There’s a new edition of Gore Vidal’s best, most prophetic – and by far his funniest – book, Myra Breckinridge. The protagonist of this 1968 satirical novel, in case you should somehow be unaware of this seminal text, is a former mild-mannered man called Myron who has been transformed via… Read More »Gore, Myra, Camille & Me
by Mark Simpson We don’t really do subtexts in the see-through, digital 21st Century. Sextexts, definitely. Subtweets, possibly. Subtexts, not so much. Who has the time? Who can even be bothered with having a subconscious? Subtexts are so analogue. Perhaps this is why Toby Kebbell who plays Messala in the… Read More »Get Hur! How Gay Subtexts Became Ancient History
The campness of Susan Sontag (Independent on Sunday, 2002) The first sentence in Susan Sontag’s latest collection of essays is eight lines long, mentions Camus and Pasternak and ends with the word “impinging”. But would we have it any other way? Sontag dares to look serious in a way that… Read More »Does My Brain Look Big in This?
Mark Simpson on the (fast diminishing) difference between fame and legend (The Hospital Club magazine, Spring 2010) A recent bloody assassination attempt on Gore Vidal, the last great American man of letters by the English journalist Christopher Hitchens in the glossy pages of Vanity Fair prompted me, and I suspect… Read More »The Legendary Test
God, I can’t help but love the old bastard. Another tour-de-force from Gore Vidal (interviewed by Tim Teeman) appeared in The London Times last week, in which, as usual, he said so many things, so very loudly that so many people know to be true but daren’t begin to mumble.… Read More »Gore Vidal Takes on The World – Again