Categorical Aperitif

I hope to resume more regular posting—and Daily Random Flickr Blogging—with the new year, which, come to think of it, begins...holy crap! tomorrow!?! I've been getting some much-needed rest during the holiday break—and I've been doing some good old-fashioned pleasure reading. I finally got around to reading Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, for example, and found it quite enjoyable despite Mailer's famously obtrusive ego. The book, an odd hybrid of novel, memoir, and history—one might call it the product of an unspeakable ménage à trois—recounts Mailer's experiences surrounding the anti-war March on the Pentagon in October 1967. It's rife with interesting details and anecdotes that help to bring a sense of the Sixties to life for those of us who were scarcely post-natal—or for that matter nonexistent—at the time, but one paragraph in particular leaped out at me. At this point in the story, along with hundreds of other protestors, some famous, some not, Mailer has been arrested and is preparing to spend the night in a crowded jail cell in Occuquan, Virginia:

Definitive word came through. The lawyers were gone, the Commissioners were gone: nobody out until morning. So Mailer picked his bunk. It was next to Noam Chomsky, a slim sharp-featured man with an ascetic expression, and an air of gentle but absolute moral integrity. Friends at Wellfleet had wanted him to meet Chomsky at a party the summer before—he had been told that Chomsky, though barely thirty, was considered a genius at MIT for his new contributions to linguistics—but Mailer had arrived at the party too late. Now, as he bunked down next to Chomsky, Mailer looked for some way to open a discussion on linguistics—he had an amateur's interest in the subject, no, rather, he had a mad inventor's interest, with several wild theories in his pocket which he had never been able to exercise since he could not understand what he read in linguistics books. So he cleared his throat now once or twice, turned over in bed, looked for a preparatory question, and recognized that he and Chomsky might share a cell for months, and be the best and most civilized of cellmates, before the mood would be proper to strike the first note of inquiry into what was obviously the tightly packed conceptual coils of Chomsky's intellections. Instead they chatted mildly of the day, of the arrests (Chomsky had also been arrested with [protest leader David] Dellinger), and of when they would get out. Chomsky—by all odds a dedicated teacher—seemed uneasy at the thought of missing class on Monday. (Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, Plume, 1968, p. 180)

My friend jules has actually met Chomsky and can perhaps vouch for that "air of gentle but absolute moral integrity." This passage illustrates one of the things I like about Mailer's style: his careful, logical yet elegant way of organizing paragraphs. This one is typical of many in The Armies of the Night; it at once (a) advances the story while (b) weaving in interesting digressional material and (c) ending with a punchy, evocative sentence that's like a decorative bow atop a well-wrapped present. For paragraphs like these, I can forgive Mailer much of his insufferable egotism. And bless his heart, he shares my fondness for the dash.

A Happy New Year's Eve to all and I'll see you in 2009.