Norman Mailer last night, Part 2

[Frances Morey]

Thanks, Mike,
For the exquisite report...
Frances

Michael Eisenstadt <michaele at hotpop.com> wrote:
For someone who was a buffed-up club fighter
in his prime, age has laid him low. He walks 
slowly with 2 canes and is quite deaf.

His opinions seem very reasonable. He believes
in a creative relativistic God who, like parents
frome their children, learns from what happens 
in the world he created. He is against the notion 
of a fundamental God theology. He dismisses 
fundamentalists as essentially power freaks.

He ended the evening with a reading from his
worst novel, Ancient Evenings. The passage
had a corpse describe, in the first person, the
process of being mummified by a hook 
through the nose which is used to break out 
the pieces of the brain. The nose continues
to function so he can smell the 2 embalmers
as they mummify him every day, one is a meat
eater with a not unpleasant body odor. the
other embalmer was into a wine and figs
diet and had an unpleaseant body odor. later
on the corpse "lives" in a pool of nitron as he 
slowly hardens to the consistency of a hard 
piece of wood. 

There was a question and answer period. The
first question was the one I was waving my
hand up to ask so I didn't get to ask it. Could
we look forward to the second part of Harlot's
Ghost? His answer was that after the Soviets
fell, he lost interest in C.I.A. especially as they
went technological and were less interesting 
as a novelistic subject.

There was a hilarious incident during the Q & A.
Some woman had come with an agenda, she
wanted to read a passage from a novel called 
the Garden of the something or other. She 
identified herself as a Republican (Norman had
said he was a Democrat faute de mieux), saying
she had enjoyed reading ALL his books but that
his opinions tonight were disgusting.

She was shouted down and after it was repeated
to him what she said and proposed to do, he said 
he didn't read novels with the word Garden in 
their title.
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