Word: mailer
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...serious mistake with them. If he did something wrong, they being women would grow up around the mistake and somehow convert it to knowledge. But his sons! He had the feeling that because they were men, their egos were more fragile--a serious error might hurt them forever. --Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night...
...external world. Amidst multiple contradictions one principle stands firm: masculinity is good, femininity is bad. Beyond the usual visual analogies--curves and receptacles are womblike; steeples, shoes, and cylinders are phallic--lie physiological comparisons. They equate woman's mind with "her most definitive organ," according to Norman Mailer (one of Them), and just as the womb is conservative, nutritive, claustrophobic, feminine influence is antithetical to energy and thought. "Let's get out of here," a Harvard student said to a girl he visited in her dorm. "The smell of women paralyzes...
...ovum.... In actuality, each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition,...an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15. The physiological contrast of apathy and enthusiasm might reasonably shift...
...Royale is driven to conquer nameless woman after nameless woman. The vision of writing that emerges from all this is somewhat masturbatory--the emphasis is not on understanding or even communication but on the need to dominate an outside implacability, like sleeping with a whore. Here again is Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night...
...about the contractual relation of one's own existence to the unheard thunders of the deep--each time guilt herded one back with its authority, some primitive awe--hence some creative clue to the rages of the deep--was left to brood about. Onanism and homosexuality were not, to Mailer, light vices--to him it sometimes seemed that much of life and most of society were designed precisely to drive men deep into onanism and homosexuality; one defied such a fate by sweeping up the psychic profit which derived from the existential assertion of yourself--which...