Word: mailer
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...Hornets is divided into the locals - those who are actually living and working on the film in 1948 - and the visitors - those like himself who were mysteriously dumped there. There are scores of visitors, including a Philadel phia cook named Whittaker Kaiser, who is a merciless lampoon of Norman Mailer at his most masculine pugnacious. Richard Nixon even puts in a brief appearance, wanting to know if there is an extradition treaty between 1948 and the future...
WHEN NORMAN Mailer '43 came to South House last year, he opened himself to the questions and taunts of a largely hostile audience. Time and again, almost unfailingly, he put his inquisitors on the defensive with his lightning-like ripostes. Finally a student came up with a question that caught him off guard, and he was sheepishly silent for a few moments. "What's your weight, boy?" Mailer snapped. The student looked puzzled, but Mailer's next comment clarified his question. "You threw me a punch I couldn't return...
...past years I subscribed to Mailer's theory of discussion-cum-boxing, and for a long time I've tried to find courses that promise academic pugilism. I looked for that idealized seminar room infused by the hovering spirit of the Marquis of Queensbury. In this age of laxness, I reasoned, men confront law school rather than German troops at the Marne--we must endeavor to substitute verbal missiles for military ones, and to replace infantry swords with forensic ones...
...Rather than risk discovering new species of seminarus superficialus, I decided to visit my old haunts. Now I sit eagerly with 300 other students and eagerly pen down the gilded words of Professor W****** J***** B**** as he expounds on Samuel Johnson. I am no longer an aspiring Norman Mailer, drifting through classrooms in search of a good fray. Now I'm more like a Philip Roth character, working out my intellectual frustrations alone in my room, the same way Alexander Portnoy allayed his sexual troubles. Harvard encourages intellectual masturbation...
Dick Cavett is the darling of people who say proudly that they never watch television. His wit is quick and responsive-it avoids the soggy, set-piece gag and flashes in reaction to what the guest has just said. When Norman Mailer once proclaimed that he was smarter than the other guests, Cavett briskly offered him another chair to contain his giant intellect. While the Jack Paars or the Merv Griffins or the Johnny Carsons put on guests like Zsa Zsa Gabor and Buddy Hackett, Cavett is likely to capture such provocative types as Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles...