I think Charlie Rose is increasingly headed down the James Lipton* slope of self-involvement but this clip of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer going at it on The Dick Cavett Show makes watching Rose for a moment bearable. It does remind me that while the jokes may have been more clever and the participants smarter, the tone of things on TV has remained about par.
A few weeks ago, New York Magazine ran a cover story interview with Mailer on his latest book On God. Worth a read.
*Interesting sidebar in the coverage of Lipton on Wikipedia is that there was some “misunderstanding” that he was a pimp in Paris during WWII. Doesn’t seem like a misunderstanding to me. In fact, it clears up a lot of things, among them, the devil-like facial hair, the self-importance, and the frightening obsequiousness to name a few.
Displaced 
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