A New Gore Vidal Memoir

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before or not, by my very favorite author is Gore Vidal. I think he's an amazing writer, I love his essays, his novels, and just hearing him express his views on books, life, and most of all, the United States.

I just found out about a new pictorial memoir he's putting out, called Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare. I work in a bookstore and I had no idea this was coming out until I read about it on Band of Thebes!

I can't wait to get my hands on it! I've read both of Gore's memoirs, Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation, as well as Fred Kaplan's biography of him (which I liked, though Gore himself didn't speak well of it in his second memoir), but I don't think I'll ever tire of hearing (or in this case, seeing) more about him.

In addition to the new memoir, Gore is speaking his mind once again on the sate of the union, this time in an interview with the Times of London. The view is rather grim, but that's because Gore never pulls any punches:

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. “Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they’d say ‘They live well but they’re all alcoholics’. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.” Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.”

I don't always agree with Gore on everything. Take his views on sexuality, for instance. They seem too much like a throwback to the closeted era of the 50's: he'd slept with, by his own estimate, a thousand men by the time he was 25 (!), but he still believes there are only homosexual acts, not homosexual people. To me, that seems too much an attempt to have your cake and eat it too, to be gay while denying such an identity actually exists outside the bedroom. Being gay goes beyond just sex, as much as many would like to claim that sex is all that's involved!

Gore has got an incredible mind, though, and whether you agree with him or not, he always gets people thinking.