Word: thumbs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Mailer looks the heavy but more characteristically acts the role of the nation's thumb-wrestling champ. He used to hold the world title too, he says, but he was whipped one night by a Mexican bullfighter who had learned the sport that day. "I wonder," Mailer muses, looking off into the distance, "if he realized what he won." Because thumb-wrestling is not just a diversion for Mailer--he gives himself to it as totally as he does to his writing, his family, and his friends. "Norman is great at thumb-wrestling," says an old friend, "because...
...plane approached New York, the child began to have convulsions. "I stood up and screamed for someone to help me," she said. "There was only one passenger who didn't look at us as if we had leprosy. He got up and put his thumb in Craig's mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. Craig bit him and took a hunk out of his thumb and the man said, 'Your baby has strong teeth. He just bit me.'" Craig recovered from the convulsions brought on by a fever, but it was several days before...
...classes. Though his 50-city concert tour this season means that he will miss 40% of his classes, he bones up on lectures taped for him by an admiring Radcliffe coed. "I take my books on tour," he says, "but it's like a child sucking his thumb. They comfort me, make me feel virtuous. But I'm always disastrously behind." Nevertheless, he caught up well enough during the first term to make the dean's list...
ANDREW HILL, COMPULSION (Blue Note). Haitian-born Pianist Hill is magnificently obsessed with the complex rhythms and bold colors of African music. Aided by Nedi Quamar's African thumb piano (a handmade wooden box holding long metal prongs that are plucked), Renaud Simmons' conga and Joe Chamber's drums, he conjures up a thundering, lashing storm with sweeps across the keyboard -and then lets it fade into the silver pinging of random raindrops. Freddie Hubbard's trumpet has a cry for every change of mood...
Though not so spectacular, the "Unwed Mother" game by Henry Beard and Mark Stiumpf, takes some excusable cracks at Pill-wheels and has the added virtue of being slightly dirty. The list of thumb-nail sketches for parlor games at the start of the issue makes good fun of Parker Bros. jargon and is an amusing reductio ad absurdum of games in general. After the third or fourth game-article, the technique of reducing a real-life problem to playing-board size starts to wear a little thin, but the pieces are worth skimming for the occasional laugh...