Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

There’s a Charles Bukowski poem that takes place at a reading during which someone asks him, “What do you think of Norman Mailer?” To which Bukowski succinctly replies, “I don’t think of Norman Mailer.” Well, seeing as how Mailer died today, I’m thinking of him quite a bit.

As a young reader, not much into my teens, I discovered Norman Mailer (almost because of his reputation more than his books). My friends and I collected and talked about his work, and I still remember getting into fights with my English teachers over him; they hated him, which only made me love him more. And even though there are many of his books I’ve still never gotten around to — for instance, I still haven’t read The Naked and The Dead — instead, it was more the force of his personality that attracted me. As a kid in high school who never got good grades and didn’t like sports, I was attracted to Mailer in a rebellious sort of way, kind of like how the Beats took up Kerouac as their idol and role-model.

And when I finally got around to actually reading Mailer, I loved almost everything I read. Even his almost inscrutable books, from Why Are We in Vietnam? to Ancient Evenings, made me admire him because he had the drive and power and vision to write books that no one else would risk (or think of) writing.

Plus, my favorites of Mailer’s never seemed to be anyone else’s favorites, such as The Deer Park, a book which cost him a publisher and almost his sanity, and Advertisements for Myself which, in its conversational asides, contains the best advice to writers that I’ve ever read outside of perhaps New Grub Street.

Later I read Mailer’s masterworks such as The Executioner’s Song and The Armies of the Night, and when I did I sat dumbfounded at the man’s total control over words (and his less than total control over his ego), not to mention the fact that any biography of Mailer (including Peter Manso’s oral biography, which cost him his friendship with Mailer) was better than most people’s fiction.

Yes, Mailer was often a jerk and a blowhard and overall a general loudmouth, but he was also an American original and someone who played a large part in who I am today. Not only that (indeed, what he has meant to me personally is dwarfed by what he has to meant to literature in general), but I think the battles Mailer fought are finally being won thanks to the Internet and the egalitarianism of a Web 2.0 world where consumers have more choice than ever. Today, the “wisdom of crowds” can often drown out the cranky, singular critic who no longer controls fates with the slash of a pen they way they did back in Mailer’s day. For instance, here’s a passage from one of the interstitial essays in Advertisements for Myself, where Mailer casts a cold eye on the literary landscape of his time:

The day was gone when people held on to your novels no matter what others might say. Instead one’s good young readers waited now for the verdict of professional young men, academics who wolfed down a modern literature with an anxiety to find your classification, your identity, your similarity, your common theme, your corporate literary earnings, each reference to yourself as individual as a carloading of homogenized words. The articles which would be written about you and a dozen others would be done by minds which were expert on the aggregate and so had senses too lumpy for the particular. There was a limit to how much appraisal could be made of a work before the critic exposed his lack of the critical faculty, and so it was naturally wiser for the mind of the expert to masticate the themes of ten writers rather than approach the difficulties of any one.

But today, with more and more mainstream publications cutting back on review space, and more and more readers and consumers trading their opinions via social networking sites and blogs, the power of the critic is beginning to slowly whither away. What’s replacing it is the power of the individual (which goes a long way toward restoring the power of the writer). And I kind of think that Mailer would have wanted it that way.