User talk:Elm311

Ten Thousand Words a Minute
“Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” a nearly 24,000-word essay by Norman Mailer, was published in Esquire in February, 1963. He had a fixation on fighting and it even permeated his business dealings. This piece was published after a battle between Mailer and Esquire in which the magazine changed the title of a previous essay from “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” to “Superman Comes to the Market.” In Mailer’s typical fashion, he refused to write for Esquire for a period of years afterward. Mailer had an affinity for boxing and as a part of the journalistic side of his career, he wrote pieces on the subject during the 1960s.

Synopsis
“Ten Thousand Words a Minute” centers around the match between heavyweight boxers, Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, who were vying for the World Heavyweight title. Floyd Patterson had first won the heavyweight Championship title against Archie Moore on November 30, 1956, and then again on June 20, 1960, reclaiming it from Ingemar Johansson. Sonny Liston had not won the title, but was nearly undefeated, with only one loss at that point in his professional career. Norman Mailer observed the first showdown between the two. The Heavyweight match took place in Chicago, IL, on September 25, 1962. In his sports coverage, Mailer is often more focused on supporting characters of the match, such as managers and members of the media, than on the athletes themselves. The essay begins with Mailer’s perception of the occupation he takes part in, as a whole, and his fellow reporters. He then offers a detailed picture of Patterson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, who Mailer makes a central figure in the essay. In “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” Mailer describes the public’s perception of the 1962 match as being a battle between good and evil. Of the evil side, Mailer explained, “Liston was the secret hero of every man who had given mouth to the final curse against the disposition of the Lord and made a pact with black magic.” Whereas, he painted Patterson as an “Archetype of an underdog, an impoverished prince.” Part of the good versus evil concept came from Liston’s particular unpopularity among the black community. Mailer makes mainly observational data to substantiate his claims and also references a small poll he took of 20 black Chicagoans, 18 of which were not interested in Liston. Mailer’s take on the overt reasoning for the bias, the phrase “You’ve gotta stick with the champion,” was that working black people didn’t want anyone to take what was theirs and the phrase came out of solidarity to that concept. Mailer elaborated on the underlying reasoning for the black community’s bias towards Patterson, writing, “They did not want to enter again the logics of Liston’s world. The Negro had lived in violence…and yet developed a view of life which gave him life. But the cost was exceptional to ordinary man. The majority had to live in shame. The demand for courage may have been exorbitant….Floyd was proof that a man could be successful and yet be secure. If Liston won, the old torment was open again. A man could be successful, or he could be secure.” Floyd Patterson may not have had the heroic personality that appealed to Mailer in political figures, but he represented a necessary stability.

The Match
The actual event was attended by big names and highly anticipated. Mailer writes of watching the fight ringside with James Baldwin who would write his version, as well. The anticipation was cut short, though, as Liston won the fight in the First Round. After two minutes and six seconds, Liston knocked Patterson down, to the dismay of many. Mailer found the defeat highly unlikely. He noticed, “There is not a single picture of Liston’s glove striking Patterson at all… The fine possibility is that there was no impact. There was instead an imprecise beating, that is a beating which was not convincing if the men were anywhere near to equal in strength…[Patterson] fought as if he were down with jaundice.” To Mailer, the boxers, themselves, were irrelevant in the way the fight unfolded. He continued, “It was the Establishment which defeated Patterson precisely because it supported him because it was able to give reward but not love.” Mailer walked to a party following the fight and saw two black teenagers in despair from Patterson’s loss: “Everything would be more difficult now. They did not want to hate Patterson, but they could hardly speak.” The establishment, had painted the “different” as evil and inhibited truth in boxing, just the same as it has done in every arena – sport or otherwise, forcing people to follow suit for sake of safety.

Motifs
The “smell of death” came up several times and the theme of death permeated Mailer’s consciousness throughout the essay. He agrees with the liberal establishment’s creed that death is void. Every mention of death was associated with a separation from self. Mailer first mentions the smell of death in his description of the Press Headquarters and the skewed facts the reporters feel they have to report rather than their own thoughts. In that way, he identifies reporters as another class that is exploited by the Establishment, if in a less aggressive way that the black community. Although boxing had a massive element of physical harm, he equated the sport to life, writing, “If he is a good fighter, his mind is more exceptional [when boxing] than at any other time… The illumination comes from his choice to occupy the stage on an adventure whose end is unknown. For the length of the fight, he ceases to be a man and becomes a being, which is to say he is no longer finite.”  This is in regard to may also be reflecting Mailer’s desire to be the writer whose opinion is most respected, the zenith of his field, immortal. “It is the culture of the killer who sicken the air about him if he does not find some half-human way to kill a little in order not to deaden all.” The protection against death, from Mailer’s perspective, is to fight for life, untethered to the rules of society.

Mailer on Mailer
After the Championship, Mailer noted the ebullient cloud of press that surrounded Liston and the missing Patterson. Mailer went to knock on Patterson’s dressing room door to no answer. He seems, in part, sympathetic, and then continues down the street wondering why he was not crowned a winner too, the day before, in a debate he had with William F. Buckley. Mailer proceeded to describe the debate as if the two intellectuals were in a heavyweight championship rather than a battle between fragile egos. Mailer takes on the persona of a title-winner, instead of describing the precision of his left-hooks, narrating, “I led an intellectual foray into the center of his position.” He gushes that he argued in the debate, “If conservatism was a philosophy which saw each person in his appointed pace so that men were equal only before God and in Eternity, that the radical in his turn conceived the form of the world as a record of the war between God and the Devil where man served as God’s agent and sought to shift the wealth of our universe in such a way that the talent which was dying now by dim dull deaths in every poor man alive would take its first breath and show what a mighty renaissance was locked in the unconscious of the dumb.” The sentence is one of Mailer’s that I would rather take a right hook than read. Mailer likens the positive feedback he received after the Buckley debate to the press’ reaction to Liston’s win. He compares Buckley’s lack of readiness to Patterson’s off-night, seemingly questioning whether the success was due to his intellect and Liston’s skill or their sparring mate’s lack thereof in that particular match-up. Mailer desperately wanted Liston and Patterson to have a second fight between as he was certain Patterson should be the winner. The day after the championship, Mailer commandeered the Liston press conference and wanted to go on record saying that Patterson would win the next fight.

AfC notification: Draft:Ten Thousand Words a Minute has a new comment
 I've left a comment on your Articles for Creation submission, which can be viewed at Draft:Ten Thousand Words a Minute. Thanks! Zanimum (talk) 01:12, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Your submission at Articles for creation
 Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.


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1292simon (talk) 11:22, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Ten Thousand Words a Minute


Hello, Elm311. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Ten Thousand Words a Minute".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. If you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz Read! Talk! 19:02, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Your draft article, Draft:Ten Thousand Words a Minute


Hello, Elm311. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Ten Thousand Words a Minute".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. If you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz Read! Talk! 17:29, 27 November 2022 (UTC)