We learned with sadness that Norman Mailer passed away this weekend.
I heard him speak several times in the last few years at the home of friends of a friend.
Sunday mornings were reserved for “Norman”, and he was consistently ferocious, urbane and irreverent: at his presentation last year, he growled, “Organized religion is the citadel of Satan.”
His passing represents the loss of yet another member of a unique generation of intellectuals and activists whose like we will probably not see again.
A singular confluence of events created them, and in my view at least, our modern Weltanschauung – frightened, tepid, vulnerable to the marketing of idiot politicians and neurotic rock stars, hostile to true inventiveness, competence and insight – is incapable of producing the kind of astute, idiosyncratic avant-garde of which Norman Mailer was a part.