Skip to main content

Gore Vidal's


The anniversary of the Hollywood sign brought to mind Gore Vidal's book on Tinseltown.  Looks like a lot of fun judging from the NYTimes review.  Interesting to see that a few letters fell off over the years.

Comments

  1. That sounds perfect! I have only read a couple of Vidal's histories but have wanted to read them all in order at some point. They aren't great novels, but they make for fascinating reading. I think he is truly brilliant.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sometime in the last year the area around the sign and the sign itself have been taken into the public domain and turned in to a park. A rare example of Los Angeles caring about its heritage; usually it just gets trashed. The sign is a bit trashy, too, from my occasional glimpses the most interesting one is over the sculpture garden at the LA County Museum of Art. It seems balanced by the big red stabile in the garden.

    avrds, I hope you read those historical novels, in order is nice but not necessary. They are a great way to learn history, similar to the Flashman novels in that respect, and nothing like Philippa Gregory's take on the Tudors.

    ReplyDelete
  3. There a few books like that, where I really want to read them all. Vidal's are certainly on that list. I have never read Flashman, but might at some point try the one in the American West -- I think there is one like that...?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Harry Flashman is in America a few times, finding himself in an Apache war troop, defending the end of a famous fort in your corner of the world that got burned to the ground (my baf I can't remember the name), as an accidental participant at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in two different books in the west. He also is a slaveholder, a part of the underground railway, at the theater when Lincoln dies (he refers to this, but it isn't played out in the story), and with John Brown at Harpers Ferry. I hope you can forgive him his Raj-ish attitudes toward various races, sexes, and classes. He always gives the individual his due and where appropriate, admiration.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Yes there are a few but there is the one titled"Flashman and the Indians"Speaking of there are two Indian books featured in the August HBC one just on Wounded Knee and the other on the Sioux.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Bo, give Harry his due. It's "Flashman and the Redskins."

    ReplyDelete
  7. Carol,you are correct.I can't stare at my Flashman titles in the bedroom because they reside in the dining room bookcases now.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I think it was Flashman and the Redskins that first caught my attention. Probably an old NY Times discussion -- between Bo and Carol, no doubt!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Speaking of the Hollywood sign just recently private development of luxury homes nearby on the same hillside was headed off by private donations to buy the land from the developer.After a month of nice thick coastal fog in LA with Temps a good ten degrees below normal we went up twenty to 94 today and for the next several days with the valley around 104.Uggh.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!