Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots: Esquire November 1977

Summary

“He prepared therefore for the meditative journey that proves most excruciating in Limbo, a rounding through the past, a trip back! It is a venture full of perils. To meditate on TV might prove equal to writing a recollection of an enemy one has never met and cannot quite believe in. Indeed, how to conceive of an enemy who is without personal animosity? It was like writing a memoir of an oxymoron. Limbo set its tasks.”

More a short book than an essay, Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots is Norman Mailer’s scathing and often brilliant takedown of television culture, penned for Esquire in the wake of Mailer’s infamous altercation with Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show.

Of a Small and Modest Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots was originally published in Esquire in November 1977.