HST's non-traditional Nixon obituary.

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/199...he-was-a-crook/8699/

I may have actually read more books by Nixon than Vidal, Capote, Hemingway & Mailer put together.

Amor de Cosmos wrote:


Aye, those are the two: Penguin Classics I spot at least once a week on the tube, usually in the hands of younger readers than I.

Here's the Cavett Show clip

And, for no other reason than a WTF laugh, Norman 'Bites Yer Ears' Mailer being hit with a hammer by Rip Torn.

That clip has really shocked me. Mailer comes across really arrogant.
This is the only thing I've ever seen of Mailer prior to that, and he comes across as someone who enjoys a good anecdote.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt49nFKEIs8

Did he mellow in later life?

And that clip from the film "Maidstone" was really odd.
For some reason, I felt it needed Bob Dylan to be there as well.
It reminded me of this;

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcSMaNlcDPs

Benjm wrote:


Philip Roth?

You can stuff your Lenos and Lettermans, that was the classic period of the American talk show. Cavett was the top, but Carson — in a different way — was usually worth watching too, as was Buckley.

That clip has really shocked me. Mailer comes across really arrogant.

He'd just come to blows with Vidal, so I guess that affected his mood somewhat. He regularly seemed to go out of his way to draw fire though. It was sometimes hard to discern what he believed, and what he said for the sake of argument.

That Nixon piece is an immensely satisfying read. I can't wait to show it to my dad.

I saw gore vidal at an event back when i was in college. A very imposing, catty old queen, with so much style. I wish I didn't get so drunk afterwards and forget the half of it.

The Truman capote movie with phillip seymour hoffman filled me with such immense revulsion that I don't think I could ever read anything by him.

Oh, he was a nasty, petty little man. If you're ever of a mind, dig around online for the longish Vanity Fair piece about his 'Black and White Ball'.

Wait...here t'is.

www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1996/07/capote199607

I have to admit that I have read more of his journalism than his books after HIH (another classic which I must reread) but he seems fairly consistent. Clinton getting interviewed by O'Rourke and Thompson in Rolling Stone is pretty good The only parallel I can think of is Blair getting interviewed by Paxman and Will Self
Something that interests me is how the list gets narrowed down to Mailer/Vidal/Hemmingway/Irving.



It's perhaps Anglocentric



Why? Was it a conscious decision?

I always found Vidal was always too quick to recognise his own brilliance, sentence-wise. He became almost aristocratic in his views in later years, too. Hemingway was blindingly brilliant, but got flabby. I never liked Bellow, which has always made me feel lacking in some way. Roth now lives in a remote cabin, receiving mail once a week; that describes my experience of reading him. Hunter S. Thompson’s recollection of breaking into a law library prior to his trial is one of the greatest pieces of comedic writing I’ve ever read.

Bored of Education wrote:


The link did not work.

O'Rourke can be funny as hell. He is unique amongst Repuke writers in that he was a flaming lefty and took loads and loads of drugs and is not ashamed of that. It sucks to see him lumped in with the likes of Coulter, Goldberg, and the other right-wing gasbags.

O'rourke is the glibbest man on earth.

...he says, glibly

Bored, no, it's not a stance or owt, it's just that I don't read much fiction, but am strangely drawn to right wing foreign policy visions and other perversities.

And that Nixon piece by HST (as I also apaprently call him) was bloomin' splendid. it's how he should be remembered. Mainly.

I wasn't accusing you of narrowing the list Bored, it just seems to me that the US writers of that generation get marginalised when it comes to the Mailer/Vidal feud when you're talking about heavyweight commentary.

Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse 5 are both hugely inspiring books and get across the futility of war in their own way but they maybe work in a more abstract way than Mailer and Vidal.

What intrigues me is that Vonnegut and Heller don't really seem to get mentioned when people talk about Mailer and Vidal, not even as a comparator.

I lean more towards Heller and Vonnegut, I like the sense of bewilderment they brought to the whole WWII thing.

Well Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse 5 are still very widely read books, well-loved by the youth in particular. Whereas you just don't hear about anything Vidal or (I always want to say Sassoon at this point...) Mailer wrote, over here at least. They're mainly seen as slightly freakish media personalities from a certain period - historically interesting in that way, but that's not a particularly substantial legacy to leave compared to Vonnegut's and Heller's.

I love Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, you know. Wasn't expecting much at all, being somewhat averse to Big Important American Semi-Autobiographical novels, but it's really, really great.

...he says, glibly

that book he wrote about capitalism around the world was perhaps one of the stupidest books I've ever read. a couple of hundred pages, on a par with mitt romney's dissection of the differences in the economic development of israel and palestine.

I think I may have done the Joseph heller thing in the wrong order. I'm afraid that I watched enough episodes of mash to become really sick of it, then I saw him speak 'live' and then I read his book, which could really have done with being 200-300 pages shorter. (I read it on a flight to china, and while I wanted the book to stretch to the end of the flight, I also wanted it to end at the same time)

It was an open goal, TAB, rather than anything too serious

That Slate piece Gramsch linked to?

"Very eye opening this piece is, inasmuch as it demonstrates how to condense every single cliched neoconservative attack on Vidal into a single malicious article. It makes two basic points, that Vidal was a racist and elitist, and doesn't begin to justify them.

If the author is so confident that Vidal engaged in antisemitic rants, then why doesn't an actual quote appear? Most likely, he is relying on some well-worn fabrications by Norman Podhoretz. The vast majority of this article works by insinuation and misrepresentation. Thus, anyone who has actually read Vidal's writings on McVeigh or 9/11 would instantly recognise this author's animadversions as baseless and fraudulent.

But if you don't know Vidal's actual words, which the author doesn't quote (again, very telling), it is very easy to be deceived. So I recommend people actually go and read Vidal. And also check Dennis Altman and Fred Kaplan for far more informed commentary on Vidal's life and work. This is an ignorant hatchet job."