Word: mailers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Advertisements for Myself, Norman Mailer described how, with success, he became "a node in a new electronic landscape of celebrity, personality, and status. Other people, meeting me, could now unconsciously measure their own status by sensing how I reacted to them . . . Success had been a lobotomy to my past...
Celebrityhood is full of lobotomy cases, skilled at not topping Johnny's lines and at flogging their book or plugging their Vegas engagement. "What a trial to be Norman Mailer, Billy Carter, Farrah Fawcett-Majors," John Leonard has written, "to have to grow a personality along the lines of one you invented, the one that sold; to have to compete with other fabricated personalities, inflations of cunning, blimps of ego." Celebrities also must cope with skeptical magazine profilers bent on finding the "real" person underneath...
Essays on surrealism, the mimetic faculty, Brecht and the Austrian polemicist Karl Kraus support Hannah Arendt's claim that Benjamin was the most important German critic between the world wars. His romantic attachment to anarchy and violence as messianic salvations may remind some readers of Norman Mailer at his steamiest. Yet at times, Benjamin's insights cast prophetic shadows. On the effect of film and advertising, for example: "Before a child of our time finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that...
These rough judgments cannot wholly condemn their maker. H.L. Mencken was above and below all an entertainer who liked to shock. In the process of making errors, he freed the language from cant and proved a tonic influence on writers from Sherwood Anderson to Norman Mailer. His tragedy was in staying too long at the zoo until his fellow visitors began to notice a want of sympathy and substance. Back in 1942, Critic Alfred Kazin observed that Mencken's "conception of the aesthetic life . . . was monstrous in its frivolity and ignorance." Others soon echoed the critique. Finally, even...
...some cases the preposterous plots are exceeded by the presumptuous flackery. Templeton's publishers announce that during his promotional tour he will "break the last taboo on national TV." Rader's novel was unveiled at a Manhattan disco with a gospel sing-along starring Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, William F. Buckley and Walter Cronkite. Stein & Day let it be known that The Final Conclave was printed under extraordinary security lest it be "suppressed." By whom? The publisher didn't say; surely a banning in Boston or a burning in Butte would have hyped the book...