The article isn't online yet, but here's a taste from the little summary sent out by the magazine's P.R. department:

"The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism," Dan Wolf, the editor of the Voice, wrote in the introduction to "The Village Voice Reader," in 1962. Similarly, as critics and columnists were permitted to inject themselves into their writing, Menand writes, the Voice showed that one could disrespect the journalistic idols of impersonality and objectivity and still sell newspapers. Norman Mailer's columns for the paper were "unprofessional on purpose: like Wolf, he wanted to poke his finger in the eye of objectivity and expertise," Menand says. "What Mailer learned at the Voice was the literary value of leading with your personality. He never forgot it."

Hey, what does sound like? Menand makes the comparison crystal clear: "more than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere . . . and Craigslist fifty years before their time."

"The Voice Was the Original Blog" may be the only way to explain to a generation whose memory only goes back to the days when the Voice was a thick and tired tabloid filled with predictably leftist polemics, escort ads, classifieds and movie listings. The vibrancy disappeared long before the business model.

The original formula Menand celebrates is basically the same one that blogs — you're reading one right now! — want to replicate. It can be summed up as this: attitude is cheap, reporting is expensive. When Britton Hadden and Henry Luce started Time magazine in 1923, it wasn't much more than rewriting New York Times clips in an idiosyncratic diction. The New Yorker launched in 1925 as a humor magazine for young Manhattanites that reveled in its insider-y tone. When advertising and circulation grew — and editorial budgets increased — these publications quickly dropped their finger-in-the-eye-of-the-establishment pose and signed up for full membership.

The Voice tried too. Menand notes of cartoonist Jules Feiffer's early works:

Feiffer's characters were sometimes business types and politicians, but they were also sometimes caricatures of the sort of people one would imagine to be Voice readers—beatniks, lounge lizards, modern dancers. The Voice was the medium through which a mainstream middle-class readership stayed in touch with its inner bohemian. It was the ponytail on the man in the gray flannel suit."

Mailer was a veteran, having served as an Army cook in the Philippines, but in the 60s, that wasn't enough to get you off the FBI's radar screen. The ego-driven writer initially came to the attention of Hoover when he wrote something perfectly innocuous about Jacqueline Kennedy's soft-spokenness. Hoover was extraordinarily sensitive to such things, and demanded agents review all of Mailer's columns and books once he started calling out the FBI in his writing.

Having run for mayor of New York on a ticket with Jimmy Breslin (and suggested New York City should secede from the state) in 1969, the FBI started sending plain-clothed agents to his door, and even calling up his father pretending to be a friend looking for Norman. They even disguised themselves as deliverymen.

Most of the file consists of FBI reviews of Mailer's writings, which were in some cases were kinder than the actual reviews:

In 1969, at Hoover's direction, an agent prepared a five-page, single-spaced review of Mailer's book "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," about the 1968 political conventions. The review carefully itemized all six references made to the FBI. "It is written in his usual obscene and bitter style," the agent wrote. "Book contains reference to . . . uncomplimentary statements of the type that might be expected from Mailer regarding the FBI and the Director."

The ever skeptical Mailer knew more about what was going on than he let on, saying in 1964's The Presidential Papers that

At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.

The FBI's 15-Year Campaign To Ferret Out Norman Mailer [WaPo]

• Oh, hey, Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg might stop snapping at people long enough to play a thinly-veiled, self-mocking George W. Bush in a Broadway play. [P6]
• Anna Wintour didn't like going to South Beach for a Karl Lagerfeld show because it made her sweaty, displeased and "miserable." Sort of like Carine Roitfeld.
• Rapper MIA is only allowed to remain in the U.S. for a few more weeks, so she's considering marrying Kanye West. It's either that or Montreal. [Oh No They Didn't]
• Nicole Kidman said ex-husband Tom Cruise has turned their kids against her. They didn't even visit on Mother's Day. [Showbiz Spy]
• Wesley Snipes enjoyed his remaining freedom at a party in East Hampton. [Rush & Molloy]
• If you snub Harvard's request for your official archives, the university will get ahold of your unofficial sexytime archives. Norman Mailer's estate learned this the hard way. [P6]
• Jennifer Aniston secretly hooked up with John Mayer three months ago. See? It's totally normal for her to be this affectionate. So she's NOT BEING CLINGY, DAMMIT. [P6]
• Naomi Campbell has to return to the Heathrow police station in London to learn whether she will be formally charged with assaulting a police officer. As though slowly going bald wasn't punishment enough.
• One reason you shouldn't attack paparazzi, even if you're insane, basketcase singer Amy Winehouse: They will then publish awful, awful pictures of your "ravaged... heavily scabbed" skin.

New York According to the Waverly Inn [Blackbook]

"He liked to hear the details of the sexual behavior of stars with whom I'd had sex," Mallory says. "Norman was turned on by hearing about my sexual encounters with movie stars . . . hearing about my sexcapades gave him great pleasure." She claims to have dated Warren Beatty, Rod Stewart, Robert De Niro, Richard Gere and Peter Sellers.

Oh God, there really is going to be a sex movie, isn't there?

[Post]

(Public domain Carl Van Vechten image via Wikipedia)

Then, stepson Matthew Mailer is quoted as saying, "What's it like being raised by wolves?" Although Mailer regularly boxed with his sons (that really means "I love you") Mailer tried to "to weave together a single family unit from the nine children he raised with an assortment of wives," the Times adds primly. Well, we're sure Mailer did his best, and he's probably enjoying the jocularity, somewhere out there.

At Tribute, Mailer Children Recall a Family Man [Photo by Chester Higgins Jr. for the NYT]

"That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being 'ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety'. That was pretty awful."

So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew....So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again!

Flash of bad sex wins Norman Mailer coveted book prize [Guardian]

• Boy George was ordered to stand trial on charges that he handcuffed a Norwegian man to a bed and "threatened him with sex toys," and no one can resist that joke. [NYDN]
  
• Jennifer Aniston attended her 20 year high school reunion. Well, wouldn't you? [Page Six]
  
• Who will inherit Norman Mailer's 15,000-piece Lego "city of the future"? [Page Six]

Because, well, here's the Times obit:

In the 1970s Mr. Mailer entered into a long feud with feminists and proponents of women's liberation, and in a famous 1971 debate with Germaine Greer at Town Hall in Manhattan he declared himself an 'enemy of birth control.' He meant it. By his various wives, Mr. Mailer had eight children, all of whom survive him: Susan, by Ms. Silverman; Danielle and Elizabeth Anne, by Ms. Morales; Kate, by Lady Jeanne; Michael Burks and Stephen McLeod, by Ms. Bentley; Maggie Alexandra, by Ms. Stevens; and John Buffalo, by Ms. Church. Also surviving are an adopted son, Matthew, by an earlier marriage of Ms. Church's, and 10 grandchildren.

Mailer was for many decades the most argumentative novelist of our time. In 1998, Mailer trashed Tom Wolfe's "A Man In Full." Mailer said that reading the book was like "making love to a 300-pound woman. Once she gets on top, it's over." (Wolfe, trying and failing to be as stylishly scrappy, called Mailer and John Updike "two piles of bones." Idiot.)

When New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani said his memoir "The Spooky Art" was like "going on a very long bus rider over a very bumpy road, sitting next to a garrulous raconteur who never takes a nap and never pauses for breath," he retaliated by calling her a "kamikaze" and a "twofer" in the Times quest for equal opportunity.

He once sat on Truman Capote (and also praised him, though not without dismissal: "He is tart as a grand aunt," Mailer wrote of Capote, "but in his way he is a ballsy little guy"); he invited William Styron to fisticuffs; he did punch Gore Vidal and accused Vidal, quite accurately, of unmanning Jack Kerouac. (It was not Vidal's fault that both Kerouac's work and masculinity were of such flimsy construction.)

In the 60s, he was both a short-lived mayoral candidate and a proponent of the idea that New York City should secede to become a 51st State. Neither idea caught fire and New York City has since been overrun by America.

Over the years, Mailer came to odd theological beliefs. In 2003, he told Ron Rosenbaum that: "I just feel we live in a triangular relation with God and the Devil, that we're a separate force. It's not that we're little puppets pushed around by an anode pole and a cathode pole. We push back on each of them. So it makes for a very complex universe, a complex moral universe, because you never know at a given moment whether you're doing it as a human or whether you're being tricked by one or the other of two opposed deities."

He regularly scrapped about women and feminism, and in a way that, in the end, made it seem that he was afraid of them. He said that "Masculinity is not something given to you, but something you gain," but also, speaking at the 92nd Street Y in 1998, he told this story:

"I once was at a party with my then-wife, it was at Frank Conroy's house in Brooklyn Heights. We were sitting around, at a given moment there were eight or 10 or 12 people there. Lillian [Hellman] had the most annoying habit of calling me Normie. She said, 'Normie, why didn't you ever fuck me?' This is in front of all those people. So I took a deep breath and I said, 'Well, Lillian, I guess I didn't because I was afraid I wouldn't be the best you'd ever had.' And she smiled very benignly and said, 'It's all right then.'"

But something like awareness about his insecurities about manhood came to him in recent years. Writing in the New York Review of Books in 2003, he said that he saw the Iraq War as an inappropriate response to the idea of modern emasculation:

And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.

The resistance of the left in America broke the will of the establishment to wage a serious war. One by one, influential members of the military-industrial complex and the higher enclaves of finance came to decide that the war would wreck America morally, economically, and finally technologically. They did not decide this because secretly they admired the militancy or ideology or principles of the left. They detested all that. But about the time students began to destroy valuable equipment and burn university buildings—even a minority of students in a minority of universities—the perspective was clear. Those students were America's future technological experts. (I obviously include the soft technologies of communications, sociology, et al., which center around social planning.) So members of the establishment came to recognize each by himself—will a novelist ever capture their long dark night?—that America could never run its industrial and media complex if even a fraction of its brightest people were determined at sabotage.

At the Puck Building last night, then, the crowd was comprised of a rather jaw-dropping list of names—the writers and their patrons both—as well as the anonymous rich, the women identifiable only by their Chanel suits and the men by their horn-rimmed glasses. One tended to overhear conversations that began: "When [so-and-so] was on the board of the New York Public Library..."

At a table in the corner, Mayor Michael Bloomberg chatted with Norman Mailer. Salman Rushdie put on a brave, Padma Lakshmi-less face. Paris Review editor and New Yorker writer Philip Gourevitch mingled, as did his wife, New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar. A frail-looking Joan Didion was surrounded protectively by a shifting coterie of women, as if she might break in two or melt away. Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld looked none the worse for wear after his embarrassing aborted attempt at running for the governorship of New York. A jeans-clad Dana Vachon spoke to men twice, perhaps three times, his age, presumably about the follies and foibles of The Street. Nathaniel Rich (son of Frank, brother of Simon) is an editor at the magazine, which has a very small masthead. "You've met practically one-third of us," he remarked, in conversation with this reporter and one of the Review's interns. Another reporter was covering the party for the Harvard alumni magazine 02138, on account of so many of the magazine's editors and affiliates having gone to that institution. The Review's late, great founder, George Plimpton, was of course a Harvard man himself, though one can only assume that he, like so many of his fellow Crimson, modestly told people he went to school "in Boston."

Midway through the cocktail hour, Mr. Gourevitch (Cornell, 1986) took the podium to try to quiet down the crowd so the Mayor could say a few words about Norman Mailer, the evening's honoree. "We have a lot in common," the Mayor said, referring to himself and Mr. Mailer. "We're both from middle-class Jewish families. We both attended Harvard—he went to the College, I went to the Business School—and we're both distinsguished authors." Laughter. "And we've both run mayoral campaigns." The Mayor said that Mr. Mailer had had two buttons when he campaigned. One said "I would sleep better if Norman Mailer were mayor." The other said "No more bullshit." Then the Mayor said he had used his senior citizens' Metrocard to get to the affair, and as such, it had only cost him $1. "I suggest that everyone become a senior citizen," he remarked. Much of the crowd, it appeared, already had. A long line of Town Cars idled outside however.

We were not invited to stay for dinner, so on our way out we peeked into one of the gift bags arrayed neatly on a table by the entrance. In a Paris Review tote bag were the Spring issue of the magazine (perhaps partygoers had not yet gotten around to reading it?); a copy one of Mr. Mailer's novels, Harlot's Ghost, which is about the CIA; a Paris Review T-shirt (American Apparel, size large); and various other promotional items (a nip of whiskey, a calendar, etc.). The tote would be perfect to bring along to Nantucket this summer. —Doree

The Paris Review Revel Gallery