You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest today is Norman Mailer on the occasion of the publication of his new book,

Harlet's Ghost.

I don't think probably that I need to say that he's the author of The Naked and the Dead

and Tough Guys Don't Dance and Ancient Evenings and the Executioner's Song and Pieces of Pont dance, and ancient evenings in the executioner's song and pieces of pontifications,

and the producer of every kind of imaginary and imaginative provocation in American letters.

To begin with, I guess I wanted to start by talking about the idea of ghosts.

It seems to me that these characters, because of the nature of the CIA, are necessarily

ghosts put together out of spare bits of information, ghosts and audio animatrons, simulations of people, seems to be what the result

of a CIA world is.

Well, you know, they are called spooks, and I think probably the reason for it is a ghost

always has a double identity. It's a spirit that's passing around

and moving into places and moving out of them and observing. At the same time, the ghost has the

feeling that they're alive, at least as we understand them from our end of it. Who had ever said

that a ghost doesn't think it's alive, as alive in the sense

that is able to affect events. When we think a ghost, we think of the enormous frustration

of being out of the stream of human cause and effect. And so they come in very abruptly

and they distort things, and our fear of ghosts, is that they alter exactly this.

We go to great lengths to find a logical chain, a cause and effect in our lives,

...