RIP GORE VIDAL

“[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: 'Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.' Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.”

and more

http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5657.Gore_Vidal

ugh this year's death toll is grim

RIP great writer

Aw, man. btw the news alert on my phone told me, "Gore Vidal, Elegant Author, Dies at 86"

RIP

Marge: So, did you call any of your friends?

Lisa: Friend?
(scoffs)
These are my only friends.
(holds up a book)
Grownup nerds like Gore Vidal, and even he's kissed more boys than I ever will.

Marge: Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls.

he said reagan was a masterpiece of the embalmers art

he said buckley was in hell with his bosses, applauding and fanning their prejudices as he did in life

at italo calvino's funeral, he said he was most upset that they put his friend in a drawer instead of a grave

ugh, terrible news. a great, great writer and raconteur from another age.

i used to think his offhand remarks in interviews were my favorite thing about him but i read 'lincoln' for the first time recently and the man could sling dialogue like whiskey. need to check out his early novels now.

bummer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

RIP man ... may you spit in Buckley's reptilian eye in the hereafter.

maybe now i will get around to reading that copy of 'burr' i've had for two years

"As one ages, litigation replaces sex"

dunno if anyone will read his novels but Lincoln is as marvelous and witty as anything in the American "canon," and he wrote at least two others at its level. His greatest book might be Palimpsest though

maybe now i will get around to reading that copy of The City and the Pillar i've had for a dozen years

Worth a read but feels unfinished.

as resposible as anyone for resurrecting Dawn Powell and publicizing Calvino in America.

My AP History teacher had us read six Gore Vidal novels. One of my classmates claimed Rush Limbaugh could beat Gore Vidal in a debate.

I think I've only read Palimpsest--quite good. Here's a clip that turned up in a documentary on Mailer I watched recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw

My AP History teacher had us read six Gore Vidal novels.

these novels were excellent gateway drugs. The amazing thing is that for the most part as history they check out.

I should probably read them again. It's been twenty years.

Did he write anything longish about same-sex marriage? All I can find is a Joy Behar interview where he says "it puts me to sleep," and I'm not posting that.

to him Marriage was all the same.

also exactly what did he mean by saying he and his longtime live-in "never slept together"?

Maybe they fucked and went to separate beds. Sounds about right for his generation.

according to his first memoir, he and Howard Austen picked each other up at the baths and slept together once – an experience so horrifying that the next morning they laughed it off. They wanted to laugh together the rest of their lives though, so they stayed together.

in the last memoir Austen, dying of emphysema in a hospital bed, asked Vidal to kiss him – only the second time it had happened, Vidal claims.

my ideal of a happy union actually

I remember watching him and Buckley spar on TV with my grandfather. I don't know that I ever saw him (my grandfather) more engaged.

man, that dick cavett clip is amazing

hmmmmmm, no dice for me

xxp

Oddly enough, I'm going to visit his villa in October

I knew he said “I told you so” were the happiest words in the English language, but the three saddest: “Joyce Carol Oates.”

One of my classmates claimed Rush Limbaugh could beat Gore Vidal in a debate

the closing of the american mind. shouldn't be surprised but this is so appalling.

i liked lincoln, loved palimpsest and many of his essays, but at the risk of trolling on an obit thread i have to say his late-in-life flings w/mcveigh and 9/11 conspiracy theory really tarnish his legacy

anyone whose trap keeps running in public for 65 years is bound to say some stupid shit.

He also apparently said around 2009 that Hillary Rodham would've been a great president, which sounds like dementia to me.

All-time greatest interviewee. RIP

Who's left from the great literary/critical feuds of the '50s/'60s/'70s? People really knew how to throw a great feud then.

Hitchens, who knew something about tarnishing his own legacy, documented the collapse:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2010/02/hitchens-201002

getting anecdotal about the old Orson Welles:

"Why,” he turned to the waiter with small cold eyes, “do you keep bringing me a menu when you know what I must eat. Grilled fish.” The voice boomed throughout the room. “And iced tea. How I hate grilled fish! But doctor’s orders. I’ve lost twenty pounds. No one ever believes this. But then no one ever believes I hardly eat anything.” He was close to four hundred pounds at the time of our last lunch in 1982. He wore bifurcated tents to which, rather idly, lapels, pocket flaps, buttons were attached in order to suggest a conventional suit. He hated the fat jokes that he was obliged to listen to—on television at least—with a merry smile and an insouciant retort or two, carefully honed in advance. When I asked him why he didn’t have the operation that vacuums the fat out of the body, he was gleeful. “Because I have seen the results of liposuction when the operation goes wrong. It happened to a woman I know. First, they insert the catheter in the abdomen, subcutaneously.” Orson was up on every medical procedure. “The suction begins and the fat—it looks like yellow chicken fat. You must try the chicken here. But then the fat—hers not the chicken’s—came out unevenly. And so where once had been a Rubensesque torso, there was now something all hideously rippled and valleyed and canyoned like the moon.” He chuckled and, as always, the blood rose in his face, slowly, from lower lip to forehead until the eyes vanished in a scarlet cloud, and I wondered, as always, what I’d do were he to drop dead of stroke.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1989/jun/01/remembering-orson-welles/

I remember the yuks over the Rudy Vallee memoir ("Conrad").

Can anybody explain the "saddest three words in the English language are 'Joyce Carol Oates'" line? I can't find a source on it

It was in the AP obit (which is on Salon), but I don't know anything more.

That Welles piece is quite sympathetic and touching, really, and this is nifty:

Writers who teach tend to prefer literary theory to literature and tenure to all else. Writers who do not teach prefer the contemplation of Careers to art of any kind. On the other hand, those actors who do read are often most learned, even passionate, when it comes to literature. I think that this unusual taste comes from a thorough grounding in Shakespeare combined with all that time waiting around on movie sets.

A filmmaker who loves to read is indeed a rare thing, which is why I often reread bits of Welles' Bogdanovich interviews for his remarks on Kafka, Fitzgerald, Wilder, et al.

In 2000, that essay compendium with the Jasper Johns flag on the cover was a serious fucking game changer for me. So far, I've only read Burr of the historical series, but I loved it. Lincoln has been next in line for a few years.

Most priceless for me were the interviews caught here and there on the radio. The earth scorching way he pronounced 'hagiographer'.

Burr is hilariously good

It needs to be repeated: the historical novels aren't a drag; they're funny as shit.

RIP

Sully's strange obit.

tough year to be an old celebrity with "vidal" as one of your names

somehow i still find vidal's stupid lapses -- and they were truly stupid -- more forgivable than hitch's. maybe because his lapses didn't involve sucking up to evil ppl in power.

Vidal's pose was not to show affection so not likely we woulda gotten a Slate essay on Paul Wolfowitz's beautiful literate wife or a defense of Doug Feith's prose.

Vidal's pose was not to show affection

really his most distasteful quality imho. he seems to share with Burroughs a rather unhealthy loathing for affection and sexual intimacy, which just seems sad to me.

not gonna be mean to shakey about that chart being from the heritage foundation since i'm sure the numbers are fine but it's still funny

http://nationalpriorities.org/media/uploads/publications/talking-about-military-spending/chart_1.jpg

defense spending has gone down plenty of times, and they're pretty much the times you'd expect (cf the sharp rise between 1965 and 1970, and then the drop) but this graph that takes it as a straight number and not as a percentage of the budget p much lines up w vidal's narrative, right? plummets (like you'd expect) between 1945 and 1950 and gradually rises (on average) from then on. anyway i am not calling anyone a neocon i am just saying that yes indeed there was a significant change in the u.s. govt's attitude towards military spending and global military action during the cold war and yes indeed we all grew up in the country that change made, and that's why the 90s seem like peacetime to us.

It's so large a percentage of the budget in the nineteenth century because the federal government had literally no other responsibilities except making war.

which is why heritage has chosen to graph it as they have, and then filenamed it myth-of-isolationism.jpg

okay much lolz at filename

and yeah I didn't really care about the 19th century half of the graph, but it was attached to the 20th century half

Good job:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INW6i6K1NmQ

All I've read by Vidal was his memoir, so I came to this only knowing him through his public persona. His blanket sourness about politics (I think someone in-house once internalized his every pronouncement) was persuasive, both softened and mitigated by things I don't especially feel like getting into. That aside, it's another good documentary about getting old.

sound mix in trailer is a wreck; doesn't bode well

I don't have the greatest hearing in the world, and there wasn't a word in the entire film I couldn't make out. Honestly, not a problem at all.

Meant to say that one of the funniest things in the film is Vidal's skill as an impressionist. He does JFK, Tennessee Williams, and W. He's like two notches below a good SNL impression.

Loved Best of Enemies, about the Vidal-Buckley convention spots (“debates”) in ‘68. For most of it, exactly what I wanted: all the segments in their entirety (the 10th is excerpted for an epilogue, but I think most everything from the other nine is included), with all the necessary context (effectively provided piecemeal and a little scrambled--e.g., you get a Ben-Hur clip well into the film, connected to Vidal’s thoughts on the war and American empire). Great line from Frank Rich that I think I knew but had forgotten: “The joke was that if you really wanted to end the Vietnam War, put it on ABC and in 13 weeks it would be cancelled.” Towards the end, I found it genuinely sad: how this one skirmish stayed with both men for the rest of their lives (Buckley seemed especially haunted by it). The epilogue makes the obvious but necessary point, and not sentimentally: it locates Vidal and Buckley not as one last great shining moment, but in fact--in the words of Vidal himself--as the beginning of the circus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSH20evwVIc

Howard K. Smith's equanimity in the face of these two guys got huge laughs more than once.

Meant to say that one of the funniest things in the film is Vidal's skill as an impressionist. He does JFK, Tennessee Williams, and W. He's like two notches below a good SNL impression.

― clemenza, Friday, December 6, 2013 9:45 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finally watched this last night, and YES! He does a good Reagan as well, but his best Reagan zinger remains this one (included in the film):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iuNpn17pfM

I'll be seeing this twice this week with different friends--I've been proselytizing.

You meant the Vidal documentary--I meant Best of Enemies.

I see no reason to pay to see BoE in a theater as all these debates [sic] are online and the reason the whole 'event' has been neglected to date is that it's extremely minor, no matter what these filmmakers think.

His blanket sourness about politics (I think someone in-house once internalized his every pronouncement)

rrrreally

It was a blow to learn from reading In Bed with Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood, and the Private World of an American Master, last year that he cried and had feelings.

scratch a cynic etc

Yeah, should have mentioned that I meant United States of Amnesia, which my library just got, not the new one, which I'll have to wait to hit DVD.

i prefer buckley/chomsky

I'm caught between considering it absurd that a feature film was made of the whole Vidal/Buckley shebang and yet quite wanting to see it at the same time.

Best of Enemies held up great for me. Love the left-field period details: Alan Sues, Streisand, Playboy After Dark, etc. I find the last 10 minutes--these two guys 35 years later--more moving than I ever would have thought possible.

“I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public,” writes Gary Wills for the New York Review of Books. “There is more intellectual insight and incisive commentary on a single night of Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report or Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show than in all of the mean broadcasts of Buckley and Vidal.”

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/aug/11/william-buckley-myth/

Wm F. Buckley used his gaudy vocabulary and his patrician accent and mannerisms to create an aura of intellectualism, but he was just appealing to the class prejudice that believes the rich must be awfully smart or they wouldn't be rich. Nothing he said was particularly intelligent or insightful. George Will works the same side of the street, but a bit more understatedly.

Vidal was nimbler and far better read and the superior writer, but if we're constructing binaries then "The Daily Show" is more fun.

i.e. I don't regard the Buckley-Vidal debates as a reminder of What We've Lost.

Neither does the film, as to the Buckley-Vidal segments (I won't call them debates) themselves. The film, to me, very clearly sees their sniping as the beginning-of-the-end much more than the end-of-the-beginning. I think it does, in a more general sense, deify the '60s as a moment in time when Buckley/Vidal/McLuhan/Sontag/Mailer/etc. had a public presence in the way they wouldn't today.

I've read a few reviews now, and James Wolcott's is the first to address something I really loved about the film: how sad the last 15 minutes are. (He does, though, accept the interpretation of the film that Willis complains about.)

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/08/best-of-enemies-james-wolcott

Thw Wills essay mentions Murray Kempton, about whom there aren't enough words of praise.

I'd completely forgotten that Wolcott is in the film briefly (one or two clips). So kind of a vested interest.

i've never understood what buckley meant when he threatened to hit vidal and then said that he'd "stay plastered" -- was he saying that vidal was drunk?

Plaster = euphemism for punch

to dig slightly deeper into the rabbit hole, bandages that were designed to adhere were once called plasters. the implication of someone "plastering" his foe in a fight was that they'd suffer injuries requiring bandages, generally on their face. this term was discontinued long before the 1960s, but the idiom based on this lingered on until my childhood.

Not to deify the 60s, but, as Alfred has pointed out on ILB, Vidal, Mailer, Bellow, Updike, Roth, McLuhan, Galbraith, maybe Singer and Malamud, wrote best sellers back then (probably Buckley too, but still).

thanks! i figured it was probably something like that, but couldn't find anything in any online dictionaries.

I see no reason to pay to see BoE in a theater as all these debates are online and the reason the whole 'event' has been neglected to date is that it's extremely minor, no matter what these filmmakers think.

Didn't know you used youtube every now and then.

Anyway this probably should've moved to the way these debates started up the whole culture of punditry and debate that is often more noise than insight or what have you. The 'Epilogue' was certainly going that way. The intellectuals embracing TV, doing it with hatred/contempt (certainly Vidal would rather be known for his books?): like when Buckley takes the mickey out of Vidal for his Hollywood scripts but he is doing it on TV, and the cheap channel too.

I found the Buckely presenting the Kennedy letter more nasty than the trading of insults - has Vidal ever lost his cool on TV? Impressive how he kept it.

That was even nastier, agree--it was an unprovoked ambush (the infamous insult wasn't, notwithstanding how crude and personal it was), zeroing in on a touchy relationship for Vidal. Somehow he got off a couple of good lines as he eyed the letter.

For me, the link between then and now was handled as well as was needed in the end-credit clips, although I'm pretty well versed in the now. Someone unfamiliar with the Crossfire-type shows might need more.

bringing out the letter is simultaneously so ridiculously vicious and so irrelevant i suspect vidal's little smiles are not forced but restrained. eyeing buckley trying to figure out if he genuinely thinks he's scored a triumph here.

Really I was watching and thinking "How Does he get out of that?" Looked effortless.

Over here you get to be well-versed in the emptiness of these arguments on the news/Question Time (which is worse than ever). What I wanted to see is more analysis of a politics gone completely wrong.

Also wasn't that convinced by Vidal's liberalism. They are too pro-elite, and looking back its the 'expat' jibe that probably made Vidal most uncomfortable. Can totally see why he is not v much read.

he's not?

Doesn't feel like it, at least over here.

Vidal's series of novels on American history seem like they'll continue to be read in the USA for at least the next few decades.

Definitely

(Burr is great)

“I am sorry to see Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s Best of Enemies being hailed for remembering a golden age when intellectuals fought out profound issues in public,” writes Gary Wills for the New York Review of Books.

Now that I've seen it, I can say Wills is Wrong.

I had a couple problems with Best of Enemies. The first is that it is significantly padded, an obvious consequence of having to structure a feature length documentary around whatever the total running time of the debates was (they seemed short; did the film significantly excerpt them?). Most of what the talking heads had to say was just explaining/mildly elaborating on what had just been shown in the film; the linguist (I forget his name) talking about what constitutes profanity then vs. now was by far the most insightful moment. Second, and seemingly less significant but even more annoying to me, is the way that it presents clips from some of Vidal's work. Obviously it is a lot easier to show clips from Myra Breckinridge than to display passages of the novel on film, but by presenting the film as representative of Vidal's work--which it does, mainly by failing to acknowledge that the film was a notorious flop, which Vidal called "an awful joke"--the film implicitly confirms Buckley's dismissal of it. Even more infuriating is the labelling of a clip from Caligula (accompanying someone or other's speech about moral decay) as Gore Vidal's Caligula, which a) the film was never called, and b) Vidal took his name off of once his original scrip was drastically altered. Whether intentional or not, the filmmakers seem okay with equating Vidal with trash without really examining the content of his writing.

The United States of Amnesia, the other Vidal documentary from a few years ago, was way better.

I finished Parini's mediocre bio a few days. I didn't Vidal the workaholic was also a functioning alcoholic.

Really? "Functioning alcoholic" is the first thing I see when I look at Vidal. Extremely highly functioning yes but it's very clear.