He's the one on the Left.
From the L.A. Times:
Writer Gore Vidal, 86, has diedHere is Gore Vidal talking about a few of the things Reagan hagiographers always seem to forget:
by Elaine Woo July 31, 2012, 9:02 p.m. Gore Vidal, the iconoclastic writer, savvy analyst and imperious gadfly on the national conscience, has died. He was 86.
Vidal died Tuesday at his home in the Hollywood Hills of complications of pneumonia, said nephew Burr Steers.
Vidal was a literary juggernaut who wrote 25 novels, including historical works such as “Lincoln” and “Burr” and satires such as “Myra Breckinridge” and “Duluth.” He was also a prolific essayist whose pieces on politics, sexuality, religion and literature -- once described as “elegantly sustained demolition derbies” -- both delighted and inflamed and in 1993 earned him a National Book Award for his massive “United States Essays, 1952-1992.”
...
Here is a sample of Gore Vidal's screenwriting (video preceded by short ad):
9 comments:
I've been on a Vidal-reading kick recently. "Burr" is on the headboard of my bed right now, I'm about 60% of the way through. He really takes the piss at the Founding Fathers, but by pointing out the flaws in their characters, he makes them seem more human than the cardboard cutouts who are usually portrayed. Was this the book that made MMiicchheelee Bakkkhman turn Repubelican?
I finished "Empire" a few months ago, which made me lose respect (but gain understanding) of Teddy Roosevelt. I didn't read "1876" until about 2007, when my wife I and had fled to Australia, but it was SO prescient about Bush v. (Al) Gore, yet (Vidal) Gore had written it in 1976! Reading "Julian" about the last pagan Roman emperor was a great adjunct to Gibbons' "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
I will miss Gore Vidal, who was in the same vein as Mark Twain -- perceptive, cantankerous authors who knew what America COULD be, and were saddened by what Amerikkka had become.
I heard a tape of him speaking at the National Press Club in the late 80's where he dissected the 1986 Reagan budget (also Reagan himself) and explained how Reagan was using the entire general fund on defense spending and financing the actual running of the country with deficit spending. To this day, I look at that speech as the thing that got me interested in politics.
-Doug in Oakland
Just finished Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar,” a novel to which I should have treated myself years ago. But I probably wasn’t ready to read it then.
Gore Vidal
The book is beautiful, bleak and honest in its closely observed, flatly written descriptions of oddly familiar types in an unfamiliar era, the 1930s and 1940s.
Vidal suffered a lot of slings and arrows just for writing it, and shrugged them off pretty bravely even at a young age. He lost all chance at the political future he’d wanted, and saw his books banned from being reviewed in the New York Times, simply because his dim but decently direct protagonist was gay. Watching all this receding in the rear-view mirror of the 21st century, the cowardly, brute injustice of it all couldn’t be clearer.
Vidal is a writer with whom I have had an ambivalent reader relationship over the decades, but I find myself finally and completely on his side. Deeply cynical, he can nevertheless be as cleanly honest as a steaming hot shower.
"I stab my wife once, and you just can't let it go, can you?"
That's not a talking point you hear very often, is it?
In other news, Friedman actually shocked me by writing a very decent column today. I expect to see flying pigs outside my window at any moment.
During the GWB years, I'd hoped that somebody would mount a musical based on Vidal's Julian, an early novel of his. It told the story of a late eastern Roman emperor who tried to turn his nation's clock back a couple centuries to earlier religious beliefs and who invaded Mesopotamia with no exit strategy.
Julian is the book that gave me insight into our Xristian Xrazies; I've been a big fan of Vidal at least since high school. I remember reading Burr and suddenly getting that history was pretty interesting.
Regards,
Tengrain
(who really is in mourning today)
I haven't felt this bad about the passing of a public literary figure since the death of Hunter S Thompson.
It almost makes me wish there were a heaven and hell....for the deservedly epic eternal ass kicking Buckley would now be having to endure...
But then again, I wouldnt want Vidal to have to spend eternity make the arduous daily trip to hell....
well, audio of Gore Vidal repeatedly calling WFB a "crypto-Nazi" is something I could put on an endless loop. Can't wipe the smile from my face when Buckley threatens to punch him...Jaysus!
that first clip doesn't so much make me Gore Vidal as it make me miss the Dick Cavett show.
Post a Comment