FREE THE ESSENTIAL GORE VIDAL PDF Gore Vidal,Fred Kaplan | 1024 pages | 19 Oct 2000 | Little, Brown Book Group | 9780349112671 | English | London, United Kingdom The Essential Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal Vidal described his homeland as the United States of The Essential Gore Vidal. Throughout his life he railed against how he felt it had betrayed its founding principles. So that's the end of the constitution The Essential Gore Vidal a working machine. He told the Times three years ago that the US is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. It's no surprise then that he detested George W Bush. Indeed, Vidal claimed the terrorist attacks of 11 September occurred because the Bush administration was "incompetent" and Bush himself was "inactive and inopportune". Vanity Fair refused to publish an essay he wrote reflecting on the attacks. In another essay, published by the Independent, he compared the attacks to the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour, arguing that both presidents Franklin D Roosevelt and Bush knew of them in advance and used the disasters to advance their agendas. We are a sort of militarised republic. Not all Vidal's targets were political. He had a lengthy feud with fellow writer Truman Capote. Capote, perhaps, started it. He gave an interview saying that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House for drunkenness and quarrelling with Jackie Onassis's mother. Vidal took Capote to court for libel, where the two traded insults. Vidal suggested Capote had "raised lying into an art — a minor art". Capote retorted: "Of course, I'm always sad about Gore. Very sad that he has to breathe every day. After the death of his nemesis inVidal insulted Capote one last time, saying his death had been "a good career move". Vidal was sceptical about democracy in general "Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates" and its American incarnation in particular "Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman president everything will be all right. But it won't be. Gore Vidal was a better essayist than he was a novelist. That is taken as read in litcrit circles these days, and it will take a prodigious revisionist to make a case for the overblown novels and reverse the orthodoxy. Martin Amis, who has little time for Vidal the novelist, recognised the glory of the witty, learned, aphoristic essays. Even his blind spots are illuminating. Vidal was too forthright and opinionated to be a great writer of fiction, where many viewpoints have to be represented. He knew where he stood, never wavered from his Jeffersonian commitment to individual freedom, and found the essay the ideal form in The Essential Gore Vidal to express his views. His collection, United States: Essaysis a huge and majestic compendium that charts not just Vidal's rumbustious life but the culture and politics of the country he could love and hate in the same sentence. He had always vowed not to write a memoir — he eventually relented, though too late to write a great one — and saw his essays as an alternative, a repository of his wit, wisdom and occasionally venom. United States: Essayswhich won the National Book Award for non-fiction in the US, runs to 1, pages and contains essays on subjects as diverse as Oscar Wilde, the legalisation of drugs, life in Mongolia and the journalist HL Mencken — a lifelong hero and The Essential Gore Vidal rare exception to Vidal's dictum that "journalism has always been the preferred career of the ambitious but lazy second-rater". There are also several shorter collections, mainly of his later essays, and A View from the Diner's Club, published inis the ideal place for the newcomer to begin. His long essay on the American writer Dawn Powell, first published in his beloved New York Review of Books, is scholarly, charming and entirely convincing in its advocacy of a largely forgotten novelist. His essay on his friend Orson Welles is laugh-out-loud funny. He could do The Essential Gore Vidal voice he chose. What is needed now is a definitive collection of the essays — not even the bumper United States: Essays contained them all. Whatever happens to the novels, the essays should always be in print. He was America's Montaigne. Vidal loved making cameo appearances in film and on television. Vidal's final film appearance was as a chat show host in the film Shrink, about a psychologist who treats Hollywood stars. But arguably his most significant cameo came The Essential Gore Vidal in when he appeared in his friend Federico Fellini's film Roma. Fellini wanted him in The Essential Gore Vidal film because Vidal The Essential Gore Vidal been living in Rome since the early s and become well-known on the literary scene. The appearance is most memorable for the fact that, for once in his life, Vidal's eloquence was definitively upstaged. And there were four of the most beautiful white horses drawing an empty cart. It looks nice. Don't you think it looks nice? He kept adding things to the scene, then he would take them away, and finally the horses were gone. I suddenly realised that it didn't matter what I said, that I could be saying any nonsensible thing in my supposed interview, and that it wouldn't matter because I was part of his composition. Who was he? Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, The Essential Gore Vidal find cold water. Vidal satirised the monstrousness of his vanity, without wholly undermining it. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices. He lived for many years in a mountain-top retreat in Ravello on the Amalfi coast until he became too infirm to cope with the hills. Inhe moved to the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. Vidal claimed to have had a brief affair with the beat writer. In Palimpsest he recalled finding, "to my surprise", that Kerouac was circumcised. It was Capote, not Vidal, who came up with the most waspish dismissal of Kerouac's work: "That's not writing, that's typing. Vidal never tired of telling us of his famous friends. He was close to John Kennedy and was a relative of Jackie Kennedy. That said, Vidal lived for 53 years with former advertising executive Howard Austen. The key to their relationship, he repeatedly told interviewers, was that they did not sleep together. Austen The Essential Gore Vidal buried at Rockcreek Cemetery in Washington in Vidal said he wants to be cremated and have his ashes placed The Essential Gore Vidal to his longtime companion. Vidal and author Norman Mailer conducted a lengthy literary feud. Mailer punched Vidal at a party, prompting Vidal to retort: "Words The Essential Gore Vidal Norman again. He wrote 25 novels. His third, The City and the Pillar, published inwas a coming-out The Essential Gore Vidal about a handsome, athletic young man, and was, he later claimed, blacklisted by the critical and literary establishment. That blacklisting made it so difficult for him to get reviewed that Vidal took the pseudonym Edgar Box for a series The Essential Gore Vidal thriller novels and later gave up novels altogether for a time in favour of writing for the stage, television and Hollywood. In MGM hired him as a contract writer: among other projects he helped rewrite was the screenplay of Ben-Hurthough he was denied an official credit. He also wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of his friend Tennessee Williams's play Suddenly, Last Summer. In the 60s he returned to fiction, writing a series of The Essential Gore Vidal Julianabout the Roman The Essential Gore Vidal who wanted to restore paganism; Washington, DCthe first of his fictional chronicles of American history; and Myra Breckinridge The two exchanged letters after Vidal's article The Essential Gore Vidal Vanity Fair on "the shredding" of the Bill of Rights and their The Essential Gore Vidal inspired Edmund White's play Terre Haute. He's not insane," Vidal said of McVeigh. Vidal ran for elected office twice: once for Congress inin upstate New York; once for the Senate in California in He lost both times, but in the race garnered more votes than any Democrat in the district for the previous 50 years. The conservative columnist William F Buckley once called Vidal a "queer" on live television in the s. The exchange went as follows. Buckley compared anti-Vietnam war demonstrators to Nazis. I was in the infantry in the last war. As far as Vidal was concerned, he won that one and any other of the many TV duels in which he tilted: "I mean I won the debates, there was no question of that," Vidal said in a CNN interview in And because I'm a writer, people think that I'm this poor little fragile thing. I'm not poor and fragile And anybody who insults me is going to get it right back. From a barbaric bronze age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved — Judaism, Christianity, Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal — God is the Omnipotent Father — hence the loathing of women for 2, years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course.