Elmore Leonard

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."

-- Elmore Leonard

[Source: Michael Schmidt, "The Novel: A Biography"]

Red

There really is a Sunday delivery. At first I thought it was UPS extending its range of business, but, no, it is actually the federal post office. Usually, they threaten to lessen the number of days for delivery, not increase them. That Amazon must really have some power.

Late in the afternoon, I was growing skeptical and went to Amazon's site to track my package, and there was a note saying that my package was left in the mailbox. And it was true!

I got "Red", a play by John Logan. Speaking of Amazon and their spooky powers, it was a suggested item. I had never heard of this play before, or of John Logan. It was about art, and everyone seemed to be lavishing wild praise for it, and it has won a number of prizes. So, I gave it a shot. It didn't blow me away, but after the screenplay for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", it is the only other script that has joined my list of 're-readables'.

In this excerpt, the painter Mark Rothko is talking about the death of Jackson Pollock, arguing that the fatal car accident was really a suicide.

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At his worst you still loved him, though: you loved him because he loved art so much ... He thought it mattered. He thought painting mattered ... Does not the poignancy stop your heart? ... How could this story not end in tragedy?

Goya said, "We have art that we may not perish from truth." ... Pollock saw some truth. Then he didn't have art to protect him anymore ... Who could survive that?

-- "Red" by John Logan

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After reading the play, I was surprised to learn that the play rests on a strong factual basis. There really was a Mark Rothko, and the story about his big commission for the Four Seasons is true. More poignantly, Rothko himself ended up in real life dying by suicide.

Miss M. J. Fukalot

What a day! I also get a story from a sexy lady friend whom we will call Miss Mary Jane Fukalot.

( Read more... )

Vidal-Buckley

“Never turn down the opportunity to have sex or to be on television.”

-- Gore Vidal

We have another good article on the documentary about the Gore Vidal/William Buckley debates at the 1968 political conventions. I am keeping the part that goes into more detail over the most famous, or notorious, exchange between the two political gladiators.

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The mayhem strained the already taut nerves of Vidal and Buckley. Vidal had seen it up close, driving, accompanied by Arthur Miller and Paul Newman, into a cloud of tear gas. A sleep-deprived Buckley had been kept up the night before by what he called the “sheer utter obscenities” of the demonstrators in the park 14 floors below his hotel window. In the debate Vidal said, “It’s like living under a Soviet regime here,” whereas Buckley expressed his contempt for the demonstrators — who, he claimed, had provoked the police reaction by chanting the name of Ho Chi Minh and raising a Viet Cong flag.

Then a seemingly innocuous question was posed by the moderator: Wasn’t the display of the Viet Cong flag by the demonstrators a “provocative act,” rather like “raising a Nazi flag in World War II?”

Leaping at the comparison, Buckley said that those who “egg on” the enemy to shoot our soldiers in Vietnam should at the very least be “ostracized” the way “pro-Nazi” Americans were. Upon which Vidal interjected, “As far as I’m concerned, the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” In the split second it took Buckley to register this remark, his jaw tightened and his usually cool features contorted in a rictus of hatred. “Now, listen, you queer,” he said, lingering with contempt over the word, “stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Then, as Vidal blinked his moist eyes and cooed, “Oh, Bill, you’re too extraordinary,” Buckley leaned forward, looking to be on the verge of delivering the sock-to-the-goddamn-face then and there, on live TV. But instead, he fell back again — perhaps under the restraint of a clavicle brace he was wearing under his suit, the result of a broken collarbone he had sustained in a sailing accident — and declared, “Let the author of Myra Breckinridge go back to his pornography and stop making any allusions of Nazism to someone who served in the infantry in the last war.” Whereupon Vidal, who knew that Buckley had never actually made it into combat during World War II, shouted, “You were not in the infantry! Now you’re distorting your own military record!”

As the two men removed their earpieces at the end of the debate, a smiling Vidal whispered to Buckley, “Well, I guess we gave them their money’s worth tonight!”

Buckley, though, was indignant. In the aftermath of the debate, he brought a libel suit against Vidal and against Esquire for giving Vidal space for further animadversions (Buckley had earlier been given the same chance). For the rest of his life, Buckley looked back on the affray with pain — not because he had called Vidal a “queer,” but because he had been goaded into losing his vaunted composure. When, in a 1999 interview with Buckley, Ted Koppel showed the “Nazi”-“queer” excerpt from the debates, a stunned Buckley was uncharacteristically speechless. He had thought — he had hoped — the tape had been destroyed. Vidal, who bragged of the encounter that he had “enticed the cuckoo to sing its song,” knew better. He had obtained a complete set of tapes and reveled in playing them, night after night, for a captive audience of guests at his Italian villa. One of them, in the documentary, likens Vidal in his dotage to Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.

-- Jim Holt at New York Magazine

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