"Gonads!"

In a 1971 Town Hall meeting to discuss Norman Mailer's "Prisoner of Sex," Cynthia Ozick rose from the audience with a question about Mailer's statement he'd written in "Advertisement for Myself": “a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.”  To his credit, I think, Mailer was demure, almost pixie-like and disarming when he said he had written some pretty stupid things and that was surely one of them (link).  He ceded the point to Ozick.  

The photographer Robert Capa famously said, "If your photographs aren't good enough, you are not close enough."  

About this photograph, I would say, "Balls!"

I forced myself to make a little outing yesterday with camera in hand.  You can't make photographs if your not taking photographs.  So I've been told. 

Read some biographies of writers and artists and what do you discover?  Right? 

I read a review of the new, first biography written about Cormac McCarthy (link).  Uh-oh.  Sounds like the man might have had some flaws.  Huh.  

I got an email from my buddy Vincenzo Barney.  Just kidding.  We are not buddies.  We've just corresponded a couple times.  I'm sure he remembers.  

"I am very pleased to announce the sale of Augusta: an American Muse to Claiborne Hancock and Jessica Case at Pegasus Books."

 I had to Google that.  

"Pegasus Publishers (also known as Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie) is a hybrid/vanity press rather than a standard traditional publisher, meaning authors often have to pay fees for publication services."

So much for that.  What Barney wants is for me to subscribe to his Substack page so I can read all about the things he's learned from materials not available to others, especially those stodgy academics.  I told him they wouldn't like him, that they would come after tooth and nail.  But I didn't think that in the end he would have to publish on a vanity press.  

 Dirt.  

I've almost finished the Salter bio.  Yea.  These two are among my favorite contemporary writers.  Each is a stylist.  Each was a bit of a dandy.  They had similar passions that will problematize their legacies.  I have to separate the writing from the writer in both cases.  I met Salter.  No bueno.  I wish I would have met McCarthy, too.  

Why are creative people so problematic?  

I guess you have to tip your hat to someone like Edward Hopper, though I have never read a lengthy biography about him, but he stayed married to his wife and used her as the female model for almost all his paintings.  He didn't talk much, I understand.  God knows what was going on in that noggin of his.  

I guess there are great painters of still lifes.  But, so it seems to me, a writer has to be interested in the very darkest of human psyches.  Students used to ask me why all the stories were so troubling.  I would tell them a story about a little boy who did everything he was supposed to do.  I'd throw in some temptations to which he never succumbed.  At the end, I'd see the disappointment in their faces.  

"How's that?  What did you learn from that tale?"

Then I'd give them some Bible tales.  You know the ones.  The darkest of dark.  

"Y'all are destined to be pillars of salt. I can tell that already."

But I always ended with a caveat.  

"Maybe you'd like to write, but how many of you would like to live the life of a writer?"

And there's the rub.  Art without suffering?  Uh-huh.  Maybe you should think about being a scholar or a critic instead.  

C.C. is in NYC taking pictures of funky places and characters.  I'm wandering around farmers markets trying to find something of note among the t-shirt, shorts, and athletic shoe crowd.  If you look close enough, though, you can find the danger there.  They are all terrorists in their own way.  There is always danger in a crowd.  

I asked one of the booth owners yesterday how much she was paying to rent her space.  Forty dollars, she said.  What?!  Only forty-dollars?  Oh, my.  Why haven't I set up my photo booth already.  I need to get on that, I think.  My pulse fairly quickens. 

If Mailer had been better equipped, he might have said "Gonads!"  Could have saved him some trouble.