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The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/Norman’s Crystals: Difference between revisions
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“Elegance” became the defining attribute of a woman’s essence. Schiller also possessed extraordinary interview and research skills, especially for book length projects, where he can amass forty hours of interviews with a single subject. Schiller is able to mine details that the subject had forgotten were buried. Cops and KGB operatives fall under Schiller’s spell of giving up everything to history. Mailer learned from Schiller and Schiller learned from Mailer. These lessons are worth a future book enacting a series of creative collaborations functioning at the highest level. | “Elegance” became the defining attribute of a woman’s essence. Schiller also possessed extraordinary interview and research skills, especially for book length projects, where he can amass forty hours of interviews with a single subject. Schiller is able to mine details that the subject had forgotten were buried. Cops and KGB operatives fall under Schiller’s spell of giving up everything to history. Mailer learned from Schiller and Schiller learned from Mailer. These lessons are worth a future book enacting a series of creative collaborations functioning at the highest level. | ||
At the Colony, every Monday morning a new group of six or seven fellows arrive for the week. Mike Lennon, Mailer’s authorized biographer, shows them around the house, finding their way through the labyrinth Norman had woven around himself a house warm with family photographs and the paintings and sculptures of his wife and children. The arriving fellows are marched up the winding stairs to Norman’s study, nestled in the apex of the attic. A large picture window faces west, overlooking the little houses tucked along the curving harbor. The houses become backlit with reddish halos when the sun sets behind them; the glare made Norman tack up a heavy curtain. As his eyesight faded, becoming especially sensitive to flashes of bright light, the curtain was never lifted. | |||
The workshop meetings and seminars are held downstairs around two conferences tables abutted together. On the occasions I visited, each person seemed to have accumulated an ample stack of copies of each other’s work, plus handouts from the presenter. Light from the bay floods the room and the breaking waves begin to sound in intervals that govern the pulse of the listener. In such a setting, conversation can be calm as a flat sea or hyperbolic as a hurricane, each mood achieving its own natural, authentic measure. | |||