Eighteen minutes

Dan Visel commented on my recent post about Marguerite Young and her mammoth, many-years-in-the-making novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (1965). He sent me a link to her 1977 Paris Review interview, which (he writes) "is full of things like this":

I met Norman Mailer at a cocktail party after Miss MacIntosh was published. I had never seen him before. He came up to me and said, “Were there any fighters in your family?” I answered, “Why yes. My half-brother was a champion in the ring.” “I knew it,” he said, “I knew you had a fighter in the family.” “Well, what made you think that?” I asked. He said, “Because it took a lot of strength hanging out in the sawdust ring like that, punching away for eighteen years the way you did.” Then he wrote to my publisher to say I was a “gentle Hercules in highheels.” My publisher's publicity department gave that letter to a cartoonist at the Herald Tribune who did it up and showed it to me—a cartoon of me punching it out with Mailer with that caption, “a gentle Hercules in highheels.” So Mailer was congratulating me for the stamina of spending so many years on a novel. I suppose it took stamina in a way, but it takes stamina to write anything for eighteen minutes.

Question: Have any of you read this book? Was it great?

The plot thickens

Norman Mailer's plot amoebas for Harlot's Ghost, from the Harry Ransom Center's "Mystique of the Archive."

(Via TEV)

Or get a new tailor

I make a brief appearance in Scott Timberg's article on Mailer in the L.A. Times.

Dizzies Newsfeeds for November 13

Andrew Lewis Conn has a long appreciation of Norman Mailer up at The Fanzine: "Let us sing of the man’s ambition: that wild, prodigious, uneven, infuriating, embarrassing, brave and blustery and bruising arc, the longest, greatest song of himself in American letters."...Shades of End Zone: "After Jets linebacker Jonathan Vilma sustained a knee injury this season, Coach Eric Mangini was asked at a news conference if he knew which play the injury occurred on. He said no.

Q: Do you know which knee?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you going to tell us?

A: No.

Q: Right or left?

A: Tricky. It’s one of those two."

—"Paranoia Strikes Deep, Into Your Headset It Will Creep," NYT (via Dizzyhead Jane)...

American dreams

The Dizzies is proud to present the first entry in the title bout challenge—Dizzyhead Mollie's epic narrative of striving and ignominy:

"I used my fiancé's library—with its many books about finance and religion, as well as lots of great literature in paperback—for this (and another one I'm still perfecting), and what I came up with reminds me of those "cinquains" I used to write in grade school... except it's more than 5 lines. I am the epic novelist of bookstacking, apparently."

If you can't see the titles: An American Dream, How to Make Money in Stocks, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, The Virtue of Selfishness, An Area of Darkness, Losing Ground, Harvest of Sorrow, Interrogations at Noon, The Defense, Crime and Punishment, An American Tragedy