RIP GORE VIDAL

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.

but the thing is, it could be a pose, which I embrace

also, he claimed a couple thousand 'lovers' by age 25, so selective loathing.

there seemed to be plenty of affection in vidal's apparently chaste relationship with his partner, if not the kind he wanted to share in public.

he seems to share with Burroughs a rather unhealthy loathing for affection and sexual intimacy

no evidence of this! The mark of a man is how many friends he's got, and Vidal had hundreds.

the chapter on Howard Austen's death in his memoir is shattering. You know how much pain Vidal was in from how much emotion he suppresses.

well I haven't looked in his little black book, I'm just going by his little witticisms (haven't read his memoirs)

i bet you've misinterpreted him as often as you have me, then!

Paris Review Q&A:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3917/the-art-of-fiction-no-50-gore-vidal

best vidal urban legend:

He and brute Norman Mailer were at a party when Mailer laid him out with one punch. From the floor, Vidal looked up at him, and (the precise quotation varies) intoned like a total catty bitch, “Words fail Norman Mailer once again.”

Taking a dead man to task for not having more gay sex?

You people.

um that was not my point

Taking a dead gay man to task for not having more straight sex?

You people.

His greatest book might be Palimpsest though

I've had it sitting on my bookshelf for a couple of years. I guess I should finally get around to reading it.

Lincoln praise seconded, thirded, etc.

RIP

Haven't read this yet, but it looks promising.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/105655/christopher-buckley-his-fathers-old-nemesis-gore-vidal

one was left to wonder what it was within him that animated such hatred in him, at such a late stage? I speculated that it might be envy over the outpouring of respect and admiration for WFB—from all corners, by the way, of the ideological map.

or maybe it was WFB's eloquent suggestion that people with AIDS be branded and quarantined?

It seems so weird to me that someone would refer to his father with initials.

Bill Buckley seems like the kind of guy who would refer to himself with initials. when he wasn't using the royal "we"

skimmed through some of that norman podhoretz attack on him from the early '80s, the one that apparently convinced conservatives that vidal was an 'anti-semite.' it's pretty rife with ugly, homophobic stuff.

theres a horrible NRO thing from whats his face that speculates that vidal wanted to fuck wfb

By Jonah Goldberg

I’m getting a lot of dyspeptic feedback from folks who’re mad that NRO isn’t doing more to mark the death of Gore Vidal (though we do have an excellent little item from Rick Brookhiser). I’m torn about the matter. I’ve been trying to stick to the policy of not speaking too ill, too soon, of the dead. It’s a policy I haven’t always stuck to, but I think it’s worth trying. True fidelity to that principle would require complete silence after typing the phrase “Gore Vidal is dead.”

I think though it’s at least worth recalling that Vidal himself showed no respect to such a principle when his better in every regard, William F. Buckley, passed away.

Also, I rather like the idea that Vidal’s passing is not being hailed as all that big a deal, because it isn’t.

Remembering that Buckley's book about his parents was called Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, between WFB and Pup, WFB suddenly doesn't seem so bad.

Also, I rather like the idea that Vidal’s passing is not being hailed as all that big a deal, because it isn’t.

Silly--it was the lead story on CNN's main page for much of the day.

brookhiser:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312887/my-visit-gore-vidal-richard-brookhiser

About WFB and Vidal and 1968 — I did not see the famous clash on ABC, though there are clips on YouTube and I read the apologia that WFB wrote for Esquire. God, they hated each other. My speculation is that Bill was enraged because he sensed that Vidal wanted to sleep with him, and Vidal was enraged because he knew that would never happen.

gross. those fucking assholes.

at least Brookhiser ate some of Vidal's cheese.

in that book Pup comes across better than Mum because she was, in her son's estimation, a heartless snob and difficult i.e. a total bitch

i don't know how you guys can stand to look at that site even for fun -- my teeth would have fallen out by now from constant grinding.

theres a horrible NRO thing from whats his face that speculates that vidal wanted to fuck wfb

ugh

J.D., for me it's like replenishing bullets at an armory. I still have batshit relatives.

leaving aside the sheer homophobic creepiness of that, the implication that WFB was somehow out of vidal's league looks-wise is pretty wtf

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yh0p83tykh0/TThbGRcHFwI/AAAAAAAAADQ/kGwJp0qcfv4/s1600/william-f-buckley-jr.jpg

well i think the implication is more that WFB didnt sleep with men

ratfaced bastard xp

Rick Brookhiser looks like a fucking '50s space alien btw

I'll defend Brookhiser's The Outside Story, his acocunt of the '84 campaign. Good bon mots.

Vidal was an attitudinizer who would say anything to be noticed, including shots at his own side.

ah yes his "side"

the AP obit called Vidal a liberal, con't think he wd be pleased.

I rather like the idea that Vidal’s passing is not being hailed as all that big a deal, because it isn’t.

yeah well, neither was JFK's. (except maybe it helped the civil rights bills along)

irl loled at this in that paris review thing alfred posted:

INTERVIEWER
Have you ever thought of acting, as Norman Mailer does?

VIDAL
Is that what he does?

yeah well, neither was JFK's

You don't really believe this, do you? Forgetting about politically, even--on a cultural level, if nothing else.

yeah, one of umpteen times class whore America lost her innicence yadda yadda

Yikes. I want to quote a line from Sweet Smell of Success, but I won't.

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.