71.30c

“Mailer: Prisoner of Sex.” Interview by Elliot Mintz. Los Angeles Free Press, 20 December, 3, 18. Focuses mainly on Mailer’s two most recent works, 71.1 and 71.10. Of the former, Mailer says that he admired the Apollo 11 mission because it was “well engineered and well machined with the workmanship staying at a high level,” especially since “part of the crisis of modern civilization is that workmanship is disappearing and deteriorating everywhere.” Of the Woman’s Liberation Movement, he says he is “two-thirds to three-quarters sympathetic,” but finds it to be totalitarian in that it offers “a solution which will work everywhere.” In regard to sex, he says that there are two ways one can look at it: (1) as a pleasurable activity “that fits in somewhere between steak, chess, and football”; or (2) “altogether different from other activities of life, say as different as death from ordinary existence.” He says he prefers the latter view.