A Salon Book Editor Just Got a Story Idea

Two more brief items before you leave for the holiday weekend:

• The NYT Thursday Styles section follows up on the rainbow party myth that was debunked at Nerve.com last week. Overall, it's quite a well-reported story, demonstrating that the best evidence for the existence of such oral-fixated orgies seems to be a junior high student who says, "There's a girl in my class and everybody says she's been to one. I heard two guys talk about her."

• For the handful of people who've broached the subject of Norman Mailer with me this week, my opinion probably isn't any different than yours: Whatever problem we might have with Michiko Kakutani's reviews, it's not because she's an Asiatic feminist, and frankly, what's Norman Mailer written that's really worth talking about since Harlot's Ghost?* But it's nice to see that Douglas Brinkley has found a new washed-up rebel to champion now that Hunter S. Thompson's dead; the Rolling Stone profile (which I haven't seen) is his second big story on Mailer in two months--the first was an April NYT item about the sale of Mailer's archives to the University of Texas at Austin.

  *Although I will confess that it amuses me greatly to imagine how he might react to the news of Anne Rice's forthcoming narrated-by-Jesus novel, given the bad, bad, oh so very bad reviews he got for trying the same trick eight years ago (okay, okay, and a few politely mixed judgments, too).