“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his country and ours. Mailer lived and wrote it all: 40 books of eagle-eyed fact and fiction. First as a soldier in the Philippines, in the 1940s; then: epic poet of the Sixties in America; eventually as a celebrity and popular artist of Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra proportions. 







J. Michael Lennon, Chris Lydon, and John Buffalo Mailer.



Sinatra taught us love songs, Mailer read the maelstrom of our American dream life to us. The premise in our conversation is that Norman Mailer, 15 years after his death, is still speaking to his country. Certainly to John Buffalo Mailer, youngest of seven sons and daughters, co-editor with J. Michael Lennon of a Mailer distillation for 2023, titled A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy.









Norman Mailer Turns 100

Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics

Arts

Literature

Performing Arts

Design

Food

Fashion & Beauty

Visual Arts

We’re on a hometown spree along the famous Fenway in the heart of Boston. Fenway Park is where the Red Sox play, John Updike’s “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” Fenway Court, built around the same time just a few blocks away, is a jewel box, a treasure house of high art, an American palazzo and museum like none other, a matching monument to quirky Boston’s eccentricity and its beauty. 



Courtyard, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. (Photo: Sean Dungan. www.gardnermuseum.org.)



We owe Natalie Dykstra for her new biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner—who designed Fenway Court, inch by inch. She invented this magical space where Proper Old Boston got up close and personal with the Italian Renaissance, and does to this day. 






Natalie Dykstra. (Photo: Ellen Dykstra.)



Mrs. Gardner made social history, art history, women’s history on a grand scale, but there’s something more here, evident in the Titian room of her museum, with masterpieces on the walls by the giants: Velasquez, Titian himself, and Botticelli around the corner. But there’s Mrs. Gardner, too. She had the authority of an empress (and a whole lot of money) in assembling this art, one painting at a time. Somehow the final effect is unpretentious, intimate, humble, democratic. 



Our banner image is from John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston—www.gardnermuseum.com.

Chasing Beauty






We’re taking a drawing lesson with Nicholson Baker—yes, the multifarious writers’ writer Nick Baker; the COVID lab leak detective; the pacifist historian of World War II in his book Human Smoke; he’s also the cherubic pornographer in Vox, about phone sex; and he’s the podcaster and performer of his own protest songs. 



He is a marvel, and his big new book is a life-changer, titled Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. Listeners will hear him drawing and growing in the making of this book. And here at our site, you can see him drawing Chris (videographer: Mary McGrath).








Below: Chris Lydon and Nicholson Baker.





Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness

We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for its pattern. Columbia and USC have cancelled graduation ceremonies. Many more schools are threatening suspensions or worse if students don’t remove their encampments. In our neighborhood, Harvard Yard is encamped, closed to people without Harvard ID. Harvard students are catch-as-catch-can. 



















Zachary Samalin and Sophia Azeb.



We are dropping in conversationally on faculty players we know on either side of the country: Sophia Azeb at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Zachary Samalin at New York University in Manhattan. Santa Cruz is encamped in tents and abuzz with notably civil and inclusive debates about rights, wrongs, and history—all the arguments about Palestine that Congress doesn’t have. You could wonder: what if the 19-year-olds who have preempted the conversation from the campuses are, in fact, the leaders we have been looking for?

Campus Uproar

The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. He’s here to tell us all that we’re in a 40-year culture war and an identity crisis by now. It’s all about drawing on legendary figures like Daniel Boone and Frederick Douglass, Betsy Ross and Rosa Parks, Robert E. Lee and G.I. Joe for a composite self-portrait of the country.






Richard Slotkin.



Richard Slotkin says we’re in a contest of origin stories, in search of a common national myth. His book is A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. It is the Trump-Biden fight, of course, but with centuries of history bubbling under it.

American Disorder

We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. And then she famously covered the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi minister of death. Her study of the origins of totalitarianism keeps her current fifty years after her death and, pointedly, in our own rancorous presidential campaign of 2024.






Hannah Arendt.






Lyndsey Stonebridge.



In this podcast, the surprise turns on finding a profound humanity and hope, believe it or not, in the collected wisdom of Hannah Arendt. She noted in one essay, “We are free to change the world.” Our guest, Lyndsey Stonebridge, lifted that line for the title of her gripping, fresh take on Hannah Arendt. We Are Free to Change the World is her title, and thinking has everything to do with it.

Norman Mailer Turns 100

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