{"id":1174,"date":"2012-08-02T18:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-08-02T23:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/?p=1174"},"modified":"2012-08-03T00:03:46","modified_gmt":"2012-08-03T05:03:46","slug":"gore-vidals-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/2012\/08\/02\/gore-vidals-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading Gore Vidal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Creative Commons photo, courtesy of Thokrates<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Writing an essay\u00a0for Gore Vidal<\/a>\u00a0reminds me of picking up a guitar\u00a0after Segovia<\/a> passed —\u00a0any attempt\u00a0pales in such close proximity to the master. But I’ll\u00a0offer a few notes\u00a0in hopes of drawing\u00a0some new\u00a0readers\u00a0to Mr. Vidal’s exemplary writing and powerful social critique and analysis.<\/p>\n

I encountered\u00a0many of Mr. Vidal’s essays long before encountering sociology, so\u00a0my mind was effectively pre-blown<\/em> before entering the field. Just as early exposure to The<\/em>\u00a0New Yorker\u00a0<\/em>opened new worlds to young\u00a0Gary Keillor<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>those wicked-smart essays brought this Minnesota kid\u00a0a new vision and perspective on American society. He made historical and literary allusions that were new to me, but\u00a0the writing was richly rewarding and accessible to any\u00a010th-grader\u00a0with a little patience and a\u00a0lot of\u00a0dictionary.<\/p>\n

I inhaled\u00a0the entire\u00a0Vidal\u00a0collection in the public library, but today I’m recalling\u00a0two basic insights. He wasn’t the first to make them, of course, but he made them so\u00a0clearly and elegantly that they quickly took root. First, he offered a sharp-eyed\u00a0insider’s\u00a0analysis of how wealth and power might really<\/em> operate in the United States. Now, I\u00a0can’t say I ever\u00a0swallowed\u00a0this vision hook, line, and sinker, but it did <\/em>seem\u00a0to\u00a0comport with the evening news about as well as the\u00a0facts I’d been taught in my history and social studies classes (Dems\u00a0versus Republicans? That’s splitting hairs, my boy. Think: who’s pulling the strings?).\u00a0<\/em>And\u00a0by the time\u00a0I got to college and discovered sociologists like C. Wright Mills and William Domhoff, I could approach their arguments with some degree of familiarity and preparation.<\/p>\n

Second,\u00a0Mr. Vidal’s\u00a0sensitive\u00a0(and, at times, hilarious) writing\u00a0on sexual diversity\u00a0convinced me\u00a0that the\u00a0putatively fundamental categories I’d taken for granted were surely oversimplifications. Here too, Mr. Vidal’s perspective provided a\u00a0better fit to the social facts I was encountering as a high school student and music writer. Here’s a passage\u00a0touching on\u00a0both power and sex, from a 1979 Playboy <\/em>interview that I\u00a0likely read behind Ralph’s grocery at Charlton and Wentworth:<\/p>\n

Today Americans are in a state of terminal hysteria on the subject of sex in general and of homosexuality in particular because the owners of the country (buttressed by a religion that they have shrewdly adapted to their own ends) regard the family as their last means of control over those who work and consume. For two millennia, women have been treated as chattel, while homosexuality has been made to seem a crime, a vice, an illness.”<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some of Mr. Vidal’s obits\u00a0hint that his essays are too historically specific to stand the test of time, but I’m guessing\u00a0that\u00a0 Bernard Shaw’s obit writers\u00a0said the same things about his remarkable prefaces. The excerpt above suggests that either American society has not changed all <\/em>that much in 33 years or that, like a good sociologist, Gore Vidal’s analysis transcends the particular moments and controversies\u00a0of his research\u00a0sites. Judge for yourself, perhaps starting online<\/a> or with\u00a0United States: Essays 1952-1992<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing an essay\u00a0for Gore Vidal\u00a0reminds me of picking up a guitar\u00a0after Segovia passed —\u00a0any attempt\u00a0pales in such close proximity to the master. But I’ll\u00a0offer a few notes\u00a0in hopes of drawing\u00a0some new\u00a0readers\u00a0to Mr. Vidal’s exemplary writing and powerful social critique and analysis. I encountered\u00a0many of Mr. Vidal’s essays long before encountering sociology, so\u00a0my mind was effectively […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/files\/2012\/08\/reader.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1187,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/1187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/editors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}