Remembering Gore Vidal

About himself, Gore Vidal once said: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

My earliest memory of Gore Vidal isn't of him as a writer (I came to that later and have read most of his essays and novels), but as an aspiring political figure. He ran for Congress in 1960 in the district adjoining ours; my family lived in Albany, New York at the time, but even as a child I could see that Mr. Vidal was in a losing battle. It wasn't just that his district, unlike Albany's, was heavily Republican; no one as iconoclastic and as relentlessly frank as Gore Vidal was ever going to win any important political office in the U.S.

That he didn't win his political races may have been literature's gain, but it was also America's loss. We could have used that often cranky gadfly in the House or the Senate. The New York Times obituary is here.

UPDATE: A fascinating look at Vidal's teleplays and screenplays by F.X. Feeney at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The 2012 Olympics Begins...

...and as an American, my favorite part of the opening ceremony, after of course Her Majesty and James Bond's encounter and the salute to the rich tradition of British children's literature, was the shoutout to the U.K.'s National Health Service. Medicare for all!

Remembering Sally Ride, First American Woman in Space

Questions and jokes that were considered appropriate when astronaut Sally Ride was preparing for her first shuttle flight:

Speaking to reporters before the first shuttle flight, Dr. Ride — chosen in part because she was known for keeping her cool under stress — politely endured a barrage of questions focused on her sex: Would spaceflight affect her reproductive organs? Did she plan to have children? Would she wear a bra or makeup in space? Did she cry on the job? How would she deal with menstruation in space?

The CBS News reporter Diane Sawyer asked her to demonstrate a newly installed privacy curtain around the shuttle’s toilet. On “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson joked that the shuttle flight would be delayed because Dr. Ride had to find a purse to match her shoes.

The rest of the New York Times obituary of this brave and accomplished woman here.

A Review I Missed Earlier

A review of Earthseed was posted this spring at The Hub, the Web site of the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a branch of the American Library Association, and you can read it here. I'll be at YALSA's Young Adult Literature Symposium in St. Louis on November 2-4, 2012.

Advice for Would-Be Writers

Some advice, for what it's worth, quoted from a recent speech of mine: "...just about everything I once knew about how to conduct a career as a professional writer has fallen by the wayside (I’m thinking of such pieces of advice as “always make sure you keep a carbon copy” and “don’t write without getting paid” – an online presence pretty much requires a lot of writing for free).  About the only advice I give any aspiring writers now that has stood the test of time is “read as much and as widely as possible” and “make writing something every day a habit.”