Word: mailer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...NORMAN MAILER Brooklyn...
...Mailer was surely the best actor to pay us court, the most practiced at thinking on his feet with a glass in his hand. Now and again he paused, sipping the fine yeasts of his bourbon, to regard us over a glass rim while his eyes squinted as if to flirt with a wink. Oratorically, however, he was off his game. A few weeks earlier he had read to an appreciative Harvard audience in Sanders Theatre from his new manuscript, Of A Fire On The Moon, scooping up questions as smoothly as a sure-handed shortstop, turning a few heckler...
...Mailer has been exposed to the press since fame caught up with him in his early twenties on publication of The Naked and the Dead. A few years later he could write, in The Deer Park, "A newspaperman is obsessed with finding the facts in order to tell a lie, and a novelist is a gallery-slave to his imagination so he can look for truth." So he began by saying that as sorry as newspapers are they are in some cases improved over their pasts, then decided that the functions of most reports could easily be accomplished by machines...
...private bash afterwards, Mailer could not originally relax. Thirsting for his base hit, he called surviving Niemans around his feet to attempt his speech anew. By now, however, fortyodd children of the grape clamored and whooped in their private adventures. The Nieman Class Lover had eyes only for a stunning visitor from the Mailer entourage, The Class Drunk stood in the kitchen loudly quoting Invictus, the wife of a magazine editor complained that we had chuckled rather than fought when Mailer called us whores. Our guest soon abandoned oratory for a night of innocent reveling- including vigorous bouts of thumb...
...Cambridge became angry over not being invited to private bashes for my two old heroes, and you must here understand that in Cambridge parties are serious matters, indeed. False rumors made the rounds that I had poisoned Styron through dropping LSD into his Scotch; another popular lie ran that Mailer had engaged in pre-dawn fisticuffs with this one or that. Styron, following his sobering experience, has initiated no further contact; Mailer wrote a note apologizing for "my tongue sticking to my mouth," and alluded to a subpar performance when I next saw him in New York. (These were exactly...