Mailer’s 1969 mayoral run fused radical novelty with absurdist provocation.

Evidence

His major idea was having New York City become a separate fifty-first state—something that had been prophetically floated in The Bag, Sol Yurick’s newly published novel of East Village “welfare-hippieland,” as one Voice writer put it. Mailer also favored neighborhood autonomy and, appropriating one of the most successful attractions at the New York World’s Fair, proposed to encircle Manhattan with a monorail. Asked by a citizen of Queens how he would clear the snow that paralyzed the borough after winter storms, he replied, “I’d piss on it.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1446

Categorization

• CANDY: “I’d piss on it” is a perfect deadpan-quip anecdote about the absurdism of the Mailer mayoral campaign.