…and you know where this is going to lead. I want to read or hear something, anything, about Norman Mailer the writer.

Not Norman Mailer the celebrity. Not Norman Mailer the drunken macho blowhard. Not Norman Mailer the political “radical” with Neanderthal attitudes about women. Not Norman Mailer the antiwar activist who was quick to elevate cocktail-party disagreements into calls for fistfights. I’ve read more than enough about all those Norman Mailers.

My experiences with Mailer’s writing have been mixed to poor. I cringed at his Marilyn Monroe tribute book. Tough Guys Don’t Dance was a slop of a book that became a bigger slop of a movie.

Then there was the 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which I first read sometime in 1982 or 1983. Yes, it accurately predicted the Sixties culture wars. But it was also a piece of self-promoting nonsense. But then again, I already believed, apparently unlike Mailer, that black culture had purposes other than giving white hipsters something to copy, and that women had purposes other than facilitating male orgasms.

So: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recommend something Mailer wrote that justifies his hype. I’m afraid you’ll have to do it via email again; I’ve still not figured out how to turn comment threads on.