September 29, 2020

Idea for Mailer on WP covid-19: day 192 | US: GA | info | act

Today, I discovered an interesting page perusing Wikipedia’s list of Featured Articles for Literature and Theatre. “Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies” is an example of an article that Norman Mailer Society members could team-write for Norman Mailer. This could solve the issue of the poorly written section of Mailer’s article, recurring themes (ugh, it reads like a poorly sourced undergraduate essay), and give the society its first featured article.

In a couple of weeks at the Society’s online conference, I’m giving an update on the digital projects we’ve been up to. I think this will be an excellent call to action. I can see divvying-up the various themes for interested writers. What are those themes? Well we can start with these, with thanks from Mike Lennon:

• a desire to grow at all costs;
• a distrust of pure reason and its products;
• a willingness to take risks;
• a trust in the authority of the senses;
• a faith in courage as the cardinal virtue;
• a fear and loathing for the incipient totalitarianism of American life;
• a belief in an heroic but limited God locked in struggle with a powerful, wily Devil, conceivably with the fate of the universe in the balance.

. . .