Norman Mailer's Letters

I am tempted to go mad Jenny on you all and just quote paragraph after paragraph from Norman Mailer's letters, as excerpted in this week's New Yorker. I can't remember when I last garnered such enormous enjoyment from reading anything. I'm not much of a Mailer fan, not in a negative or positive way, he just hasn't been someone I've had much of a desire to read, though of course I was always fully aware of him culturally. But these letters show such bombastic brilliance (which I can imagine would occasionally but far from always translate into literary brilliance), such cultural insight, such vast knowledge, such a social network, such energy--really I was completely dazzled, and smiling the whole time I read.