The Pridelets Files for October 3
On this day in 1847, kiddie lit writer Hans Christian Andersen professes his affection in rather queer quill scribblings to the Hereditary Grand-duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, "I love you as a man can only love the noblest and best. This time I felt that you were still more ardent, more affectionate to me. Every little trait is preserved in my heart."
BIRTHGAYS (and the occasional straights)
* 1859 - Actress Eleanora Duse
* 1835 - Piano/organ prodigy Camille Saint Saens
* 1882 - Composer Karol Maciej Szymanowski
* 1925 - Novelist/critic Gore Vidal
* 1928 - Dancer Erik Bruhn
* 1951 - Writer Bernard Cooper
* 1974 - Chicago's Lambda Resource Center for the Blind
Q.UOTE
"The more gay people are portrayed on screen as understandable human beings, the more threatening they seem off-screen. ...No one - whether supportive about gay rights or not - should confuse the fantasy tolerance of television with a culture in which gays are treated as equal citizens." -- Richard Goldstein
THE BEDSIDE TABLE
"Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir" by Gore Vidal
In Point to Point Navigation, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal ranges freely over his remarkable life with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his. The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II. As he says, “As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.” It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards (mostly) eluded during his eventful life and for the way this memoir proceeds—far from linear but always on course.
From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics and international society where he has cut a broad swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, sketched with a draftsman’s ease and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs, are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (the “Glorious Bird”), Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book’s most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.
This work is copyright© 2006 Thomas Allen Heald, all rights reserved. Contact the author at tom@idontgetit.org and the latest column are always available at www.Pridelets.com.
BIRTHGAYS (and the occasional straights)
* 1859 - Actress Eleanora Duse
* 1835 - Piano/organ prodigy Camille Saint Saens
* 1882 - Composer Karol Maciej Szymanowski
* 1925 - Novelist/critic Gore Vidal
* 1928 - Dancer Erik Bruhn
* 1951 - Writer Bernard Cooper
* 1974 - Chicago's Lambda Resource Center for the Blind
Q.UOTE
"The more gay people are portrayed on screen as understandable human beings, the more threatening they seem off-screen. ...No one - whether supportive about gay rights or not - should confuse the fantasy tolerance of television with a culture in which gays are treated as equal citizens." -- Richard Goldstein
THE BEDSIDE TABLE
"Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir" by Gore Vidal
In Point to Point Navigation, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal ranges freely over his remarkable life with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his. The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II. As he says, “As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.” It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards (mostly) eluded during his eventful life and for the way this memoir proceeds—far from linear but always on course.
From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics and international society where he has cut a broad swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, sketched with a draftsman’s ease and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs, are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (the “Glorious Bird”), Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book’s most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.
This work is copyright© 2006 Thomas Allen Heald, all rights reserved. Contact the author at tom@idontgetit.org and the latest column are always available at www.Pridelets.com.
posted by Thomas @ 2:09 AM
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