RIP GORE VIDAL

http://www.gorevidalnow.com/2012/07/in-memoriam/

damn tough period for old lefties

RIP

what a quote machine

“[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.

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.

no really, there was a mournful "ppl watching Dallas '63 on the store window TV" scene when I saw The Wanderers recently, and I nearly yelled "Spare me."

was Malcolm X a cookie full of arsenic?

you wanna be up high where the air is balmy

It's a Gore Vidal thread, I don't want to sidetrack it, but I would hardly know where to begin disputing this. Maybe start with the PBS Warhol biography, the part that describes how the assassination affected him, and then go from there.

the key word with Warhol is "affect"

my favorite opening to a vidal essay:

Most Americans of a certain age can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing on October 20, 1964, when word came that Herbert Hoover was dead. The heart and mind of a nation stopped.

hahaha

Mr Veedle: "Andy Warhol is the only genius I've met with an IQ of 60."

really clem, you picked the wrong thread to cluck over ppl being poisonous.

Last word I'll say on the matter, promise. The segment I'm thinking about starts at 1:47:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljlHbHL8KUo

No, I don't expect that this will be worth anything to you. But "I don't know what this means" is a very good question, even though it's not a question.

GV on JFK:

"Jack Kennedy... was a good friend—-witty, sharp, and very smart. I would rather be with him than practically anybody now alive. But what did he do for us in a thousand days? He invades Cuba, fucks up, and brings the world close to a nuclear collision over the so-called missiles down there in Cuba. Deplorable."

(btw, he said Teddy's legacy "was nothing," which I disagree with)

KLOMAN: What kind of president would Bobby Kennedy have been?

VIDAL: Pretty sinister. A little Machiavellian. Not Machiavellian, he was Savonarola, he was highly moral, obsessed, vengeance. Jack had a funny story about him. Nobody could stand him, they put up with him because of John. And somebody came up to Jack and was complaining about Bobby's behavior. And Jack says (slipping into a hauntingly good Kennedy impersonation): "Look, you've got to remember, Bobby's a policeman, he's gotta arrest somebody. If he hasn't arrested somebody, he'll go home at night and he'll arrest Rose."

i find the cult of robert kennedy even more odious than any JFK sentimentalism -- the whole camelot thing has been pretty well discredited, but hard-nosed liberals will still get all weepy thinking of 'what could've been.'

thankfully he's still an odious shit in the new Caro volume.

doesn't come off too well in Nixonland either.

(it took me 11-1/2 months to read)

at the same time we're in no position to tell black liberals that they have no right to their affection for the buck-toothed Savonarola once he converted to liberalism in the late sixties though.

still need to read nixonland. nixon's inspired more great books than any other politician, hasn't he? 'the selling of the president,' the HST campaign book, jonathan schell's stuff, 'nixon agonistes.'

and, yes, Vidal's views on the Kennedyklan were so ossified that he couldn't recognize poor dumb Teddy as the greatest liberal of the last forty years.

RFK converted to liberalism in his last 6-12 months!

At least Bobby hated LBJ for all the right reasons.

LBJ had the advantage: he hated RFK and himself for the right (and left) reasons.

J.D. you should read nixonland and then start a thread about it! it's great. i think it took me 11 1/2 months, too.

i think i will! need to read his goldwater book too.

Of the two, I thought the Goldwater book was even better.

i find the cult of robert kennedy even more odious than any JFK sentimentalism -- the whole camelot thing has been pretty well discredited, but hard-nosed liberals will still get all weepy thinking of 'what could've been.'

I think this is still a thing thanks mainly to Hunter S. Thompson... at least when I read his campaign trail books he was always returning back to '68 and basically reiterating that Nixon was pure evil and RFK was pure good.

the new The Presidents Club shows Nixon's outsized influence on the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton presidencies.

i'm a gene mccarthy guy myself.

Anyone seen/read Vidal's play An Evening with Richard Nixon? I haven't.

i just started the perlstein goldwater book but it's so depressing i can't make much headway

mccarthy is a genuinely fascinating character to me, basically a lovable eccentric and underachiever who writes poetry in his spare time and who seems like the least likely person in the world to take on lyndon johnson -- lyndon johnson! -- and somehow he actually does it. then he gets permanently knocked out of the ring, first by RFK stealing his thunder, then by the assassination, then by daley's thugs in chicago beating up his still-loyal followers, and it's so traumatizing he basically quits his office and disappears, except that he also makes these half-hearted runs for president for like the next 20 years. so weird. there's a really haunting description of him in the HST book that has always stayed with me.

McCarthy and McGovern were two of the more literate men in public life.

clem and J.D, thanks for the Schell recommendation a couple years ago. Anyone who hasn't read it: do so!

I maybe mentioned owning it, but I haven't actually read it. I just finished a book within the past few months that presented McCarthy in a less than flattering light, and I've blanked out on what it was.

That queeny nihilist!

the last caro book has some fun anecdotes about rfk being a thuggish dick to everyone but it also subscribes fully to the A Change Came Over Him narrative (and says that throughout the missile crisis he was the one guy in the room urging jfk to be careful).

nixonland is the best book i've ever read about the 60s, prolly cuz its author was born in 69. gotta get some distance.

Until Obama writes his – oh wait.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Caro almost apologetic about believing in the transformation of Scrooge McKennedy?

he's more just kind of thin on it. that book seemed kinda thin in general really. i assume there'll be plenty more bobby vs lyndon stuff in vol 5, if we make it.

this interview is from The Decline, when the one-liners are more obviously canned (tho i do like, on albion, "this isn't a country; it's an american aircraft carrier", even tho i guess it's just an old joke of orwell's), the history sloppier, and the mcveigh defenses crabbier, but it's a really good and sad profile i thought. plus it has a great kicker. wrenching, even, is the word.

Corrections!

hence my confusion about him and the companion

you know i think vidal gets a pass just based on the time that wfb said that being gay was like being a drug addict and that being vidal was like being a drug pusher

I tell him that while I agree with many of his criticisms of US foreign policy, it seems that to keep his isolationism pristine and pure, he has to go further than the truth. He has to imply every attack on the United States' power was provoked, and therefore justified – when some were not. He looks coldly at me. "Okay – name one." Pearl Harbour, I say. If the US can be an expansionist empire, so can other countries. The Japanese empire attacked the US, just as the US expansionists attacked Guatemala, Vietnam and others. It was unprovoked aggression.

not that pearl harbor was 'justified' or anything, but the interviewer's stance here is ridiculously simple-minded. it's pretty well established that the roosevelt administration had done a lot to 'provoke' the japanese in the pacific prior to PH.

I guess you could say the US provoked Japan by objecting to their invading a bunch of countries?

imo they just took a long-ass time figuring out how to respond to adm perry

that's not entirely unserious, you could argue the us presence in the philippines, etc was a provocation

Confrontation between two great powers over sea lanes and trade was inevitable, which is not to say that FDR 'encouraged' the bombing.

vidal says that right after, no? about roosevelt's "taunting". i'm not entirely un-with him there but then i don't share his total objection to american entrance into ww2. even if yes obv it's what finally made us rome.

yeah, and aggressive imperialism was the only reason we were even in pearl harbor. still glad we won WW2 obv.

A difference between being relieved that the insane battle FDR fought with the isolationist GOP/southern Dems and giving orders that forced Japan to bomb Hawaii.

my favorite vidal theory is that lincoln destroyed the US

*the insane battle FDR fought with the isolationist GOP/southern Dems WAS OVER. I need water.

the point where he really does become just a crab is when he handwaves away soviet imperialism with "they had a whole continent to play with". (like um so do we gore.) it's not enough for him to know america's an empire; it apparently has to be the only empire. (which it is now, unless you're a chechyan or a tibetan or or or, but that's not the point.)

favorite vidal theory is that lincoln destroyed the US

Jefferson did by purchasing Louisiana.

dlh, I may send you Burr next.

i have it! was reading it this morning.

it's not enough for him to know america's an empire; it apparently has to be the only empire. (which it is now, unless you're a chechyan or a tibetan or or or, but that's not the point.)

― a hauntingly unemployed american (difficult listening hour), Thursday, 2 August 2012 22:32 (59 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's not enough to be an empire; other empires must fail

anyone watched this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLyvszhFAC4

burr is cool clear fun as usual. i worry tho cuz my early american history is terrible; he can say whatever he wants and i have no choice but to believe it.

I'm not too sure about Jefferson's relationship with the parakeet.

I watched that '84 video last year... He reveals his all-time fave film in it, which Eric will enjoy.

laughed so hard at "now paaaaaaaaaaaat, let's work on our verrrrrbs here."

haha i stumbled on that clip a while back and that line almost made me fall off my chair.

Rep. Bachmann told TheDailyCaller.com: “I had been a Democrat and I’d actually worked on Jimmy Carter’s campaign and I was reading a novel by Gore Vidal and when I was reading it he was mocking the Founding Fathers and all of the sudden it just occurred to me."

“I set the book down on my lap, I looked out the window of a train I was riding in and I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I’m a Democrat. I think I really am a Republican,’ because the Founding Fathers were not the characters that I saw Gore Vidal portraying in his novel and that snotty, mocking attitude to me didn’t in any way reflect who we are as a nation.”

my favorite vidal theory is that lincoln destroyed the US

― the late great, Thursday, August 2, 2012 9:31 PM (8 minutes ago)

i was relieved to find that this theory is not really a major aspect of his lincoln novel, a few snarky bits of dialogue aside.

otm

xpost

John Hay in Lincoln's last graf: "...Lincoln, in some mysterious fashion, had willed his own murder as a form of atonement for the great and terrible thing that he had done by giving so bloody and aboslute a rebirth to his nation."

Vidal is not an insufferable snob...He is just a big reader and intelligent. I mean yeah he is liberal and gay but that doesn't make him a snob but rather pretty awesome

MusicJew158 2 years ago

In Hitchens' (much more complimentary) Vidal essay from the nineties he recounts sitting in a green room with Newt Gingrich and a GOP apparatchik who was fuming over a Vidal column. Gingrich said he would not stand by and let the man who wrote the great Lincoln be insulted.

i got that theory out of "united states" (the essay collection)

i'm fuzzy on the details because it was about 10 years ago when i read it but it was basically just the whole "better as a confederation of states" line and hand-wringing about american empire (whether ruled from ca, ny, tx or dc)

in light of recent congressional deadlock it seems relevant but i don't think that's exactly what he was getting at at the time

lincoln really creates the (modern) u.s. in the novel; there isn't much editorializing about whether or not this is A Good Thing, which is really how i like my history, i guess.

great video. damn bummed about vidal. much love to myra breckenridge and duluth too. really singular guy.

still haven't read Duluth or Creation or Kalki.

i have never read any of his books, which is something rather rare for me— i'm like an encyclopedia of gay literature, or at least i feel like it sometimes

anyway, don't think i'm going to start now.

i've actually only read his essays

where would you start w/ his fiction? i don't want a tome ...

Lincoln
Myra Breckinridge
Burr

in that order

My favourite Gore Vidal clip - I can't find it on YouTube right now - is the chat show where he's explaining to Dick Cavett why he's a homosexual and a virgin. It's all about not having kids. Gore says (and I'm paraphrasing):

"The important thing is to win at being yourself rather than lose at being someone else. If I had kids, I'd have to tell them that. But of course if they followed my advice they'd be losing at being me rather than winning at being themselves. So, in order to follow my advice they'd have to rebel against me by defiantly not rebelling against me, which would, in turn, be rebelling against me, and not rebelling against me, and so on, in a self-devouring recursive loop. And - poof! - my children would be gone, swallowed by the irreconcilable contradiction. Both I and they knew this in advance, and this is why they don't exist."

Cavett clutches his head and says: "Just wait until I tell the kids I'm never going to have about this."

hahahahaha

so Gore, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward -- best threesome of the '50s?

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01521/vidal-joanne-newma_1521207i.jpg

chat show

so Gore, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward -- best threesome of the '50s?

― Pangborn to be Wilde (Dr Morbius), Friday, August 3, 2012 6:27 AM (44 minutes ago)

reading about this kind of broke my brain in the best possible way.

tabes, Gore Vidal is not a Gay Author.

does vidal cover the truman years in any of his novels? (harry, not capote.)

Truman makes a two-page appearance at a train station talking to Vidal's house intellectual in The Golden Age.

kind of amazed at how negative (and occasionally outright untrue) most of the obits collected on A&LD are. i guess a lot of ppl were really waiting for the moment when GV couldn't sue them for libel anymore.

what's A&LD?

arts & letters daily -- www.aldaily.com.

good stuff from time to time, also a lot of crap.

slightly NSFW pic so just a link:

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8ciatQPB81rcf0aqo1_500.jpg

a few choice excerpts to promote an interview anthology... On the immediate post-WW2 period:

So here we were, right on the edge of a golden age, all prepared to go, to make civilization, something the United States has never done. We were all dressed up with nowhere to go. Then in 1950, Harry Truman was looking forward to the Cold War, with a new enemy: Communism. He gets us into a disastrous war with Korea, which we promptly lose. And we have been at war ever since, and it has not done our character much good, and it hasn’t been good for business either, except for Wall Street. That’s what I say to the golden age. It was there, in ovum, but you have to sit on the egg, not step on it.

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/06/gore_vidal_told_you_so/

gore OTM on that one, obv.

can't wait for that book!

He did write – repeatedly – that lles années d'après-guerre up to 1950 were the golden age.

not surprising that it was his age 20-25, but also the last time the US war machine was (somewhat) idling.

what war were we fighting between '92 and '00 I forget

1992 – Sierra Leone. Operation Silver Anvil: Following the April 29 coup that overthrew President Joseph Saidu Momoh, a United States European Command (USEUCOM) Joint Special Operations Task Force evacuated 438 people (including 42 third-country nationals) on May 3 .Two Air Mobility Command (AMC) C-141s flew 136 people from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to the Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany and nine C-130 sorties carried another 302 people to Dakar, Senegal.[RL30172]

1992–1996 – Bosnia and Herzegovina: Operation Provide Promise was a humanitarian relief operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars, from July 2, 1992, to January 9, 1996, which made it the longest running humanitarian airlift in history.[6]

1992 – Kuwait: On August 3, 1992, the United States began a series of military exercises in Kuwait, following Iraqi refusal to recognize a new border drawn up by the United Nations and refusal to cooperate with UN inspection teams.[RL30172]

1992–2003 – Iraq. Iraqi no-fly zones: The U.S., United Kingdom, and it's Gulf War allies declared and enforced "no-fly zones" over the majority of sovereign Iraqi airspace, prohibiting Iraqi flights in zones in southern Iraq and northern Iraq, and conducting aerial reconnaissance and bombings. Oftentimes, Iraqi forces continued throughout a decade by firing on U.S. and British aircraft patrolling no-fly zones.(See also Operation Northern Watch, Operation Southern Watch) [RL30172]

1992–1995 – Somalia. Operation Restore Hope. Somali Civil War: On December 10, 1992, President Bush reported that he had deployed U.S. armed forces to Somalia in response to a humanitarian crisis and a UN Security Council Resolution in support for UNITAF. The operation came to an end on May 4, 1993. U.S. forces continued to participate in the successor United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II).(See also Battle of Mogadishu)[RL30172]

1993-1995 - Bosnia. Operation Deny Flight: On April 12, 1993, in response to a United Nations Security Council passage of Resolution 816, U.S. and NATO enforced the no-fly zone over the Bosnian airspace, prohibited all unauthorized flights and allowed to "take all necessary measures to ensure compliance with [the no-fly zone restrictions]."

1993 – Macedonia: On July 9, 1993, President Clinton reported the deployment of 350 U.S. soldiers to the Republic of Macedonia to participate in the UN Protection Force to help maintain stability in the area of former Yugoslavia.[RL30172]

1994: Bosnia. Banja Luka incident: NATO become involved in the first combat situation when NATO U.S. Air Force F-16 jets shot down four of the six Bosnian Serb J-21 Jastreb single-seat light attack jets for violating UN mandated no-fly zone.

1994–1995 – Haiti. Operation Uphold Democracy: U.S. ships had begun embargo against Haiti. Up to 20,000 U.S. military troops were later deployed to Haiti to restore democratically-elected Haiti President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from a military regime which came into power in 1991 after a major coup.[RL30172]

1994 – Macedonia: On April 19, 1994, President Clinton reported that the U.S. contingent in Macedonia had been increased by a reinforced company of 200 personnel.[RL30172]

1995 – Bosnia. Operation Deliberate Force: In August 30, 1995, U.S. and NATO aircraft began a major bombing campaign of Bosnian Serb Army in response to a Bosnian Serb mortar attack on a Sarajevo market that killed 37 people in August 28, 1995. This operation lasted until September 20, 1995. The air campaign along with a combined allied ground force of Muslim and Croatian Army against Serb positions led to a Dayton agreement in December 1995 with the signing of warring factions of the war. As part of Operation Joint Endeavor, U.S. and NATO dispatched the Implementation Force (IFOR) peacekeepers to Bosnia to uphold the Dayton agreement.[RL30172]

1996 – Liberia. Operation Assured Response: On April 11, 1996, President Clinton reported that on April 9, 1996 due to the "deterioration of the security situation and the resulting threat to American citizens" in Liberia he had ordered U.S. military forces to evacuate from that country "private U.S. citizens and certain third-country nationals who had taken refuge in the U.S. Embassy compound...."[RL30172]

1996 – Central African Republic. Operation Quick Response: On May 23, 1996, President Clinton reported the deployment of U.S. military personnel to Bangui, Central African Republic, to conduct the evacuation from that country of "private U.S. citizens and certain U.S. government employees", and to provide "enhanced security for the American Embassy in Bangui."[RL30172] United States Marine Corps elements of Joint Task Force Assured Response, responding in nearby Liberia, provided security to the embassy and evacuated 448 people, including between 190 and 208 Americans. The last Marines left Bangui on June 22.

1996 - Bosnia. Operation Joint Guard: In December 21, 1996, U.S. and NATO established the SFOR peacekeepers to replace the IFOR in enforcing the peace under the Dayton agreement.

1997 – Albania. Operation Silver Wake: On March 13, 1997, U.S. military forces were used to evacuate certain U.S. government employees and private U.S. citizens from Tirana, Albania.[RL30172]

1997 – Congo and Gabon: On March 27, 1997, President Clinton reported on March 25, 1997, a standby evacuation force of U.S. military personnel had been deployed to Congo and Gabon to provide enhanced security and to be available for any necessary evacuation operation.[RL30172]

1997 – Sierra Leone: On May 29 and May 30, 1997, U.S. military personnel were deployed to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to prepare for and undertake the evacuation of certain U.S. government employees and private U.S. citizens.[RL30172]

1997 – Cambodia: On July 11, 1997, In an effort to ensure the security of American citizens in Cambodia during a period of domestic conflict there, a Task Force of about 550 U.S. military personnel were deployed at Utapao Air Base in Thailand for possible evacuations. [RL30172]

1998 – Iraq. Operation Desert Fox: U.S. and British forces conduct a major four-day bombing campaign from December 16–19, 1998 on Iraqi targets.[RL30172]

1998 – Guinea-Bissau. Operation Shepherd Venture: On June 10, 1998, in response to an army mutiny in Guinea-Bissau endangering the U.S. Embassy, President Clinton deployed a standby evacuation force of U.S. military personnel to Dakar, Senegal, to evacuate from the city of Bissau.[RL30172]

1998–1999 – Kenya and Tanzania: U.S. military personnel were deployed to Nairobi, Kenya, to coordinate the medical and disaster assistance related to the bombing of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.[RL30172]

1998 – Afghanistan and Sudan. Operation Infinite Reach: On August 20, President Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack against two suspected terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical factory in Sudan.[RL30172]

1998 – Liberia: On September 27, 1998, America deployed a stand-by response and evacuation force of 30 U.S. military personnel to increase the security force at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia. [1] [RL30172]

1999–2001 - East Timor: Limited number of U.S. military forces deployed with the United Nations-mandated International Force for East Timor restore peace to East Timor.[RL30172]

1999 – Serbia. Operation Allied Force: U.S. and NATO aircraft began a major bombing of Serbia and Serb positions in Kosovo in March 24, 1999, during the Kosovo War due to the refusal by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to end repression against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. This operation ended in June 10, 1999, when Milosevic agreed to pull out his troops out of Kosovo. In response to the situation in Kosovo, NATO dispatched the KFOR peacekeepers to secure the peace under UNSC Resolution 1244.[RL30172]

2000 – Sierra Leone. On May 12, 2000 a US Navy patrol craft deployed to Sierra Leone to support evacuation operations from that country if needed.[RL30172]

2000 - Nigeria. Special Forces troops are sent to Nigeria to lead a training mission in the county.[7]

2000 – Yemen. On October 12, 2000, after the USS Cole attack in the port of Aden, Yemen, military personnel were deployed to Aden.[RL30172]

2000 – East Timor. On February 25, 2000, a small number of U.S. military personnel were deployed to support the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET).

the Truman Doctrine debuted in '47.

kinda pwned there, Shakes, by all the Clintonian brushfires

I think you'd at least remember Bosnia, Mme Albright itching to use "this wonderful military" or Black Hawk Down

the 90s were pretty crucial as a pretext to our current misadventures and, don't forget, 9/11. or have you already forgotten.

"pretext" isn't correct there, but anyway

yeah those weren't wars sorry guys

he did. he forgot. crank up that darryl worley

at least, not any moreso than whatever hijinks we were up to between the end of WWII and the beginning of the Korean War

xp

presaging of events is what i meant. but really all of that was collectively a vast collection of military actions that may as well have been a "real" war, for how it led to what we're up to now and for how it affected the world's view of us.

like all of us Gore Vidal isn't immune to mythologizing his past

'we weren't at WAR, we just bombed a bunch of other countries. how could you possibly confuse the two?'

i think sometimes what we don't view as war, what we view as a minor action and something we can just go and forget, is viewed by our adversary as war. which is maybe more important to take into consideration than whether or not we viewed it as such.

the serbia thing was pretty crucial in re-legitimizing the idea of 'humanitarian intervention,' and hence played a fairly important role in the leadup to the iraq war.

people not thinking that list constitutes "war" (it's an unnatural thought for 90s-kid me, too!) is the only piece of evidence future anthropologists will need to come to a working understanding of post-ww2 american life

otm. that older definition of war as event has changed its utility has diminished but it's still war and there's more of it than ever. xxp

as its utility

you guys are nuts

the military evacuating some diplomats from Albania /= firebombing of Dresden

let's keep some perspective here

it would be excessive to say that everything there counts as 'war' but come on, a 'four-day bombing campaign'?

barely got their hair mussed, those pissant little countries!

SMC finally comes out as a neolib/neocon whatever warpig-enabler label you wanna use

didn't Billy Blythe ejaculate some bombs immediately after his dress-stain indictment?

I don't deny that you can clearly see the US military "war machine" (as Morbz puts it) in action behind all of those actions when you take them all together, primarily because the scope and scale that they encompass (ie, globe-spanning) requires a functioning military industry. The only distinction I was trying to make was that the US has not been on the unbroken, unending mission of imperialist genocide that Morbz' rhetoric implies. There are gaps, there are peaks and valleys, and they weren't all encapsulated within Gore Vidal's halcyon days of youth.

xp

the least violent episode on that list is indeed /= one of the most violent from the largest war in human history

didn't Billy Blythe ejaculate some bombs immediately after his dress-stain indictment?

yeah and I thought this was disgusting in its transparent cynicism, I said so at the time, I am no fan of Clinton etc

ftr I think this was even less violent dlh:

1998 – Liberia: On September 27, 1998, America deployed a stand-by response and evacuation force of 30 U.S. military personnel to increase the security force at the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia.

yeah, Dresden, I didn't realize every NBA star hadda be Michael Jordan.

Sotosyn, what will be your book mythologizing your past be like?

thx for playing tho yes lets all keep encouraging Morbsian hysteria

xp

Billy also took the Concorde down to Little Rock to pump electricity into a retarded man.

reads like a line from some 70s AM radio country hit

that was the night the lights went out in Arkansas

My memoir will be told from multiple points of view, one of which will be an unreliable female narrator.

do we have a chart of US military spending btwn GHW Bush and Clinton? I'm pretty sure it didn't go down by any standard.

has it ever?

hmm this is not what I was expecting tbh

http://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/infographics/2011/11/myth-of-isolationism-defense-spending_1200.jpg

clear downward trend during Clinton's terms there btw

partially because the economy/GNP was booming during Clinton's terms

I forgot that the death of the USSR prob played its legendary "peace dividend" role there.

Also the feds have only been paying a lot for education/ infrastructure/ healthcare etc for the last 80 years, right? So arms would've been a bigger slice of a smaller pie.

(before the New Deal, that is)

and the Great Society, moreso? bcz it appears to dip under 50% for the last time just as Vietnam is revving up.

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.