Miller?

HELLER: What you get there is the raw activity.... I must say, for me, it doesn't normally make good literature. Fiction having extensive detail about the gymnastics of copulation or sexual congress--or even the alleged responses to it--does not make interesting reading to me. It's like trying to describe the noise of a subway train. There are people who can do it. Young writers go in for that type of description. But when they're finished, all they've done is described the noise of a subway train coming into a station or pulling out of a station. Is that the noblest objective of a work of fiction? To convince the reader that what you're writing about is really happening? I don't think so....

VONNEGUT: Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, ''Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?'' That's how to pick a wife.

HELLER: If people were more widely read, there'd be fewer marriages.

VONNEGUT: I will give you all the money that's left after the divorce if you can get me a film clip of Frank Sinatra making it with Nancy Reagan. I think that is the funniest damn thing.

PLAYBOY: In the White House?

VONNEGUT: I don't care where. Those two scrawny people....

Norman Mailer died.

Today.

Remember when he ran for Mayor?

I do.



The idea was that NYC should be the 51st state. It'd be the 12th largest, you know. (In case you've been wondering how big a job it is to be mayor of NY.)

Sorry I don't have anything more to say about Norman Mailer. I've never read his books. I read the mean things Kate Millet wrote about him in "Sexual Politics," back around when that picture was taken of me. The man stabbed his wife and nearly killed her. Maybe I should have wanted to read what he had to say anyway — I've heard him interviewed on the radio and found him interesting — but I never did.

ADDED: Sorry, I read "The Executioner's Song." I even wrote an article about it, called "Standing, in Fluffy Slippers" (PDF).

AND: Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking, but I'm surprised he says that I'm remembering Mailer "fondly." Anyway, he points to Roger Kimball's essay, and I was glad to see that because I'd just read Kimball's book "The Long March," which has a section on Mailer, and I was trying to remember exactly why Kimball heaped abuse on him. So let's read the essay (which tracks the book):

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash....

An American Dream was the infamous novel in which the hero, Stephen Rojack, a savvy, tough-guy intellectual—just like Norman Mailer, you see—starts out by strangling his wife. He then walks downstairs and buggers his wife’s accommodating German maid, a former Nazi who declares, “I do not know why you have trouble with your wife. You are an absolute genius, Mr. Rojack.”

(Buggery—another “B” to put alongside booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—was to become an obsession with Mailer.) There are numerous Mailerian fingerprints in the novel. President Kennedy (“Jack”) calls to convey his condolences; Rojack’s wife is rumored to have had affairs with men high up in the British, American, and Soviet spy agencies; even Marilyn Monroe—who was to become another of Mailer’s notorious obsessions—makes a posthumous cameo appearance: when Rojack fantasizes about having a telephone conversation with a dead character, he reports that “the girls are swell. Marilyn says to say hello.” But the chief point of the book is that Rojack gets away with the murder. Such, Mailer wants us to believe, is the real if unacknowledged “American dream.”

[Novelist William] Styron recalled that at the time Mailer said to him: “God, I wish I had the courage to stab a woman like that. That was a real gutsy act.” That tells one all one needs to know about Norman Mailer’s idea of “courage.”

What is perhaps most alarming about Mailer’s violence against his wife was that it seems to have titillated more than it repelled his circle of friends. In any event it brought very little condemnation. “Among ‘uptown intellectuals,’” Irving Howe wrote “there was this feeling of shock and dismay, and I don’t remember anyone judging him. The feeling was that he’d been driven to this by compulsiveness, by madness. He was seen as a victim.” Readers who wonder how stabbing his wife could make Mailer a “victim”—and who ask themselves, further, what Mailer’s being a victim would then make Adele—clearly do not have what it takes to be an “uptown intellectual.”

It bothers me that Kimball does not acknowledge Kate Millet's attack. She set a generation of feminists — including me — against him. His name was poison for me for years, and I read "Executioner's Song" because I was writing about the death penalty theme, but the whole time I held Norman Mailer at a distance. (Writing this post, I initially forgot I'd read one of his books!) I was suspicious. I saw his respect for Gary Gilmore's sexual vigor, and I could still hear Kate Millet's denouncement echoing in my ears.

Of course, the feminists detest the social conservatives like Kimball, and vice versa, but would it kill Kimball to acknowledge the feminist attack, which was there in full view in 1969? Don't act like no one was onto him at the time.

Speaking of feminism, Kimball hates this quote from Mailer (from "Pieces and Pontifications"):

I think when a woman goes through an abortion, even legalized abortion, she goes through hell. There’s no use hoping otherwise. For what is she doing? Sometimes she has to be saying to herself, “You’re killing the memory of a beautiful fuck.” I don’t think abortion is a great strain when the act was some miserable little screech, or some squeak oozed up through the trapdoor, a little rat which got in, a worm who slithered under the threshold. That sort of abortion costs a woman little more than discomfort. Unless there are medical consequences years later.

But if a woman has a great fuck, and then has to abort, it embitters her.

But Kimball should know that feminists — no matter how pro-abortion — hate that too.

Old age is cool.

According to Norman Mailer (who is 83):

There's one good thing about old age that people don't recognize. Which is that if you have a reasonable old age, as I do, in that you're not in pain, and you're not in terrible trouble emotionally with your children, or your mate, then what happens is you cool. And you finally are cool in a way that you never were before. And you realize that you won and you lost, and that's just what happens to everyone else. They win and they lose also. And what you didn't succeed in doing, you didn't succeed in doing, so f--- it....

In other words, I'm at peace with myself in a way that I wasn't for many, many years. I feel more sane than I've ever felt in my life.

"The classical pimples of the adolescent working his first gas pump would also pump for her..."

Virginia Heffernan quotes and is disgusted by a PBS show about photographs of Marilyn Monroe:

The narration sounds like a terrible Norman Mailer rip-off except that it’s Mr. Mailer himself, professor emeritus of the University of Marilyn Blather. Like so many smart people recruited for documentaries, he drops his sense of humor and intones in that portentous, “would”-heavy way typical of programs about American culture. (“The mayo packet would change American drive-through cuisine forever.”)

He may be humorless, but it sounds like there are laughs to be had. And pictures of Marilyn.

"There still resides, however, under my aging novelist's pate a volunteer intelligence agent, sadly manque."

Norman Mailer lumbers up to the HuffPo keyboard and taps out a conspiracy theory, in that wonderful literary style where things don't "stink" but are "redolent with bad odor."

In every covert Department of Dirty Tricks, whether official, semi-official, or off-the-wall, great pride is best obtained by going real deep into down-and-dirty-land—Yeah! Expedite the consequences.

What the hell is he ranting about? He's guessing that the Pentagon deliberately fed Michael Isikoff fake Koran-in-toilet info. And maybe those riots are "orchestrated" too.

Or is he just attempting to spoof blogging?

The big, foaming mass-o'-celebrities blog.

Arianna Huffington thinks she's discovered something new in blogging: the group blog with famous people, a lot of famous people. If you've got 250 people -- famous people -- able to post on one big, foaming mass-o'-celebrities blog, that's got to be exciting, right?

When I think of blogging and celebrities, I think of bloggers tweaking and slamming celebrities. When I think of a big mass of celebrities, I think of pretty people murmuring self-congratulatory banalities -- like at the Oscars -- barely able to say anything interesting to go with the pretty pictures.

Among those signed up to contribute are Walter Cronkite, David Mamet, Nora Ephron, Warren Beatty, James Fallows, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Diane Keaton, Norman Mailer and Mortimer B. Zuckerman.

Well, now my picture isn't so pretty. But they'll be writing, so it doesn't really matter that they are not really telegenic. Of course, if they're writing, how do we know it's really them and not some assistant or P.R. person or joke-writer?

UPDATE: This post was talked about on an MSNBC TV segment today. Political Teen has the video clip here.

Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft, who does the segment, pronounces my name funny. It's "alt" as in "salt" without the "s," and then "house" as in "house" -- just plain old "house is not a home" "house." It means: old house.

Unrelated observation: The "v" key on my keyboard suddenly only works if I hit it twice. What could possibly cause that? This problem just started when I first tried to type MSNBC TV. Do you think I should hold Bill Gates responsible?

The 51st State.

The post-election talk of blue-state/red-state divisions (and the recent retirement of Jimmy Breslin) got me thinking about the time Norman Mailer ran for mayor of NYC (with Jimmy Breslin as his running mate). It was 1969, and their big issue was that New York City should become the 51st state. They had a cool poster, which I looked for and couldn't find on line. By chance, I ran across this photograph from 1970 showing the very poster. Too bad it's so blurry and not in color, but let there be at least one display of the great old poster on the web. And that's me, at age 19 (looking annoying in that special 1970 way).