On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> Or it could be he and Jack Kerouac have more in common than a night in
> the sack together. Kerouac was always a conservative prick, he just got
> worse when he moved in with his mom to die. Could be Vidal's not
> senile, just showing some true colors.
But Kerouac is also an example of a guy getting a lot worse. When he was young, literally all his best friends were gay. When he was old, the anti-gay screeds in his journals were just poisonous.
In both cases, there might be a simple solution, namely the last stages of alcoholism. At that stage it often corrodes both mood and brain. And in Vidal's case, where he's really old, it often magnifies the desire to lash out in fury at the dying of the light.
Michael