Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

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.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sulferblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today we continue our special series, Escaping the Cage, Identity, Multiculturalism, and Writing.

This is, colloquially speaking, our living white male show, and with Norman Mailer,

EL Doctoro, and Russell Banks, we attempt to trace the path from a felt loss of centrality

to a new embrace of diversity.

Norman Mailer, born in 1923, published his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, years before the rise

of identity politics and multiculturalism. I spoke with him about his book, The Spooky

Art, Thoughts Upon Writing, published in his 80th year. You see, I think of myself as being

part of a generation that knows what a hallucinogenic

jolt, pros by Norman Mailer packs.

As you write, I found what keeps you going is that you can, you have to stay fresh.

And one of the things I have is I'm getting a lot older.

I may never be able to catch that kind of prose again.

I'm the equivalent of an old athlete, very old athlete.

And they tend to get by more on their secondary gifts when they get old.

Their lore, their canniness, their experience, their

subtlety, their humor. And they recognize that they're, whatever, 90, 80, 70 percent as gifted

...