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We had a jolly little dessert party here last night with precocious children and low-maintenance grownups, and thus I exorcised the ghost. And was able to email someone this morning who is legitimately grieving: You know, you can’t really rescue anyone. You can reach out your hand. But they have to want to rescue themselves.
###
Also, I did not win Powerball.
###
Also, I’d wanted to brush up on my dimly, dimly, dimly remembered Italian (which is actually not Italian at all, but Sicilian, a whole ‘nother dialect.)
But Dutchess Community College doesn’t offer conversational Italian to non-students.
So, I guess I’ll be learning conversational Russian instead.
###
“You need to come visit me,” I told B on the phone yesterday. “I am totally obsessed with JR jumping out that window, and I’m just sick of thinking about it. It’s not like I knew the guy particularly well. And I’m so sad about it. I can’t work! One knockdown, drag-out fight with you over Bernie Sanders, and I’d forget all about him.”
B laughed. “You need to watch Bad Television! Maybe a Blue Bloods marathon. Or maybe you should lock one of your Sims in a room without doors and watch him starve to death.”
Instead we talked about Gore Vidal and the fate of American literature.
###
I’d finished both the Jay Parini bio and a really awful memoir I found in the library by someone called Michael Mewshaw that chronicles Vidal’s obsession with plastic surgery, tax evasion, and paid sex with adolescent boys in lurid detail.
Mewshaw’s memoir really upset me: It was just so unrelentingly mean; it described the last 30 years of Gore Vidal’s life – the encroaches that Wernicke-Korsakoff’s Syndrome made into that beautiful brain – with a dazzling display of petty Schadenfreude. Gore Vidal stumbling drunk up La Rondinaia’s steep oleander-lined path; Gore Vidal smashing a bottle of 35-year-old single malt against a fireplace and guzzling scotch from its jagged porcelain rim; Gore Vidal on display in a wheelchair at some writer’s conference, a bobble-head in stained sweatpants and cheap, glaringly white tennis shoes, “an antimacassar of dandruff around the shoulders.” (WHY the hell did you feel compelled to add that particular detail, Mewshaw? And how many thesauruses did you have to search through before you came up with the word antimacassar?)
Mewshaw appears never to have forgiven Vidal for the fact that in all their years of acquaintance, Vidal never spoke with him spontaneously, from the heart. That Vidal used him as a one-man focus group for bon mots.
But surely any idiot knows when you’re around someone like that, that this person is to be pitied? That this person believes in the deepest part of his or her soul that he’s absolutely worthless unless he’s tap dancing?
###
“Some might argue karma caught up with Gore Vidal,” B said.
“Or hubris,” I said. “It’s just very, very sad. He was trapped in his persona. And, of course, a raging alcoholic. But one day he decided to stop pretending to go to the gym or watching what he ate or drank. And boom! He turned into Dorian Grey’s portrait.”
“Well, that’s the depression,” B said. “I suspect in part he lived long enough to recognize that that entire generation of writers who came out of the war would be forgotten – as most generations are. Who reads Mailer now? Or Heller? Or Jones? Or Bellow? Or Roth when he's gone? Only Salinger endures. I’m not sure Vidal could stand that.”
“Right,” I said. “Books that are taught in high school endure because that’s the last time most people read. So, Harper Lee. And I think Mailer will be remembered, but for The Executioner’s Song. Not for his fiction. Never underestimate the American public’s fascination with spree killers! I think Bellow may still be read.”
“Yeah, Mailer and Capote are no longer recalled as fiction writers but rather as the masters of True Crime. And Bellow is gone, baby. G-O-N-E. Oddly enough Kerouac has made the cut. Odder still, Phil Dick is the Van Gogh of genre writers. A jack in his day and now taught everywhere.”
“Right. And a really bad writer from a prose style point of view. And Harper Lee – on the basis of that one book.”
“Oh, but it was a perfect book, in the same sense that Stephen Crane is still taught for Red Badge of Courage.”
“Yes, it was a perfect book,” I said. “Although apparently there’s a bit of a backlash to it now within the legal community from politically correct firebrands who resent the fact that Atticus Finch has become the patron saint of lawyers. Still serves to support my thesis that the only literature that survives is stuff that can be taught in high school. De facto YA fiction – whether it was written to be YA or not.”
“That’s okay,” B said. “High school is probably better without the Brontes, and Jane Austen is still every smart girls go-to these days. They still teach Moby Dick, too – the most difficult book most people will ever read. And they still teach Steinbeck. I think Hemingway these days is considered too sexist, and Faulkner too hard. The saddest causalities are writers like Willa Cather. And only I miss Thomas Wolfe.”
“I was never much of a Thomas Wolfe fan myself,” I said. “And wasn’t Cather gay? I’d imagine that would make her the ideal syllabus inclusion.”
“Gay, yes, but that’s not a good enough excuse for her essential Midwestern values.”
“Right. Nobody loves the Midwest.”
“We like Garrison Keillor!” B said. “Midwest lite.”
“Garrison Keilor’s popularity is on the decline, too,” I said. “I think he’s generally viewed as the Boomer equivalent of Lawrence Welk.”
“He is Lawrence Welk. Without the bubbles.”
“Think so?” I asked. “I actually find his Lake Woebegone monologues moving. I guess I’m terminally square.”
“I'm not suggesting that he isn't a wonderful story teller,” B said. “He is. But that upper Midwestern cheer that Welk had is a lot like Prairie Home. Not a bad thing, but we live in a darker age right now.”
“Is it?” I said. “The people who watched Welk were cowering under the fantasy of nuclear annihilation. I think all people in every time and place think the era they’re living in is the darkest age.”
“Oh, this isn't the darkest age by any stretch,” B said. “Cold War fears were tempered by the recent memories of defeating Nazis. The Summer of Love was only 22 years after the defeat of Germany and Japan.”
“It took me a long, long time to see my life in the context of the Second World War,” I mused.
“There were still war vets in college on the GI Bill when you were born,” B said. “When Robin was born, Bill Clinton was halfway thru his first term. And five minutes from now he may be de facto President again.”
“I know,” I said. “But somehow I never related to it. I was shocked when I finally figured out that I’d actually been born during the Truman administration.”
“Had he just managed to hang on another eight years, FDR would still have been President!” B said.
“Then I’d really be a relic of a bygone era,” I said.
###
Also, I did not win Powerball.
###
Also, I’d wanted to brush up on my dimly, dimly, dimly remembered Italian (which is actually not Italian at all, but Sicilian, a whole ‘nother dialect.)
But Dutchess Community College doesn’t offer conversational Italian to non-students.
So, I guess I’ll be learning conversational Russian instead.
###
“You need to come visit me,” I told B on the phone yesterday. “I am totally obsessed with JR jumping out that window, and I’m just sick of thinking about it. It’s not like I knew the guy particularly well. And I’m so sad about it. I can’t work! One knockdown, drag-out fight with you over Bernie Sanders, and I’d forget all about him.”
B laughed. “You need to watch Bad Television! Maybe a Blue Bloods marathon. Or maybe you should lock one of your Sims in a room without doors and watch him starve to death.”
Instead we talked about Gore Vidal and the fate of American literature.
###
I’d finished both the Jay Parini bio and a really awful memoir I found in the library by someone called Michael Mewshaw that chronicles Vidal’s obsession with plastic surgery, tax evasion, and paid sex with adolescent boys in lurid detail.
Mewshaw’s memoir really upset me: It was just so unrelentingly mean; it described the last 30 years of Gore Vidal’s life – the encroaches that Wernicke-Korsakoff’s Syndrome made into that beautiful brain – with a dazzling display of petty Schadenfreude. Gore Vidal stumbling drunk up La Rondinaia’s steep oleander-lined path; Gore Vidal smashing a bottle of 35-year-old single malt against a fireplace and guzzling scotch from its jagged porcelain rim; Gore Vidal on display in a wheelchair at some writer’s conference, a bobble-head in stained sweatpants and cheap, glaringly white tennis shoes, “an antimacassar of dandruff around the shoulders.” (WHY the hell did you feel compelled to add that particular detail, Mewshaw? And how many thesauruses did you have to search through before you came up with the word antimacassar?)
Mewshaw appears never to have forgiven Vidal for the fact that in all their years of acquaintance, Vidal never spoke with him spontaneously, from the heart. That Vidal used him as a one-man focus group for bon mots.
But surely any idiot knows when you’re around someone like that, that this person is to be pitied? That this person believes in the deepest part of his or her soul that he’s absolutely worthless unless he’s tap dancing?
###
“Some might argue karma caught up with Gore Vidal,” B said.
“Or hubris,” I said. “It’s just very, very sad. He was trapped in his persona. And, of course, a raging alcoholic. But one day he decided to stop pretending to go to the gym or watching what he ate or drank. And boom! He turned into Dorian Grey’s portrait.”
“Well, that’s the depression,” B said. “I suspect in part he lived long enough to recognize that that entire generation of writers who came out of the war would be forgotten – as most generations are. Who reads Mailer now? Or Heller? Or Jones? Or Bellow? Or Roth when he's gone? Only Salinger endures. I’m not sure Vidal could stand that.”
“Right,” I said. “Books that are taught in high school endure because that’s the last time most people read. So, Harper Lee. And I think Mailer will be remembered, but for The Executioner’s Song. Not for his fiction. Never underestimate the American public’s fascination with spree killers! I think Bellow may still be read.”
“Yeah, Mailer and Capote are no longer recalled as fiction writers but rather as the masters of True Crime. And Bellow is gone, baby. G-O-N-E. Oddly enough Kerouac has made the cut. Odder still, Phil Dick is the Van Gogh of genre writers. A jack in his day and now taught everywhere.”
“Right. And a really bad writer from a prose style point of view. And Harper Lee – on the basis of that one book.”
“Oh, but it was a perfect book, in the same sense that Stephen Crane is still taught for Red Badge of Courage.”
“Yes, it was a perfect book,” I said. “Although apparently there’s a bit of a backlash to it now within the legal community from politically correct firebrands who resent the fact that Atticus Finch has become the patron saint of lawyers. Still serves to support my thesis that the only literature that survives is stuff that can be taught in high school. De facto YA fiction – whether it was written to be YA or not.”
“That’s okay,” B said. “High school is probably better without the Brontes, and Jane Austen is still every smart girls go-to these days. They still teach Moby Dick, too – the most difficult book most people will ever read. And they still teach Steinbeck. I think Hemingway these days is considered too sexist, and Faulkner too hard. The saddest causalities are writers like Willa Cather. And only I miss Thomas Wolfe.”
“I was never much of a Thomas Wolfe fan myself,” I said. “And wasn’t Cather gay? I’d imagine that would make her the ideal syllabus inclusion.”
“Gay, yes, but that’s not a good enough excuse for her essential Midwestern values.”
“Right. Nobody loves the Midwest.”
“We like Garrison Keillor!” B said. “Midwest lite.”
“Garrison Keilor’s popularity is on the decline, too,” I said. “I think he’s generally viewed as the Boomer equivalent of Lawrence Welk.”
“He is Lawrence Welk. Without the bubbles.”
“Think so?” I asked. “I actually find his Lake Woebegone monologues moving. I guess I’m terminally square.”
“I'm not suggesting that he isn't a wonderful story teller,” B said. “He is. But that upper Midwestern cheer that Welk had is a lot like Prairie Home. Not a bad thing, but we live in a darker age right now.”
“Is it?” I said. “The people who watched Welk were cowering under the fantasy of nuclear annihilation. I think all people in every time and place think the era they’re living in is the darkest age.”
“Oh, this isn't the darkest age by any stretch,” B said. “Cold War fears were tempered by the recent memories of defeating Nazis. The Summer of Love was only 22 years after the defeat of Germany and Japan.”
“It took me a long, long time to see my life in the context of the Second World War,” I mused.
“There were still war vets in college on the GI Bill when you were born,” B said. “When Robin was born, Bill Clinton was halfway thru his first term. And five minutes from now he may be de facto President again.”
“I know,” I said. “But somehow I never related to it. I was shocked when I finally figured out that I’d actually been born during the Truman administration.”
“Had he just managed to hang on another eight years, FDR would still have been President!” B said.
“Then I’d really be a relic of a bygone era,” I said.
