Foot in mouth; author in casket

By MEDIA FARM

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RECENT TIMES HAVE BEEN TOUGH for Howie Carr. He's being subjected to white slavery (indentured servitude, as he calls it) by his current employer, WRKO. At 'RKO's salary, the guy can barely subsist in Wellesley. He's struggling. So he makes a grab for $7 million, jumping to WTKK (the one station willing to properly compensate him for all the work he puts into playing audio clips of Mayor Menino and allowing callers to kiss his speckled old ass). Except that he signed this piece of paper-a contract, the lawyers call it-that allows 'RKO to keep him if they want. They do indeed want to keep him, and Howie winds up in court, and off the air, for nearly two months.

That's a long time to not have the world revolve around whatever thoughts leak out of your pants, and the layoff has clearly taken its toll. Check last Friday's Herald. In an otherwise staid column about Hizzoner, Carr sized up the mayor's chances for reelection rather questionably: "The smart money's on Mumbles ... Flats he can beat, he can probably even take an establishment black like Ralph Martin."

We'll let that one sink in for a minute.

"Establishment black." It's got to be the strangest insult we've ever seen hurled in print. Granted, it probably took a good deal of restraint to just label Ralph Martin an "establishment black," rather than "that nappy headed ho of a former DA." It's so bizarre, we're nearly speechless.

Still, what are the chances that it was an out-and-out slur? It could've been a Freudian slip. H and B are right next to each other on most keyboards, and we all know how often Carr condemns bloated government hlacks.

So the real question is, why hasn't the Herald corrected this reprehensible typographical error on their website?

NORMAN MAILER died last week. The occasion provided several newspapers with the opportunity to write about his death.

The Globe turned in a rather impressive effort, calling Mailer a "literary giant" before delivering the most concise, biting summation of his career we've ever seen: "In a sense, Mr. Mailer was the chief advertisement for himself. No book stands out as his masterpiece. Many of his books, quickly written for money or attention or both, do not stand out at all. Or they do so for the wrong reasons ... The most memorable character he created-and it was no small accomplishment-was himself."

New York magazine's blog eulogized "A true New York character, both colorful and controversial," who "co-founded The Village Voice, penned over 30 books, directed four movies, won two Pulitzer Prizes, and tossed at least one drink at Gore Vidal. A fascinating man with an ego to match, Mailer was nothing if not captivating, and the world of letters won't be the same without his bluff and bravado."

More interesting to watch was the reaction of the New York Times. Mailer had, not too long ago, taken to the pages of Esquire to do battle with the paper's literary critic, Michiko Kakutani, saying, "What put the hair up her immortal Japanese ass is beyond me." Kakutani's volley over the dead prick's casket was rather restrained. She praised "his copious talents-a quick, skewering eye; a gift for the cameo portrait; bat-quality radar for atmosphere and mood; and blustering, bellicose prose," before noting that, by his own standards, Mailer was an utter failure: "Instead of writing a great Tolstoyan novel about America that would 'speak to one's time' and capture the social and political pulse of the nation, he increasingly produced tendentious novels that were scaffolds for his eccentric, sometimes perverse ideas about violence and sex and power...."

Still, for our money, the greatest Mailer tribute was produced early this year, by New York mag. It was an annotated index of Mailer's several enemies, and the myriad ways they came to hate each other so. This is the kind of tribute Media Farm will want when we get all old and arthritic and suffer deadly renal failure:

William Styron

Crime: Allegedly bad-mouthing Mailer's wife Adele.

Action taken: Wrote a critical piece in Esquire and a letter to Styron in 1958 that said, "I will invite you to a fight in which I expect to stomp out of you a fat amount of your yellow and treacherous shit."

Gore Vidal

Crime: Comparing The Prisoner of Sex to "three days of menstrual flow" and Mailer to Charles Manson.

Action taken: Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal-and punched him-at a Lally Weymouth soirée.

Blowback: Still on the floor, Vidal said, "Words fail Norman Mailer yet again."