COLUMN: Some Advice For Norman Mailer

From Mark Tonsetic's "Java Daze," Fall '95 From Mark Tonsetic's "Java Daze," Fall '95Pulitzer Prize-winning author [Norman] Mailer told the audience in Meyerson Hall that he came to the University to see if 'he has something to write about.'" Mr. Mailer -- Norm? -- look no further. You've hit paydirt, mon frere! Might as well call up your editor and have your next cover painted red and blue. If you can't find inspiration at Penn, then you might as well hang up your word processor. It'd be a little hard for you to go incognito as a student these days, and I imagine that you don't have the time. So, if you will, let me give this little primer to help you over your writing block. I'll assume that you haven't hung out on the Green for a while, if at all. Have you noticed all the tiny clusters that dot the grass? Visualize them and you have a map of Penn, metaphorically speaking. The University doesn't exist in a holistic sense; what you see is actually a number of petty kingdoms nestling and rustling up against each other. God knows how many are out there, but nearly everyone's a citizen of one or the other -- the Greek system, student government, the DP, varsity sports, performing arts groups, religious fellowships, pre-professional clubs, minority groups, garage bands, the drug subculture, etc., etc., etc.?ad nauseaum. Sure, there's crossover, but everyone seems to wear one as a badge -- or better yet, a shield. These kingdoms are no more petty than the real-life ones they imitate: They have allies and enemies; they trade and rumor and go to war; they convince their members to live and die in their name. Any refugees without a kingdom fall through the cracks of the University and disappear. The paragraphs you've completed include this thought recently published in the DP: "When ideology, not profit, is placed at the core of society, it behaves, in one manner, exactly like profit." The article added, "People can be controlled by ideology and the search for profit, but ideology becomes much more 'dangerous in its search for power than the profit motive.'" Think of it in terms of what was set out above. Ideology isn't just for superpowers. It's in every last petty kingdom you'll find here. Establish a University dedicated to the freedom of the mind, and watch its members scrap tooth and nail as they try to entrench the tyranny of their respective ideas. Common sense isn't a common virtue, and morality is as simplistic as a Saturday-morning cartoon show. Things are only heroically good or horrifically evil here, without a shade of gray between them. The title for your embryo of a novel, Toward a Concept of Spiritual Ecology doesn't quite work, though. It sounds like the name for a gut course, or maybe some SAC-funded venture. You might be overreaching, towards a grand theme you don't really need. I realize you're looking to encompass several issues, all under the rubric of "spiritual malaise." But you really don't need to leave Penn. Just live through a senior year of college. You're twenty-one, but everyone from your insurance company to the bouncer at Smoke's to a professor you try to have a serious discussion with looks you over like you lost your way home from high school. You've just wrapped up your major but are left wondering whether you actually learned anything, or whether it even interests you anymore. You fight fiercely enough at CPPS to make Darwin proud, all for work that will chain you to a desk for sixty hours a week, doing things that probably wouldn't hurt the world one bit if they went undone. Or maybe you're waiting to hear from grad schools, so that you might spend another three or four years trying to figure out Life, the Universe, and Everything. Meanwhile, you sit out on the Green without a thought in your head, perfectly happy until you have to go to class. That's spiritual malaise enough for me, and I wonder if this place inspires it. Might be a good subject for a novel. Don't get me wrong, Norm. Penn can be fun, and I'm sure I'll miss it's little quirks and pleasures, from Street Society to Billybob's to the Palestra with a few classes thrown in between. But those are for the body and the intellect. In between, I have to wonder what this place has done to my soul.