Gore Vidal

WHEN GORE VIDAL is on a tear, outrage and wit blend to produce a new, delicious and deadly substance, like sulfuric Champagne or a napalm martini. Consider, for example, an especially corrosive—and funny—essay on the twinned destiny of gays and Jews, "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," originally published in The Nation in 1981 and newly reprinted in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (Doubleday, $27.50). Here’s a sample:  read more »

This week, Esquire.com posted the magazine's most recent "What I've Learned" interview with Gore Vidal.

While Mr. Vidal's interview was as erudite and prickly as the great man himself (samples: "'You got to meet everyone—Jackie Kennedy, William Burroughs.' People always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the true way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to?"; "Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia"), the most interesting part was the behind-the-scenes story in the form of an email from interviewer Mike Sager.  read more »

Jon Bon Jovi may no longer be headlining, but the organizers of this summer’s Book Expo 2007 don’t feel any less young and hip for that.

Just look at the Web site! In its press area, there’s a special corner for bloggers (BookExpo America Loves Bloggers!).

Elsewhere, there’s a place to load in personal essays inspired by the event! (“Did you meet your wife? Lose your mind? Get stranded at the airport and end up talking with Gore Vidal? Tell us.” Umm, we’ll be tracking these closely.)  read more »

I spent a couple days in New York city this week, including an obligatory meeting with a pseudo-friend. If you don't live in New York, you might not know what a pseudofriend is. New York is full of them. These are the people who want to get out of you a lot of the benefits of a friendship—the exchange of ideas and gossip, the warmth, the removal of loneliness—but without really paying out as a friend in any real generosity of spirit. Truly, they'd just as soon you do badly, and they even act to achieve that result. I'm not talking about friend/rivals. That's an old and honored category of friendship. Old friends know how to negotiate that (ask Gore Vidal and Truman Capote..).

Pseudofriend is a professional category. It's hard for writers to get along that well in N.Y. cause N.Y. is the writers' olympic village. As it's the olympic village for investment analysts, TV people, legal turks, advertising people, etc. I bet they have pseudofriends, too.

Here are two eminent writers holding forth on the subject. First is the late Saul Bellow, as interviewed by Philip Roth in The New Yorker:

I've thought quite a lot about the New York setting of "Seize the Day" and I'm inclined to agree that the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings. I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of "Seize the Day" are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.

Wow. Note that: Bellow never won any of his struggles in New York. (No wonder Roth lives in CT).

Now here's Hemingway in a famous passage from The Green Hills of Africa:

Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle...

Yes, I'm collecting string on this subject...

I spent a couple days in New York, including meeting with a pseudo-friend. If you don't live in New York, you might not know what a pseudofriend is. New York is full of them. These are the people who want to get out of you a lot of the benefits of a friendship—the exchange of ideas and gossip, the warmth, the removal of loneliness—but without really paying out as a friend behind your back. They'd just as soon you do badly. I'm not talking about friend/rivals. That's an old and honored category of friendship. Old friends know how to negotiate that (ask Gore Vidal and Truman Capote..).

Pseudofriend is a professional category. It's hard for writers to get along that well in N.Y. Because N.Y. is the writers' olympic site. As it's the olympic site for investment analysts, TV people, legal turks, advertising people, etc. I bet they have pseudofriends, too.

Here are two eminent writers holding forth on the subject. First is the late Saul Bellow, as interviewed by Philip Roth in The New Yorker:

I've thought quite a lot about the New York setting of "Seize the Day" and I'm inclined to agree that the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings. I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of "Seize the Day" are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.

Wow. Note that: Bellow never won any of his struggles in New York. (No wonder Roth lives in CT).

Now here's Hemingway in a famous passage from The Green Hills of Africa:

Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle...

At an appropriately sophisticated hour on a recent Tuesday evening, 29-year-old Cody Franchetti rela  read more »

1) The Post-Millennial Grassy KnollThe four things that have made me laugh the most this summer were  read more »

People used to laugh at my father's theories on dieting and nutrition.  read more »

Remember the way that rabid, self-destructive, paranoid, murder-list Clinton hatred paralyzed the Ri  read more »

It's back.Remember the way that rabid, self-destructive, paranoid, murder-list Clinton hatred paraly  read more »

Gore Vidal once tried to get me to print an alleged secret-a very big secret-about Richard Nixon's p  read more »

The celebrated and reviled Polish novelist Jerzy Kosinskiwas a fantasist in a good cause-namely, art  read more »

Gore Vidal-or Moses as he's known among the prophets-is back in town to lead us from the wilderness  read more »

Warren Allen Smith stood in his cramped Greenwich Village studio apartment and recalled the time he  read more »

Gore Vidal: A Biography , by Fred Kaplan. Doubleday, 850 pages, $35.Ah, to have been Gore Vidal!  read more »