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 egghead violence. Overnight, Mailer became the undisputed bad boy of
 American letters, so said the drooling, yet chiding media.
+These developments fed the early LQ verdict in the January 2008 ''Smithsonian'', a print-medium legacy bible. The presumptive judge, Lance Morrow,dissects Mailer’s “huge ego” and finds it “unpleasant” and “poisonous.”Thus, Mailer “[I]n his own ways he embodied America’s worst faults: selfindulgence, bullying, sense of entitlement, irrelevant belligerence, the obnoxious American self-importance that is a corrupted Emersonianism—Emerson without the sweetness, the calm, the brains, the transcendence”{{sfn|Morrow|2008|p=97}}.Such deconstruction gets a body English treatment when Morrow refers to a 1994 Valentine’s Day incident at Carl Bernstein’s fiftieth birthday party.Mailer was about to commit a social atrocity and was likened to a madcap Existential killer-driver:
+<blockquote>He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet in the boxer’s way he had, a rhythmic motion meant to conjure menace, as if he wished to let you know that while he had one foot safely on the brake, the other was pressed on the accelerator, his motor surging ... so that if he chose, he might release the brake and hurtle across the room and smash through the brick wall and cause God knows what mayhem in the world outside.{{sfn|Mailer|1994|p=94}}</blockquote>
+What a tell-all negative image! Norman Mailer as boxer-motorist, an all American arch-menace in the ring, on the streets, and in the salon. Small wonder that Mailer’s (LQ) now barely quivered, so spoketh Lance Morrow, prophet extraordinaire.
+My recourse to an imaginary auto derby now begins, to expose the audacity and absurdity of judging this contest or any other race at the starting line.
+Let me say at the outset that Morrow and I are at opposite poles, except
+for our general agreement that Mailer in his seventies had mellowed socially,
+was becoming downright harmless, sporting (in Morrow’s apt phrase) “Prospero's winkle”.{{sfn|Mailer|1994|p=94}} Otherwise, we are at opposite ends of a racetrack. I’m a starter and they are early finishers.
+My time spent with Norman Mailer was not ongoing but was rather sporadic. I was an early Mailer scholar (articles and a book) and, later, a Mailer book collector and long-time friend.
+Naturally, I differ with ''Smithsonian'' and Morrow. So, I toured the derby
+site, did some laps cruising, not speeding, but stopping. I consider my experience with multiple Mailer “stops” or “visits.” Over a span of more than forty years, four visits of them were in-depth and three visits were less so. The following discussion is not a composed memoir, just a series of short takes. I was looking for “Courtly Norman” and I found him.