Muffin tops and other things

Someone mentioned "muffin-tops" in something I was reading this morning and I really didn't remember the meaning of the term. It made me think of a few other such terms which I won't go into right now, but it did cause me to run to my normal source of information about all things cultural, Wikipedia. I thought I would cast the curse off the desire to define "muffin-tops" by reading about Norman Mailer, of whom I had been thinking when I saw a broadcast of a fight between Gore Vidal and himself on the Dick Cavett Show back in the late 60's. Both writers kind of represented two types of American Writer Archetypes: the effete Eastern snob and the overly-masculine pugilist-writer. Kind of like Fitzgerald v. Hemingway. That is not quite as good an analogy, since Fitzgerald was from Minnesota and Hemingway from Illinois; however, Fitgerald did attend Princeton and married a debutante and was a bit pretentious, when he wasn't drunk. Hemingway, on the other hand, seemed to be looking for some task to prove his manhood, whether boxing or hunting or fishing. And drinking.

But, anyway, after reading about Mailer and then Updike and then John Kennedy O'Toole, who each won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in consecutive years, I settled down to read about "muffin-tops" and even look at a picture of some young lady walking down the street, with her muffin tops hanging out over her pants, not too far, but enough to illustrate the term.

I guess neither Fitzgerald nor Updike had muffin-tops. They were both fairly slender. But the rest of these writers seemed to hang out over their belts. So perhaps I now have a new way to differentiate between American writers: muffin-top writers and non-muffin-top writers.

I am sure that is a helpful designation between the archetypes.