Word: mailer
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...natural role of 20th century man is anxiety," as Norman Mailer's General Cummings said in The Naked and the Dead, Americans beginning the last third of the century are bearing their full load. "Uncertainty is the way it is now," says Joshua Golden, assistant professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. "People can be comforted if they understand that it's a normal occurrence...
...like a particle in the livid-frigid Flux, I decided to drop in on the Cecilia Society and the Glee Club concerts at the still point of the burning world. "Song is the key," I reasoned, "for only the rapture of song links such disparate spirits as Arjuna, Chemosh, Mailer, Nixon, Tristan, Bruckner, and the confluence of latent universal souls thrashing about in the torpid light of Art. Let us ublimate the manifold contradictions of life in an decipherable moment of ineffable unity. And so, rowing Endgame on top of Presidential Power, and ling the ineluctable pull of some Taoist...
When a newspaperman strives for "objectivity"--an impossible goal if this means total detachment from his subject matter--what he truly seeks is fairness. Mailer's approach, with a couple of exceptions, in no way is intended to describe impartially the plight of human beings on the wrong (police) side of the barriers. Newspaper reporters do seek this sort of impartiality, or lack of bias--or, if you like, omniscience...
...latest Harper's piece, Mailer offers some constructive criticism to journalism by citing a newspaper account of a confrontation at the GOP National Convention between some Reagan Girls dressed in red, white and blue tights and a group of black demonstrators from the Poor People's March. "Were the Reagan Girls livid or triumphant?" he asks. "Were the Negro demonstrators dignified or raucous or self-satisfied?" Mailer's questions seem to the point. There is, as he says, "no history without nuance...
...same time, it is only fair to note that one newspaper reporter--perhaps unfairly, and not dispassionately--described Mailer during his arrest as "smiling wanly." It was a choice of words--a subjective comment, a personal judgment--that in the opinion of Mailer not only was wrong, but infuriating...