Entropy is all around. The following is from Hitchens' review of Gore Vidal's new memoir in the NY Times today:
"To describe this collection of fragments ['Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006'] as a valediction would apparently be in accordance with the author's wishes. Nearly every page is heavy — I almost said 'gravid'— with intimations of mortality.
... [A]s P. G. Wodehouse observed when he approached the age of 90, the hot blood of the 80s is beginning to cool a bit.
Indeed, much of 'Point to Point Navigation' is almost alarmingly laconic, as if offhandedly dictated. Saul Bellow did not retreat 'to the "real" world of Chicago where he celebrated the likes of Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss in books like "Ravelstein."' He left Chicago for Boston and wrote one novel about Bloom that was the recompense for a promised and unwritten memoir of him. Hearing of the plan to bury Susan Sontag in Paris, Vidal notes that he doesn't envy her executors 'all that bureaucratic French paperwork.' Perhaps he knows of some other kind of paperwork. 'As a 20th-21st-century writer,' he observes, 'ladies and page boys don't send me locks of hair as they did Byron.' Quite possibly not, but then ladies and page boys are not a 20th-21st-century writer. I have been reading Vidal with pleasure and profit for decades and though I have often wished to differ with him, I have never before wanted or dared to do so on a point of style. He used to define his craft as 'making sentences,' but a sentence like the following is only just rescued from going straight over the cliff: 'Pentagon machinery had overtaken the moon; we had surpassed the Communists was the general theme of the celebration of what was happening.'"
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/books/review/Hitchens.t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin>
Carl
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