RIP GORE VIDAL

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.