Word: mailer
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...Mailer: You bragged about what you did to Jack Kerouac, after...
...Mailer: Well...
...Faith of Graffiti," the author defends the space invaders from Krylon: "They had written masterpieces in letters six feet high . . . We are back to the cave man and his cave painting." To Mailer, the spray-can artists are brilliantly writing "I am." It never seems to have occurred to him that what is also being inscribed is "You aren't." Urban scrawl does not merely decorate, it also defaces: maps, buildings, trees, monuments. In this vandalized epoch, graffiti can be avoided only by the wealthy, and celebrated only by those who bombinate about the "rapt intent seething...
Even further removed from aesthetic or social sense is Mailer's assay of Henry Miller. More than 40 years ago, when it was bold to praise Tropic of Cancer, George Orwell wrote that Miller's value lay in his very ordinariness: " 'The average sensual man' has been given the power of speech, like Balaam's ass." That is not an inconsiderable gift, but Mailer will not be content with it. To him, "one has to take the English language back to Marlowe and Shakespeare before encountering a wealth of imagery equal in intensity...
Pontifications contains 20 interviews with the author, all of them featuring Mailer's celebrated amalgam of adrenaline, mysticism and flapdoodle...