Notes on the Testicular and Penile Theories of Talent
Celebrating Norman Mailer
I have a terrible confession to make—I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale. At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say that the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquille in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn. Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict may be taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the ground of departure–that a good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.
–Norman Mailer
Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.
–Alejandro Jodorowsky
With them that day were various members of [Salvador] Dalì’s Divine Court: Gala, his muse, coiffed and rouged like a ventriloquist’s dummy; Prince Dado Ruspoli, famed as having the largest penis in Europe; Princess Nanita Kalaschnikoff, with her celebrated Louis XIV profile; the collector Sir Edward James; painter Léonor Fini and the unimaginably gorgeous Amanda Lear who, like Léonor, could not paint, as Kirk Douglas learned from his host, because genius is only found in the balls.
‘Paint is about time, space and balls. And Amanda doesn’t have any,’ said Dalì, bringing his palms together as if in them he held two bricks.
‘Genius,’ she [Léonor Fini] screamed. ‘Is in the slit.’
(From here)
The winners of the Norman Mailer Nonfiction Writing Awards were just announced. A lucky college student will be now be $10,000 richer. Since the awards are intended to honor the legacy of Norman Mailer, now seems like an appropriate time to defame his name by remembering what a sexist asshole he was. Thinking about Norman Mailer’s legacy, I am reminded of the way in which he advanced what I call the Testicular Theory of Talent (TTT).