He fancied himself one of the big thinkers, and most of his ideas were not only bad but appalling; for he lived largely for the body’s pleasures, actual and vicarious, and adopted ideas that serviced those pleasures. T.S. -Eliot remarked that a great writer creates the taste by which he is appreciated; Mailer helped create the moral confusion amid which he was glorified—not quite what Eliot had in mind.

Until he is forgotten, Mailer should be remembered not only in a fool’s cap and bells but also in a scoundrel’s midnight black. For in an age crawling with intellectual folly, he was one of the reigning dunces, even his best works were shot through with adolescent fatuities, while the worst of his words and deeds were stupid and vicious without bottom.

Yeah, what he said.  Although this ran a close second:

By this point, Mailer had jettisoned his first wife, college sweetheart Beatrice Silverman, and clearly traded up in the sexual-allure department by marrying the painter Adele Morales in 1954. With Adele’s all-too-willing complicity, he cultivated the ugliest part of his nature and called it high moral adventure.

High moral adventure.  That’s what you call it when you live a life that is without basis or constraint.  Just ask any sociopath.

It is tempting, on this day of love and lust, to think we’ve found some answers in the tale of Iris Robinson — yes, Mrs. Robinson — the 60-year-old member of Parliament whose husband is the first minister of Northern Ireland. Last month the BBC revealed her affair with a 19-year-old. Her lover was the son of her local butcher, whose deathbed wish was that she “look after” the boy, and so she did, financing his small cafe during their seven-month liaison with $80,000 supplied by local developers and supposedly taking an $8,000 kickback.

She tries to make some points about sex and power and how men and women celebrities are treated differently with regard to cheating. She makes claims about the components of narrative that are applied to women but not men. Then she adds:

We accept complexity in male leaders far more readily than we accept it in women — perhaps because we have fewer examples to draw from. So here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson — for being just as flawed and complicated as any man.

Yo, lady, clue up. Cheating is a selfish act undertaken by narcissistic people. They do it for the same reasons that a substance abuser takes a drink.

Julie Powell is a published author who wrote a book about cooking and other things and it was turned into a movie, “Julie and Julia”.  After the book was published, she, although married, embarked on an affair with someone else.  And now she has written a book about it.

This book is partially about your experience as a butcher, but also partially about your relationships with your husband Eric and your lover, D. Why did you decide to fit the two into the same book? Is butchering the metaphor, or do you hate food metaphors for life?

Well, I’m wary of food metaphors in general, though it’s certainly true that metaphor lies thick on the ground when it comes to butchery, and is almost unavoidable, even more than I’d imagined when I began. But I think I’d rather think of the butchering apprenticeship in Cleaving as a prism through which I was able to look at my marriage, and myself and who I wanted to be, in a new way. My original working title, when I was writing my proposal, was The Dying Art: A Story of Meat and Marriage. I was obviously in a much rawer and less optimistic place then, because the links I saw between marriage and butcher shops were that: 1) Both were struggling, perhaps indeed dying institutions. 2) A sort of dying, whether actual or spiritual, seemed an inherent facet of both. But as I began to do the work, I realized there was something beautiful about the delicate process of ushering a dead animal into something else that was nourishing and beautiful.

Yes, the marriage is dying, especially if you are taking a cleaver to  it.  The second meaning of the word, cleave, is to adhere.  I guess she didn’t get that.

The truth is that she wanted something just for herself to the exclusion of her husband and she got it.  Cheating is selfish and narcissistic.  But then her husband also cheated.  These are people without children and trying to find the meaning of life.  For them, the meaning of life is whatever they want to pursue at the moment.  This is not a truth that extends to those of us who are parents.