A Hitch in time.

[uvula_fr_b4]

Yesterday, the first thing that leaped out at me from the Google News feed on my computer at work was the hardly unexpected, but no less devastating, word of the passing, on Thursday night (15 December) of British-American professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, book critic, public intellectual, public gadfly), from

Comments

[marlowe1]

I have always found Gore Vidal to be a rather bitter crank but that's probably because the first thing I read by him was his short book about U.S. presidents where he found nothing good to say about any of them. I then read a book where he played up the conspiracy theory concerning FDR and Pearl Harbor and later on I read Anais Nin's diary where she thinks that he's sensitive and fragile and only realizes that he's a spiteful little creep toward the end (but then again Anais Nin was a flake

[uvula_fr_b4]

If you're inclined to like Nin despite her flakiness, you might want to check out Vidal's take on her; it's collected in his United States: Essays, 1952 - 1992, which won the National Book Award. I got over whatever half-assed inclination I ever had to read her after reading Vidal, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Oh, and watching Henry and June. (Vidal's hilarious on Miller, BTW.)

Yeah, Vidal is bitter, extremely so; a crank? Mmm, perhaps, but anybody who's essentially a lone voice shouting in the wilderness has got to be at least a little bit of a crank. If I'd had to endure the misguided carping that he did in response to Lincoln, I probably would've repaired to a cave, or at least to a Unabomber shack