Word: barbed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Amusedly saddened by his own middle-aged moral spread, Mailer moves with almost prissy distaste among the rabble. His sharpest barb is reserved for Poet-Polemicist Paul Goodman, who "looked like the sort of old con who had first gotten into trouble in the Y.M.C.A., and hadn't spoken to anyone since." Arrested himself during the opening hours of the Pentagon siege, Mailer winds up in the same paddy wagon with a tall, ferocious American Nazi, and stares him down in the inevitable Mailerian confrontation of wills. "You Jew bastard," shouts the Nazi. "Kraut pig!" replies Norman, only...
...manages to deliver a barb without offending is a matter of chemistry that he himself cannot define precisely. "I think it conies from experience," he says. "I know most of these people personally and I know when something will hurt them. I can get away with nuances and insinuations that will sting them a little." He is, says a friend, "lethally neutral." Every target -tycoon or President, Republican or Democrat, general or sergeant, victor or vanquished-gets equal time...
...another compound, hundreds of the rank and file of the PLA pressed against the barbed-wire and called to reporters; Israeli soldiers sporting sub-machine guns converged on them and forced them back to a white, chalk line several feed from the barb wire. One of the prisoners, their spokesman, held up a piece of paper which he promised would prove that they were refugees on the U.N. payroll and not soldiers. The contract, upon closer examination, had expired on May 31, five days before the battle for Gaza; U Thant's withdrawal had left them in the hole...
...that the psychedelic "revolution" is really under way, they are discovering new highs with dizzying speed, and their discoveries are passed quickly around the underground through such newspapers as Manhattan's East Village Other and the Berkeley Barb...
...Passos also interpolated his narrative with the Newsreel, an impressionistic montage of headlines and boldfaced journalism that sharpened the ironic barb of his deadpan stories. The three inventions-with the waning of Dos Passos' reputation-have been dismissed as fashionable quirks of the experimental '30s, like that of e e cummings' renunciation of the capital letter or Dos Passes' own abhorrence of the hyphen. It can now be seen that they were more than razzmatazz...