Norman Mailer

November 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Norman Mailer died on Saturday. Sociologist/criminologist Chris Uggen posted briefly about Mailer’s criminal-justice-related writings – Chris is less impressed by Mailer’s fiction – so here’s my Mailer story. Not much, not sociology, not even lit crit, just one degree of separation.


In the summer of 1963, still in my teens, I was traveling across the country to San Francisco on a Greyhound bus. We’d stop every few hours in larger or smaller towns. You’d get off to use the bathroom or get a snack, and when you got back on, the demographics of the bus would have shifted. Different accents, different bodies.

We scaled the Rockies at night, crossed Utah as the sun was rising, and made it into Reno at mid-morning. The layover was an hour or so, and when I got back on the bus, my new seatmate was a gaunt, sallow, man in his thirties, much different from the plump and pasty folks I’d gotten used to over the previous thousand miles.

He’d stayed awake for thirty-six hours straight playing chuk-a-luck in a casino, winning a lot, losing it all back, and eventually developing a severe eye infection. He’d just gotten out of the hospital, and he was going to California to try to write for the movies and TV.

It was at about this point in our conversation that he pulled out a plastic bag with some odd food in it. It was thick crusty black bread covered with strange seeds and perhaps mold. “It’s Zen macrobiotic bread,” he said, and offered me a piece. I hadn’t heard of macrobiotics then, though I did know that Zen was cool. Still, I politely declined the offer.

He’d come from New York, where he’d taught English in grade school. But he also was an aspiring writer and hung out with the literary crowd in Greenwich Village. He’d been at parties with Norman Mailer.

He must have sensed my heightened interest at the mention of the name. Mailer was famous. He’d written a Big Novel, he’d published advertisements for himself, he’d invented the White Negro, he’d stabbed his wife.

“You know what another writer once told me at one of these parties?” he said. “‘Norman Mailer is a little Jewish kid from Brooklyn who still thinks it’s a big deal to get laid.’”

I remembered this pithy ad hominem when, a couple of years later, I read An American Dream. From that viewpoint, it seemed less a novel of political and social significance than a string of adolescent fantasies of sex and power. Like Chris Uggen, I never could never see the greatness of Mailer’s novels (at least the ones I read). But I remember being impressed immensely by Armies of the Night, even reading passages of it out loud to my roommates.

Kids and Danger - II

September 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Matilda’s mother apologizes for calling so late, but she wonders whether Caroline might be free for a playdate? Like, tomorrow? “Matilda’s had a cancellation,” she says. Liz searches the kitchen drawer for Caroline’s Week-at-a-Glance. It’s ten already and she’s had her wine; down the hall the baby nurse, Lorna, is asleep with the twins and Caroline; Ted’s out of town. What the hell is Matilda’s mother’s name, anyway? Faith, Frankie, Fern— “We could do an hour,” Liz says. “We have piano at four-thirty.”

That’s the opening of “Playdate,” a story by Kate Walbert published in The New Yorker several months ago. It fits with my previous post about parents and children, control and protection.

Is this the way we live now, I wondered as I read these paragraphs – six-year-olds with planner appointment books, mothers scheduling playdates because a child had “a cancellation”? A nurse for the kids even when mom is at home? (The twins, we learn later in the story, were conceived in vitro with another woman’s eggs.)

Sometimes fiction captures the culture and social structure well before the sociologists move in. For freshman English long ago, I had to read J.D. Salinger’s much anthologized story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” At the time, I didn’t appreciate its sociological imagination, its showing the connections between private troubles and social structures. Nor did I appreciate how ahead of its time it was in applying this sociological imagination to women. (If you have a copy of the story, take it off the shelf and read it now. It won’t take long.)

The postwar years in the US seemed prosperous and problem-free. The principle criticism of the period at the time was that it was dull, dominated by conformity. But Salinger’s story gave us the underside of middle-class prosperity – the frustrations of the bright, educated woman trapped as a housewife in suburbia. That suburban context makes us understand and sympathize with her cynicism, her drinking, her anger at her husband, and even her anger at her child.

Salinger’s story was published in 1948. Sociologists and psychologists began exploring this territory in the fifties and didn’t begin thinking seriously about women until at least a decade later.

“Playdate” is obviously based on “Uncle Wiggly.” (I suppose there are fine lines between being inspired by, writing in homage to, and just plain ripping off another author.) The New Yorker blurb puts it this way: “Short story about two Manhattan mothers getting drunk and confiding in each other while their daughters are on a playdate.” Which would work for “Uncle Wiggly,” except that there’s only one daughter, and the setting is a Connecticut suburb rather than Manhattan. The rhythm of the events in the stories is the same, some of the images are identical (a woman lying on the floor balancing her drink on her chest), even the flow of the final sentence.

In both stories, the women sense that something is missing from their lives, something they can’t quite identify. In the 2007 story, that sense is symbolized in the pet cat’s “hot spot”: “Their cat . . . recently contracted a hot spot. A hot spot, she tells Liz, is an itch that can’t be scratched.” A problem you literally cannot put your finger on.

But while the mood of Salinger’s postwar story is isolation and anger, the tone of “Playdate” is not as bleak, and its central feelings are anxiety and uncertainty. The mothers have attended a talk at school: “Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety; or, How to Let Go and Lighten Up!” Walbert is spoofing pop psych here, but the “anxiety journal” the professor tells the parents to keep becomes a significant item in the story.

“We are living in the Age of Anxiety,”says the professor. But several eras in the last century have been the age of anxiety – the phrase itself originates (I think) in a 1948 poem by Auden, and an Internet history guide applies the phrase to the 1920s. What’s different from one era to another are the causes of the anxiety. This is the post-9/11 era. “Helicopters,” the mother lists in her anxiety journal along with Thieves, Crowds, and Playdates. Twice in the story we hear the subway warning announcement: “Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious package or activity . . . .”

There may also be differences in how we react. Salinger’s suburban postwar mother chose sarcasm and alcohol. The Manhattan mothers in 2007 deal with anxiety by trying to schedule uncertainty out of their children’s lives. They hover like helicopters.

The New York Post

June 20, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I love the New York Post. I don’t actually read it; but I see the front page every day. Regardless of the actual content, the message of the subtext could often be summarized in the following headline:

THIS IS NOT A REAL NEWSPAPER.
We’re in it for kicks.

Here’s yesterdays front page.



The story was that Israel was trying to boost its sagging tourism. Apparently the Israelis thought that potential tourists —younger male tourists — were staying away not because of questions of politics and safety but because the Israel “brand” lacked sex. So they made a deal with Maxim, the lad mag, to sponsor a party honoring Israeli women soldiers. They used this photo of Miss Israel 2004 on the invitation.

The Post usually supports Israel, but when it comes to politics on one side and a bikini and a smutty pun on the other, it’s no contest. (“Piece” seems somewhat dated to my ear, but I don’t spend much time listening to informal talk among the target demographic. And how many Post readers will get the pun on brouhaha?)

There’s a culture and class connection here that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s a combination of patriotism, prurience, and puritanism, and the Post, like much of the rest of Murdoch’s media empire, thrives on it. Most of Murdoch’s other outlets take themselves more seriously, though when the boys at Fox News slapped on that “Fair and Balanced” slogan, they surely must have had their tongue deep in their cheek and all fingers crossed.

The Murdoch media love sex, especially when it allows the pointing of fingers at other people’s sexuality. I’m sure they’re kicking themselves for failing to come up with “To Catch a Predator,” NBC’s champion in the “moral righteousness cum voyeurism” category, while Fox and the others must content themselves with Britney, Paris, and the rest. (For an interesting take on “Predator,” see Corey Colyer’s recent blog entry. ) Typically with these publications, you get babes in bikinis on one page and on the next a sex scandal news item that clearly shows the border between the good guys’ cheerful sexuality and that bad guys’ evil sexuality.

The simplistic moral approach also applies to politics. It’s us against them, and we’re the good guys. Again, the Post, with its lack of pretension to being a real newspaper, provides the best example. Here it is in March 2003, when in the U.N., France and Germany were opposing US resolutions authorizing the invasion of Iraq.


(In case you can’t see it in the photo, the weasel heads have been superimposed on the representatives from France and Germany.)

The Post covers politics the way it covers sports, with the Bush administration as the home team. The main difference is that the Post sports reporters try to get information besides what’s put out by the Yankee front office, and they will actually criticize the Yankee players and management when the team is not doing well. (Currently, the Yankees in MLB are sort of like the US in Iraq — spending a ton of money and not having a lot of victories to show for it, in fact just barely above having a losing record.)

For the New York Post, every day is a moral struggle. Every day, on various fronts, good confronts evil. The forces of selfless virtue, loyalty, common sense, and pride confront the forces of self-interest, danger, sneakiness, corruption, elitism, and immorality. The good guys don’t win every battle, but they can pat themselves on the back for trying. And whatever happens, they can usually find comfort in a picture of a beautiful woman who’s not wearing very much at all.

Real Simple Stuff

April 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Real Simple was #2 on Adweek’s “Hot List” of magazines, just behind O, The Oprah Magazine. Nobody beats Oprah. Seven of the top ten on the Hot List were women’s magazines. Adweek’s editor said, “Young women, older women, women obsessed with living more spiritual, less- cluttered lives — you name it, there is a magazine for almost any advertiser looking to reach women.”

I looked at the latest issue Real Simple. Advertising revenues are up, and the magazine sits on the newsstand shelf fat and prosperous with all those ad pages. It has articles on things like “Six Products for Organizing Your Laundry Room” and “Ten Organizing Problem-Solvers: Restore order in your home with these inventive products.” Suddenly, Real Simple seemed a bit more complicated. It’s an irony others must have pointed out, but since I can’t Google up anything along those lines, I’ll state the obvious:

Companies are rushing to advertise in Real Simple for the same reason they advertise anywhere — because they think the ads will get people to buy their stuff. So either the advertisers don’t know what they’re doing (unlikely) or Real Simple readers are caught in an apparent contradiction. In order to really simplify their cluttered lives they’re buying more stuff.

I admit that I don’t know any of these Real Simple readers, but the image I get is of an addict, a product junkie. The essence of addiction is the idea that the solution to your problem is more of what caused the problem in the first place. The heroin addict thinks he can solve his withdrawal symptoms with another shot of smack. The compulsive gambler thinks he can climb out of the abyss of debt that his gambling has put him in if only he can just make a few winning bets.

If I wanted to lead a more spiritual, less cluttered life I would be getting rid of the stuff in my house (and in my house that clutter includes a lot of magazines and other printed material). I would be cancelling magazine subscriptions, giving stuff away, throwing stuff out. If we have too much, it seems the solution should be less not more. Of course, there are few social rewards for having less, and our whole society and economy are geared towards encouraging the desire for more products. In fact, it seems that what Real Simple is offering is not simplicity but order.

The problem is not that you have too much stuff; the problem is that your stuff is not well organized. The ideal Real Simple reader (ideal from the point of view of the advertisers and probably the publisher, Time Warner) is the woman who tries to achieve a more spiritual and less cluttered life by buying the products featured in the ads and the articles in this magazine and using them to impose order on the chaos. Once the clutter gets organized, she’ll have room for more, more, more.

It makes sense, at least within the context of American culture. Appropriately enough, number four on the Adweek Hot List is a magazine called More.