Vale Vidal

And so the greatest essayist in America has passed away at the age of 86. There really isn't anyone like him left.

Jimmy Trimble

Gore Vidal is to be buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, a graveyard in suburban Washington DC next to his life partner Howard Austen who died in 2008 which prompted Vidal's move from the Amalfi Coast in Italy to the Hollywood Hills where he died today from pneumonia.

On one side of Gore and Howard is the grave of Henry Adams (1838-1913) the American journalist, novelist, academic and historian who featured in Vidal's books.

And on the other side is the great love of Gore Vidal's life, indeed the person who he said was the only person he had ever  loved,  Jimmy Trimble who was a school  colleague of Vidal's who died at Iwo Jima in WW2.

Here's the famous encounter between Gore Vidal & William Buckley:

Gore Vidal on Obama, gay sex and liars

It's a great read-an interview with America's greatest intellectual (or is that Noam Chomsky ?) by Tim Teeman in The UK Times :

How’s Obama doing? “Dreadfully. I was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we’ve had in that position for a long time.

"America should leave Afghanistan, he says. “We’ve failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it.” The “War on Terror” was “made up”, Vidal says. “The whole thing was PR, just like ‘weapons of mass destruction’. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He’d be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you’re both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination.”

"His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them."

“Don’t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay men’s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They’re not.” He “wouldn’t begin to comment” on how they are different."