Watching the candidates arrive at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas was a reminder of how debased the political process has become since Mailer’s time. If you’ve never seen the Nixon-Kennedy debates you’ll be surprised not by Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow but the detailed, substantial and sound-bite free answers of both candidates. Watching this gang of hopefuls try to hit the right notes, without saying anything that could be offensive to anyone, was like watching Wolf Blitzer try to herd cats.

After a cheesy advance job that treated the debate like a sporting event (with all the commentators agreeing that Hillary had to get tough) the leading lady came out with some scripted gag about her pantsuit being asbestos. Then she was asked about her iinability to give a straight answer to almost any question (the “politics of parsing”), and answered with bland boilerplate about the American people. Everyone talks about the American people as if they were a coherent mass, one that tunes into CNN when they could be watching House or reruns of Mad Men.

“The American people don’t give a darn about any of this stuff,” Joe Biden declared. Jobs, drug dealers in the hood, soldiers in Iraq — these are the sorts of things Americans are worrying about. Chris Dodd said “There is a shrillness to the debate,” though I found it more fuzzy than shrill.

There were a few surprises. Bill Richardson, when speaking of the looming energy crisis, actually mentioned those American people making sacrfices. And Dennis Kucinich sometimes sounds like the sanest person in the room, as when he said he voted against the Patriot Act “because I read it.” (And yes, he has the hottest wife too.)

But it was mostly a bloodless affair. Hillary Clinton is the kind of person who talks about being excited without ever actually seeming that way. The curse of the front runner, the presumptive candidate, is that she cannot risk seeming too lifelike. No one needs to worry about their make-up anymore. Everyone looks fine, if fainter despite all the color.

News of Norman Mailer’s death greeted me this morning as I went trawling for reports related to my wife’s new job. ( I don’t believe that Mailer ever appeared in the pages of Reader’s Digest, though I could be wrong.) I’ve written far too many obituaries in this space but most of the famous dead people I have known or seen have been younger, often dead for no good reason. Mailer was 84 and by anybody’s measuring had lived a very full life.

I remember being a freshman in high school and carrying around a copy of Cannibals and Christians, hoping to impress somebody in Auburn, California. I couldn’t make head nor tails of much of it, being unfamiliar with most of the writers and politicians he was lancing within its pages, but I do remember reading a rather combative interview he conducted with himself and thinking, “I didn’t know you could do that!”

Years later I could always start a brawl in San Francisco just by mentioning that I liked some of his books and his pugnacious attitude. I was living with some hippies in the Haight and they had a long list of things posted in the kitchen that you weren’t supposed to buy at the store (Nestles products, Del Monte, Dupont, other fascist brands) and I think there was an invisible list somewhere of writers we weren’t supposed to read, either. Mailer was on top of that list, largely because of attitude towards women’s liberation and his prejudices against homosexuality.

But what I admired was the way he confronted his critics — broken bottle in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other — that often showed a greater sense of humor than that of his enemies. When his second novel was excoriated by critics he took out a full page ad in the New York Times trumpeting the negative reviews (“A bunch of bums!” — Bosley Crowther). He criticized the Broadway production of Waiting for Godot before he actually saw it in his column in the Village Voice. After seeing the production, and being knocked out, he rode downtown in the back of a cab and glumly acknowledged his wife of the moment when she said, “Baby, you blew it.” He took another full page out (this in the Voice, I believe) saying how wrong he was and how great was Beckett.

I have forced my students to read Armies of the Night, and tried to show them how brave it was to allow yourself to look like such a fool, as he does through most of his weekend in Washington. And how getting yourself arrested to aid the nascent anti-war cause, doubly difficult for a member of the “greatest generation” who served in the South Pacific during WWII, when you could be enjoying a nice cocktail party back in Manhattan, was an act of courage of Thoreau-like proportions. He may have been cross-eyed at times but he had vision: he could look out across a political rally for JFK and see America’s past, back to the buffalo on the plain, as clearly as he saw the winos in the park gaping at the prince. And he didn’t need drugs to do it (though he didn’t mind them when he found them).

When we moved to Brooklyn Heights in the early nineties I used to spy him occasionally near the Promenade. He complained when the old coffee shop on Montague and Hicks became a modern yuppie brunch place, with five dollar cappucinos, and seemed to perpetually scowl.

Peg and I ran into him one night when we were leaving a friend’s apartment next door to his house on Columbia Heights. It was raining sideways, gale force winds blowing water up under out umbrellas and coats as we ran like babies from the storm. And there came Mailer: no umbrella, no coat, soaked to the skin, looking like some cross between Picasso and Popeye, and he was frowning at us in our discombobulation. He was vanishing breed, like those buffalo, and we will not see his like again.

Nick Flynn came to visit my memoir class at Eugene Lang on Tuesday, talking about his own remarkable memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and its relationship to his poetry.

His debut collection, 2000’s Some Ether covered some of the same bleak ground — his mother’s suicide, his homeless father, his own battles with drug and alcohol addiciton — and we had considered both the poems and the prose in class. Flynn, a remarkably chipper fellow (he had just rode his bicycle in from his new home in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn), said both grappled with the Buddhist idea that you’re the manifestation of both your parents — “that terrible thing.”

Writing Suck City (the title comes from an expression of his father’s) took him seven years and though the book changed form over that time, he knew at the beginning that he wanted the first word of it to be “please” and the last word to be “generous” — as it is. Given the absences in his life (his mother, who seemed to implicate her son’s writing in her suicide note, died when he was 16), Flynn found the memoir the right form to gauge all that loss. “In a memoir you’re not just writing about what happened,” he said, “you’re wrestling with what you don’t know.” The question he suggested students ask themselves (and sounds like good advice for any writer) is, “What is your intention in writing this?”

And how do you get rid of the self-pity, one student wanted to know? Clearly he had plenty of reasons to feel sorry for himself. His notebooks were full of self-pity he said (which he defined as that which doesn’t move toward compassion) but “it rose to the surface, like fat when you boil a chicken.” (They call that schmaltz, for the record.)

It is one thing to grapple with the realization that you are a manifestation of your parents and another to meet the limitations of that manifestation — the part where you begin. One of my students was curious about Flynn’s sojourn to Morocco, a druggy interlude that leads nowhere. Was he conscious or mirroring his father then, he wanted to know? (Dad had done his own Beat like wandering.) Flynn reminded him that the section ends with him concluding, “There is no bottom to getting lost.”

“Is it braver to get really lost?” he asked, framing it another way. “Or is it harder to be in the world sober?”

Hearing the opening chords of the Clash cover of “Pressure Drop” in the new Nissan Rogue ad does not send me running for the barricades the way some have. “Hell hath frozen over” said one post on the Daily Swarm, while another pointed out that the band had already licensed “London Calling” for a Jaguar spot and the world had not stopped spinning on its axis.

For many Clash fans, such signs of the apocalypse leave them asking, “What would Joe do?” Such loyalists are convinced that the late great Joe Strummer would have been the standard bearer opposing the fascist corporate blah blah from exploiting the music of the Only Band That Mattered (even if the song was written by Toots & the Maytalls and the lyrics are open to interpretation), had he not been felled by what turned out to have been congenital heart failure in 2002.

But Joe was not so simple, as we learn in Chris Salewicz excellent biography Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer. He was, in fact, a ball of contradictions. Born John Mellor in Turkey, where his father, in the British diplomatic corps, was serving, Joe acted the scruff later in life: living in squats, letting his teeth rot in his head, calling himself Woody. It was the kind of act that really gets under the skin of some Brits (far worse to act lower class when you were born upper than the other way around, it seems) but here in America we think it your birthright to be the person you imagine yourself to be.

Sure, some people still haven’t forgiven Dylan for changing his name, let alone telling people he’d been out riding the rails and doin’ lots of hard travelin’ when he had just taken the bus in from Duluth. But by and large we buy the myth, and let the facts take care of themselves. Joe might have been happy to have more people hear even thirty seconds of the Clash, in hopes that it would open their ears up to the rest of the band’s catalogue. He liked building bonfires and passing around the guitar (as well as the bottle and the spliff) and I like to think that Dylan was inspired by Joe’s long running radio show, London Calling, when he began his own Theme Time Radio on XM.

You can hear excerpts from Joe’s show on the soundtrack to Julien Temple’s documentary The Future Is Unwritten. He loved to play his own songs but everyone else’s too: Elvis Presley, Tim Hardin, MC5. His was a generosity that could have embraced even Madison Avenue.

But let’s hope Toots and the Clash are seeing some money.

Or so Mary Weiss sang at the Southpaw Friday night:

Kids, kids don’t know shit
They all want a hit
I don’t write hits

Actually Greg Cartwright wrote that song, entitled “Cry About the Radio.” It’s featured on Mary’s newish album Dangerous Game, her first LP since the sixties, and I don’t think it’s a hit yet, either. Introducing the number, the former lead singer of the Shangri-Las said that most music today sucked (“That’s a technical term”) and bemoaned the fact that kids making music today had no place to break in the way they did.

“FMU!” someone shouted, followed by more call letters: “”KCR!”

“Yeah, but back then you got to vote on the hits. Today they pick the music for you.”

It was an interesting crowd that turned out to see her: a few kids, actually; some older folks (I mean older than me) who had probably seen her back in the day (the Shangri-Las came from Queens; she even told a story about playing hooky from high school to get her hair done in Jamaica the day she was going to record “(Remember) Walking in the Sand”); and the odd rock critic (aren’t we all?).

I met Greil Marcus there; I had been to hear him lecture at Eugene Lang last week, talking about The Old Weird America, and here he was in Brooklyn, checking out Mary. She gives him a shout out on the back of her record and I asked him what was the connection. He said that he had been writing something about the attacks of 9.11 when someone told him that Mary had been working at the WTC that day, had been evacuated and seen the towers fall. When he asked her if she would like to talk about it for what he was writing, she declined. It was a story shared by thousands, she implied; what was so special about her?

That was part of the appeal of the Shangri-Las: they were the real girls next door, the ones with the bad boyfriends who had to leave school under mysterious circumstances. Introducing “Out in the Streets” she said it was her favorite of those old songs but she couldn’s say why. “Well, I could,” she added. “But it would take a whole afternoon.”

I got time, Mary.