Friday, November 23, 2007

Norman Mailer on his characters and their penises

Just had to upload one more brilliant little bit from Pennebaker and Hegedus' 1979 Town Bloody Hall (shot in 1971). Here Norman answers a question about the protagonists in his novels that give nicknames to their penises. Germaine Greer — who in more recent years did a stint on Celebrity Big Brother over in England — has something to say about this phenomenon.


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1 comment:

ANTHONY SIDES said...

This is a really funny clip, and I think Mailer's arguments here are sharper and fairer than in The Prisoner of Sex. Like a few of his late 60s/early 70s books, it's great as magazine reading but seems not quite substantial enough in book form - and his nonfiction is often romantic in a way his novels never were. His subsequent negativity toward feminism was almost certainly provoked by feminists' stereotyping of him as a primitive and mysoginist - though in the last 5-10 years he said he didn't blame them - "I made some stupid remarks about women, I said they were so dangerous they should be locked in cages..."

You can read my short piece about Mailer at Espresso Shots