Mailer's "Brooklyn comes out"

The 82-year old Norman Mailer is peeved at The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani:

"She is a one-woman kamikaze. She disdains white male writers, and I am her number one favourite target. She trashes it just to hurt sales and embarrass the author. But the Times editors can't fire her. They're terrified of her.

"With discrimination rules and such, well, she's a threefer: Asiatic, feminist and, ah, what's the third? Well. Let's just call her a twofer."

Despite allegations that all he's trying to do is get someone else at the paper to review his books, he says: "And what [is the Times] gonna do? Come and shoot me? That's when my Brooklyn comes out, 'Hey, mother******, whatcha gonna do? Make a martyr outta me?' "

Ooh, how macho. Still, one supposes this is pretty mild stuff for a man who, as Maud Newton reminds us, "stabbed one of his wives in the chest with a pair of scissors, used to believe that all women should be locked in cages; since then he's backtracked slightly."