Word: gored
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...press executives a year before Watergate, Richard Nixon spoke of the "great civilizations of the past, subject to the decadence that eventually destroys the civilization." Nixon went on to speculate that "the U.S. is now reaching that period." Although he agrees with Nixon on hardly any other subject, Novelist Gore Vidal-a latter-day Juvenal whose patrician life-style is as celebrated in Rome as in New York-finds that in America, "Caesars are converging on the forum. There are storm warnings ahead...
...Gore and Sadism. These massive doses of gore and sadism can, of course, be modishly defended. The artist must be granted his subject; only his execution of it is up for review. Lieberman is simply following the novelistic tradition (begun by Daniel Defoe) of piling up the minutiae in order to tell society about its own workings. Horribly mangled bodies and autopsy rooms exist, as do the dispassionate technicians who must clean up the messes that others create...
...ever escalating shocks at predictable intervals. Early on, the effect can be ludicrous: Will David get stuck in an elevator? Will his wife accidentally drink a glass of hydrochloric acid? What is the meaning of her mysterious nosebleed? Later the blood flows everywhere and the sea is awash with gore: "The moray struck, needle teeth fastening on the man's neck, throat convulsing as it pulled back toward the hole. Blood billowed out of the sides of the moray's mouth." That moray eel, which figures in the book's penultimate scene, is unlikely to start...
...escorts like croupiers. The teenies had come for Al Pacino, but he was in New York. Prodded by the eupeptic booming of the outside master of ceremonies, they stayed to squeal at Walter Matthau and (in some puzzlement) at the evening's representative of the muse of irony, Gore Vidal. When Elizabeth Taylor, almost the last survivor of the studio star system for which the Oscar ceremony had been created, appeared on the walkway, it was like the arrival of a galleon in a weekend fleet of fiber-glass runabouts...
...Novelist Mordecai Richler wrote recently that the best you can hope for "is something brown, reminiscent of coffee, poured into a Styrofoam cup that, in most cases, you are advised to hold onto as it must also serve as your on-camera ashtray." Authors sometimes deserve no better. When Gore Vidal appeared to do New York's Casper Citron radio show, recalls Citron, "he walked in and said, 'Cash my check for $50, get me a drink, and what's your name?' " Vidal admits that he does TV interviews in a complete haze: "I have...