Cheque's in the Mailer

Lamest blog title EVER. I know, I know. But serious guys, what gives? I have to wait two days to discover that we've lost that little crazy little nugget? Couldn't somenooe have called? I was looking for things to blog about and everything! This suggests that I ought to spend some time reading newspapers rather than exams or Facebook profiles.

One thing I noticed about Mailer in recent years is his slow transformation into Yoda - the tuft of hair, the large floppy ears, the increasingly incoherrent ramblings: "Mailer I am"; "Sorry when I beat you to a pulp, you will be"; "Mailer, famous novelist, mention did I?"

Even better than Yoda-Mailer is the image of the author captured in this short but sweet Obit from New York Magazine.
[http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2007/11/norman_mailer_warhols_inverse.html]

His hair looks like a craft project completed by first graders. But I digress...

Homans makes a neat point that Mailer and Warhol were two sides of the same coin - a coin destined for the slot machine of fame. Three cherries and you hit the jackpot. So the argument goes, Mailer's greatest art was his public life. Like my man DE before he turned nice he was out to make himself a star - a grumpy, irrasicble star. A legitimate star at that even though his public life was filled with enough wild and violent public outbursts to rival Britney. Once again I'm back to the same question (for which I still don't have an answer) - why authors, do you long for somekind of "stardom"? Why do you love the attention? I mean, hell, we'd all love the attention, right? We'd all like to fake it til we make it. And yet, and yet, authors seem to do it through the guise of writing. Not, note well, that they hope their writing will earn them fame, but that writing will be a act through which fame will be thrust upon them. It's like the writing is an act (Barthes talks about this), a performance that will attract attention - like dancing on a table after midnight, or stepping out of a car without underwear. This act isn't noteworthy in itself it's the balls-out bravado of the act that's worth talking about. And no one had his balls out more often (metaphorically speaking) than Mailer. Like I said, DE did it for a while til he got tired of people telling him that rountine was tired and maybe we'd all like to hear a little more about gee, I don't know, something other than how cleverly self-aware he was about being clever. Now he just keeps it to himself and his buddies.

And Homans is right, Warhol did it too, but in the opposite direction - he invited every exhibitionist to the party, plyed them with booze and waited til they ALL got up on the tables to dance. Then he stood on his own in the middle of the dancefloor and waited for people to pay attention to that creepy pale guy standing on his own. That, at least, was a suprising role reversal.

It's nice (in a kind of *wrong* way) to think that of everything a writer might be capable of having done in their career their lasting legacy is that they helped invent modern fame. Balls out fame. No underwear at the nightclub fame. Reality TV fame. It's nice to think that writers had a big impact on our culture.

RIP Norm - see you in hell.

The Great American Slumber Party

There’s a thing I’ve been thinking about on and off for a few years and this is it: how is it that contemporary fiction, post modern fiction (what-you-will) is somehow associated almost exclusively with a small coterie of young(ish), white guys? Eggers, Franzen, Foster Wallace, Euginedes, Lethem, even the newer ones like Kunkel. Go back a bit further: Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerny, DeLillo, my latest flame The Pynch. Ok, now keep going (and yes we’re moving away from Post modernism here but go with me) Roth, Bellow, Updike, Mailer. In this list the closest thing we get to “not white” is Jewish. The closest thing we get to “not guys” is Euginedes channelling a hermaphrodite (female body, male identity) in Middlesex. So, what gives? I’m not complaining exactly, I’m just trying to work out where being a “dude” fits in with the whole “postmodernism thing.”

[Side note: I’m curious to know where I fit into all this. Don’t I disprove my own theory? I’m a girl. I like postmodern, clever, show-offy stuff. Aah, yes, but, dollars to donuts I don’t like it for the same reasons many dudes do. And sorry guys, but for some reason when I think about this you’re all “Dudes” – is it the pernicious influence of Lebowski? Likely, and certainly the “dudeness” of The Dude in that film is the result of some uber-white-guy cool that so many of these novelist and their male fans aspire to, surely.]

And so, while scratching my head and browsing the stacks I happened to stumble across this on Salon today. [http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/07/teen_girls/]

This, I thought, is an eye opener. Enough of the white guys/dudes. What if teenage girls were to constitute the new literary zeitgeist? Now, THAT would be SOMETHING. It sorta makes some kinda sense too given that we’re all living in a Facebook, MySpace, virtura-land where we mediate ourselves down to the last detail in order to most faithfully project the simulacra image that is our true self-i(sh)-ness. Teen girls are experts in this field. Their self obsession is no different to that practiced by the newer (or the older) white guys mentioned above – perhaps just skewed a bit differently. Where the Dudes agonise about TV and indie music and technology and charity and ethics and international travel and proving that they’re worthy, these girls are trying to find ways to capture the experience of being young and female – itself an exercise in proving worthiness. Look! At! Me! I’m an outsider, a rebel, a sexpot…
Really, there’s much difference at all when you spell it out. And now here’s a compelling thought: Norman Mailer as the self absorbed debutante at the Super Sweet 16 party. Franzen as the hormonally charged girl on the dancefloor grinding her way to various ecstatic levels of gratification. Eggers as the deadpan ironist who refuses to join the swim team. It’s the Boys Club meets the Baby Sitters’ Club…

And what’s the deal with me and my inner teenager over the last few days?