ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF [WITH APOLOGIES TO NORMAN MAILER]

By the way, did I ever tell you about the one time I actually saw Norman Mailer?  It was at a very chi-chi Upper West Side type intellectual gathering called "The Theater for Ideas" held in a ballet studio in the Village.  I was brought along by Bob Silver, the editor of the New York Review of Books, whom I had met through Bob Heilbroner -- this was back in my Columbia days, the late Sixties.  Everyone was there -- Mailer, Susan Sontag, William Schuman, Sidney Hook, et al., for a symposium on "The Hidden Philosophy of Psychoanalysis," with Sidney Morgenbesser and Bruno Bettelheim among the speakers.  In the question period, Mailer got up -- a bantam cock in suit and vest -- and proceeded to deliver an interminable attack on his current psychiatrist, to everyone's great amusement.

Anyway, that is just me digressing, like Tristram Shandy.  The point of this post is that every so often I remember that not everyone in the literate world has read every word I have posted on this blog.  There are a few hardy souls who have read all of the instalments of my eight hundred page "Memoir," day by day as it appeared, and I imagine there may even be someone out there who stuck with me through my tutorial on The Thought of Karl Marx.  But there really is a lot of stuff that I have posted here -- more than 500,000 words of serious extended essays, leaving to one side the ephemera devoted to snarking and bitching or idle reminiscing.

If there are any folks in the cyberworld who would like a tutorial on Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, or on The Thought of Sigmund Freud, or who might enjoy essays, tutorials, mini-tutorials, and Appreciations on any of perhaps two dozen other topics, all they need do is follow the link at the top of this blog to box.net, and rummage about.  The free version of box.net, which I employ, used to actually tell me how many people have taken a look at each of the items posted there.  When they stopped doing that [since I do not pay them anything], more than six hundred people had accessed the Marx tutorial, and there were quite a number who had taken a look at one or another of the other items.  Very satisfying for an author.  Not quite J. D. Salinger territory, but we philosophers are used to whispering in a corner with a few boys [and girls, these days], as Callicles says in the Gorgias.