RIP Gore Vidal
I just sent the following message to my father:
Last night, as we spoke on the telephone, anglophonia lost her reigning novelist. I like to think that it was while we were fighting about the class politics behind the Whiskey Rebellion, or perchance as your wife was laughing over my catty quip about a television personality.
Thank you for introducing me to the work of a man, whose example tells me that one can carve a niche as a political, sexual, and socioemotional noncomformist, if one is willing to accept that said niche will be frequented by a small minority, celebrated by fewer still, and understood by next to noone.
I shall now sit down daily and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, in the effort to say what noone can be expected any longer to say for me. A propos of which, here is the poem I'm currently reworking:
If Wilde was right, and the aim of man
is cultivated liesure, then these
are barbaric days indeed. When work does not pay,
and the search for work excites the soul against itself,
so little of one's heart can be given to Beauty
that only the few have leave to create it
or means to consume it.
When precarity preoccupies
a mind that had been ripe to learn,
all that is learned is the foul strength
of that brutal trait called Character
by those so desperate as to have attained it.
To cultivate in such conditions,
to live for love in the land that lauds the thief,
incurs, inevitably, the mistrust of the miserable.
The Savage has always disdained the Citizen.
Last night, as we spoke on the telephone, anglophonia lost her reigning novelist. I like to think that it was while we were fighting about the class politics behind the Whiskey Rebellion, or perchance as your wife was laughing over my catty quip about a television personality.
Thank you for introducing me to the work of a man, whose example tells me that one can carve a niche as a political, sexual, and socioemotional noncomformist, if one is willing to accept that said niche will be frequented by a small minority, celebrated by fewer still, and understood by next to noone.
I shall now sit down daily and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, in the effort to say what noone can be expected any longer to say for me. A propos of which, here is the poem I'm currently reworking:
If Wilde was right, and the aim of man
is cultivated liesure, then these
are barbaric days indeed. When work does not pay,
and the search for work excites the soul against itself,
so little of one's heart can be given to Beauty
that only the few have leave to create it
or means to consume it.
When precarity preoccupies
a mind that had been ripe to learn,
all that is learned is the foul strength
of that brutal trait called Character
by those so desperate as to have attained it.
To cultivate in such conditions,
to live for love in the land that lauds the thief,
incurs, inevitably, the mistrust of the miserable.
The Savage has always disdained the Citizen.