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{{user sandbox|plain=yes}}
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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”(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:
Raymond’s observation of Mailer’s habits and working routines, his earned understanding of the man’s thoughts and desires, eventually condenses into something very like a psychic union, and Raymond misses few opportunities to cite the spooky nature of their connection. The market trip leading to his employment with Mailer is represented as a causeless whim rather than a legitimate need for groceries, a propitious intuition rather than mundane event. Raymond at one point shouts at Mailer, “I’m not in your head!” as Mailer tries to explain, in sparse terms, the changes he wants made to ''Gifts''. But Raymond spends much of his memoir showing that, in fact, he was in Mailer’s head for many of the one-thousand mornings the two spent together. Mailer himself appears to have knowledge unfounded by experience: “he simply knew things. I don’t know how, but he did. ”Mailer was a bit superstitious about discussing their bond, somehow fearful that, verbalized, it would vanish. “I had never given much weight to the belief that two minds, clearly of different caliber, could rock along in comfortable tandem,” Raymond writes. “The odd communication that we shared, which Norman likened to telepathy, seemed more delicate now, more important, yet we still
 
avoided discussion of the phenomenon as little as possible.
<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>
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