On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 02:08:56 -0500 "David
Miller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
> Terry wrote:
> > Will someone who has thought
this
> > through please give me your findings?
>
> Hi
Terry.
>
> >From my perspective, the options appear straight
forward. Saddam
> Hussein is working toward obtaining nuclear weapons in a secretive manner.
(?)
the premise above (underlined) is a
strange one, DavidM--the issue is that SH has nuc weapons on hand, is hiding
them
regardless, here's an
interesting perspective on the issue by Norman Mailer (someone who has
thought this through? imo, probably more than the average person); with the
media source/article, ff.
<<"It doesn't matter what they're up to
in Iraq..It doesn't matter if they have nuclear bombs or not or whether they're
ready to do chemical warfare. They're not a danger, but they are absolutely a
position in the world we need militarily. Dominate Iraq, dominate the Near East,
and then get China in a position to make China the Greece to our
Rome.">>Norman Mailer, below
--
<<Norman Mailer Ruminates on Literature and
Life
January 22, 2003
By JULIE SALAMON/[New York
Times]
PROVINCETOWN, Mass., Jan. 16 - Not five minutes into
the
interview, Norman Mailer put in his hearing aid. "I'm a
little deaf,"
he said. "If I'm at all vague in my replies,
it means I didn't hear you. I'm
usually not vague."
Vague, no; loquacious, yes; and cannily
charming, as he
proceeded to ruminate and postulate, looking very much
the
lion in winter, while evoking the tomcat of his youth and
middle age.
His eyes cannot stand the glare from the sun
that pours through the window of
his beachfront house here,
about a mile from the center of town, and his
arthritic
legs require the support of canes, but the mind remains
frisky.
That was evident in Mr. Mailer's vivid and elaborate
theorizing
on writing, aging, technology and politics; on
why, as he put it, "if we
don't go to war with Iraq, George
W. Bush is going to feel ill."
Turning 80 on Jan. 31, Mr. Mailer has comfortably assumed
the
pose of grand old man of American letters, assessing
his place in the
literary pantheon with little of the
braggadocio that has become his
trademark.
"I'll last or I won't last," he said regarding
future
evaluation of his body of work, which began in 1948 with
his novel
"The Naked and the Dead" and includes two
Pulitzer Prizes. "It's the one
thing you really can't
predict, because history takes turns. There are
certain
writers who are so great you can never throw them off. I'm
not in
that category. I may last or I may not last."
For this birthday he
and his wife, Norris Church, are
planning a small party for friends at their
house in
Brooklyn, now chiefly occupied by various Mailer offspring.
Mr.
Mailer and Ms. Church have lived primarily in
Provincetown, at the tip of
Cape Cod, for several years.
This intimate gathering is a big contrast to the
gala at
the Rainbow Room given by his publisher, Random House, for
his
75th birthday, also celebrating publication of his
anthology "The Time of Our
Time."
While he is not sentimental about round-numbered
birthdays,
Mr. Mailer said, he does like having the publication of
"The
Spooky Art," his new book, coincide with his 80th.
"It occurred to
me it's a wicked notion," he explained, his
blue eyes twinkling, making him
look dangerously like the
kind of sweet old coot he says he disdains. "I
would
classify myself and half the people I know as wicked.
Gamblers.
People just upping the ante."
The digression had an endpoint,
which is Mr. Mailer's
fascination with the relationship between authors
and
reviewers. "There are so many reviewers who have been good
to me over
the years and so many who have been bad over the
years," he said, adding that
it would be fun to see if his
80th birthday would soften those who did not
like him.
Now he appears to be the amiable paterfamilias,
surrounded
by paintings by Ms. Church, an artist, and his daughter
Maggie
Mailer, and tables crowded with photos of children
(nine) and grandchildren
(eight). But this is the same
Mailer who used to stagger onto lecture stages
infirm from
liquor not arthritis, hurling curses at his audiences.
He famously carved his displeasure into one of his
five
previous wives with a knife and routinely avoided writer's
block by
indulging in drugs. Even in his prime he wasn't a
big man, though lack of
size did not stop him from
brawling, or from grandiose ambition, manifested,
for
example, in his hapless New York mayoral campaign in 1969.
He recalled the legends that he helped to create
around
himself, with journalists' compliance. "The newspapers
built it up
enormously," he said, referring to the bad-boy
image. "I half liked it and
half disliked it. I half liked
it because it made me sound tougher than I
really was. I
half disliked it because it meant the ante was upped.
It
isn't that something would happen every time you went to a
bar, but
maybe one in 20. It becomes a little like Russian
roulette: one bullet, six
chambers. If you pull the
trigger, the odds are five to one in your favor,
but you
feel as if it's even money."
Yet he plows ahead,
writing several hours a day, even as he
expresses fear for the survival of
the serious novel. "If
you grew up as I did going to college in 1939 and
1940, you
had the feeling that writers are the marrow of a nation,
the
nutrient," he said, "if you start with Tolstoy and
Dostoevski and add to that
the great English novelists of
the 19th century (Dickens and Thackeray) and
certainly add
the French (Zola, Balzac, Proust) and look at the
effect
Joyce had on Ireland. In the course of my life I've seen
everything
else take over. The novel now rides in a
sidecar."
Which does
not mean he thinks there are no good novelists
anymore. In the interview and
in his book he praised
Jonathan Franzen as a writer, while bemoaning
the
limitations of ambition in "The Corrections," his much
praised and
best-selling novel. "With talent like that, he
should have tried for much
more," said Mr. Mailer, who was
never accused of not trying for everything.
"I think it's
almost paradigmatic of what's going on with the
talented
writers right now. They're probably more talented now than
they
ever were in America, but they're doing less and
less."
Still,
he cannot resist the public life, taking time last
year from the novel he's
been laboring on for years - and
isn't sure he will ever finish - to give a
series of
interviews on the political situation after Sept. 11. He
has
been refining his hypothesis of American empire, namely
that by the end of
the cold war certain forces in the
United States felt that America should be
the dominant
military power in the universe. Because of its oil and
its
location, Iraq is the linchpin in that plan. In this simple
thought,
he comes close to the views of his old rival and
sparring partner Gore Vidal.
"It doesn't matter what they're up to in Iraq," he said.
"It
doesn't matter if they have nuclear bombs or not or
whether they're ready to
do chemical warfare. They're not a
danger, but they are absolutely a position
in the world we
need militarily. Dominate Iraq, dominate the Near East,
and
then get China in a position to make China the Greece to
our Rome."
"Sept. 11 was the `open sesame' to the path to world
empire,"
he said. "It doesn't matter for Bush if things
turn out well or badly in
Iraq. If they turn out well, they
can start to think of the next step. If
they turn out
badly, that's still good for him because of
American
patriotism. Who's going to be against George W. Bush when
he's
mourning the deaths of our boys? Either way he won't
have to face the
increasing problems here with the American
economy and the scandals, with the
breakdown in belief in
two huge systems: corporate leadership and the
priesthood."
Mr. Mailer's writing has never been better
than when he
acted as journalist, in his account, for example, of
the
protests against the Vietnam War, in "Armies of the Night."
Who better
to analyze why protest now is comparatively
muted, at least in the United
States?
"Two things numb a protest movement," he said. "One
is
9/11. That moved Americans to thinking that something has
to be done
about this. The second thing is Saddam Hussein
himself. You have to go back
to melodramas in the 1850's
where a villain with a great big mustache leaped
onto the
stage to defile the maiden before you get someone as good
as
Saddam Hussein as an enemy. Ho Chi Minh had that
wonderful saintly look that
made life much easier for a
good protest movement."
But Mr.
Mailer does not expect to be writing about this
war, he said; he has a novel
to finish, whose subject he
won't divulge and whose completion he would not
take bets
on. "If I can bring it off - the IF by now is in capital
letters
- it will be the biggest thing I've ever done. But
at my age you can't
approach it with the confidence you
once had. Illness can deter you,
affliction can stop you,
breakdowns can occur."
He invokes a
favorite metaphor, of the athlete. "An older
one who's been around for years
almost always measures his
chances against his physical stamina. A
quarterback, if he
has any choice on calling plays, may think, No, I'm
not
going to go for that long pass because I've gotten whacked
the last
two times. As a professional, he's always
measuring possibilities. The same
is true in writing, you
measure what you can and you can't do."
Mr. Mailer also spoke about the change in publishing
that
discourages risk. "People are always complaining in sports
about how
much money these athletes get," he said. "At
least those athletes can answer,
`I'm getting that money
because I'm the best in my field.' In literature
it's
exactly the opposite. It's the mediocrities who make the
mega-sums.
That was always true to a degree, but it's
intensified considerably."
While good-humored and not past offering the
occasional
unprintable sexual reference, Mr. Mailer spoke with a
palpable
sense of resignation if not disappointment. He's
clearly had to shrink
expectations to a size far more human
than the larger-than-life scale by
which he once measured
his ambition.
"The notion that what you
put into a book is going to have
powerful effect is a notion that's harder
and harder to
maintain," he said. "Part of the ability to keep
writing
over the years comes down to living with the expectation
of
disappointment. It's the exactly opposite of capitalism. In
capitalism
you want your business to succeed, and to the
degree it does your energy
increases, and you go out and
buy an even bigger business. In writing it's
almost the
exact opposite. You just want to keep the store going.
You're
not going to do as well this year as last year
probably, but nonetheless
let's keep the store going."
Then, a fine Mailer moment, that
neatly packaged his
strength and weakness as a writer. "I don't like this
image
much," he said, waving his hand as if to vanquish the
earnest
shopkeeper he had conjured. "It doesn't offer as
much as I thought when I
embarked on it. The only fun in
working images is that, as you elaborate on
them, they
always turn out either better or worse than you'd hoped.
The
alternative is to say the same thing you've been saying
over and
over."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/22/books/22MAIL.html?ex=1044272944&ei=1&en=e38b736dd2b330e2
Copyright 2002 The New York Times
Company>>
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