Comments on: It’s Literally Wednesday: Gore Vidal (1925 – 2012)

By: At Home in Decatur

At Home in Decatur — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 02:52:45 +0000

They had finally outlived their testosterone levels.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:26:40 +0000

If I recall correctly, Buckley made an argument along the lines of: white people are more advanced — the NAACP, by virtue of its name, states that black people need advancement — and therefore a local white minority had a proper role in ruling over a black majority. One could finesse this by stating that Buckley did not claim that whites were inherently superior. At any rate, he later did renounce his earlier statements. Buckley was a towering intellectual figure, even if he wasn’t always right.
I watched the Buckley-Vidal debates with my parents. At the time I thought that this was normal sophisticated political discourse. While it wasn’t exactly civil, it was very serious and, as it turned out, very rare.

By: Parker Cross

Parker Cross — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:22:09 +0000

I’ve always laughed at the punchline to this story about Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. From The Telegraph: His (Mailer’s) finest altercation was arguably with Gore Vidal, though. Vidal described Mailer’s work, The Prisoner of Sex, to “three days of menstrual flow” and Mailer to serial killer, Charles Manson. Mailer reciprocated in 1971 by head-butting Vidal in the green room of the Dick Cavett Show. Six years later, Mailer threw a drink at Vidal and punched him. Prostrate on the carpet, Vidal managed to utter the immortal line: “as usual, words fail him,” a comeback that’s gone down in history. Still, the pair grew tired of fighting and reconciled in 1985.

By: Parker Cross

Parker Cross — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:15:47 +0000

I never realized how handsome Vidal was.

By: Decatur's Token Republican

Decatur's Token Republican — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 21:02:02 +0000

Read Vidal’s “Burr” a number of years ago, and still remember how much I enjoyed it. It was an often humorous look at our founding fathers (and their foibles), especially the somewhat unflattering, but very human, descriptions of George Washington.