Norman Mailer RIP
Dunkirk NY -
(Mailer) recalled something he had said at the National Book Award ceremony in 2005, when he was given a lifetime achievement award: that he felt like an old coachmaker who looks with horror at the turn of the 20th century, watching automobiles roar by with their fumes.
“I think the novel is on the way out,” he said. “I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that.” -NY Times obituary of Norman Mailer
I remember when Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin ran as a team for Mayor of New York City back in 1969. The more I think about it today, the more I’m convinced that their secessionist platform for the city of New York was a correct one. Make NYC the 51st state in the union. Then perhaps the city would not be bleeding upstate NY so dry. I’d couple that to add Long Island, Westchester, Rockland and Orange County to the mix.
His quote seems so right to me now as I think about theatre as an art form. Even a literary mind as great as Mailer’s understood he was a dinosaur. Simply substitute the word “theatre” for “novel” in the second paragraph and you have pretty much the same situation. It’s not that it’s unusual for styles to disappear, but whole forms like theatre, the novel, poetry and the like; this is something new to current culture. I doubt we’ll see another Norman Mailer. Who reads, anyway? -twl
