Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky in Conversation
March 20, 2013 § Leave a Comment
Wonders of Youtube! A 1991 video of a conversation between the two greats surfaces.
Gore Vidal on the South Bank Show
December 3, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Gore Vidal on the South Bank Show in 2008, with extracts from Point to Point Navigation.
Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal – BBC Omnibus 1995
September 10, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal is a BBC Omnibus documentary first screened in 1995. The two part film biography covers Vidal’s life by visiting scenes from his past.
Episode One
Gore Vidal on the Republic and its Fall
August 11, 2012 § 1 Comment
The best interview with the late Gore Vidal that I’ve heard so far. Unsurprisingly it comes from the inimitable Christopher Lydon of Radio Open Source.
Having read all the Gore Vidal obits and the many more-and-less grudging encomia, I find the man himself at very near his best in my own conversational files — from an evening at Harvard just before Thanksgiving in 2003, on the occasion of his publishing Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams and Jefferson. He’d walked into the hall slowly, on a cane, that night, but his chatter was was crackling with fresh mimicry and mischief. (Two nights earlier, his reward at a joint reading in Provincetown was discovering that ancient nemesis Norman Mailer was getting around on two canes.) Great entertainer and great complainer, Vidal at 78 came through as passionate historian and erudite old comic who could still fill the house, and whose repartee was not all repertoire.
Gore Vidal, RIP
August 1, 2012 § 2 Comments
The great Gore Vidal is no more. One of the greatest prose-stylists of the last 100 years, he had a rapier-like wit, and remained a non-conformist to the end. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate his life than to leave you in Gore’s own company. Here is an archive of Gore Vidal’s writings and media appearances, some of them rare, that PULSE has published over the years. Also, don’t miss this blistering 1986 response to the Norman Podhoretz in which Vidal is identifying predilections, particularly the neoconservatives passionate attachment to Israel, that 17 years later would lead the US to disaster in Iraq.
Gore Vidal on Italo Calvino
May 14, 2012 § 2 Comments
Gore Vidal sat down with Riz Khan to discuss Italo Calvino, whom Vidal describes as “the only great writer of my time”. Vidal’s essay on Calvino is available here.
Hardtalk with Gore Vidal
January 28, 2012 § Leave a Comment
This one is from 2008. Gore Vidal on the BBC’s Hardtalk.
American Masters: Education of Gore Vidal
January 13, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Vidal in Venice
August 3, 2011 § 3 Comments
At an old bookshop that I frequently visit, I recently found a book titled Vidal in Venice, a glossy coffee-table hardback about the history, architecture and culture of Venice, illustrated with superb artwork and photography. The book was a companion edition to a series of documentaries Gore Vidal wrote and presented in 1985 for Channel 4 about the city he calls ‘perhaps the most beautiful cliche on earth.’ Thanks to the wonders of youtube, today I was able to find it and here it is in its entirety.
