Various news sources have reported that Gore Vidal died today at age 86. He had been in declining health for some while. Over the years, I’ve seen him numerous times around town at various events such as the LA Times Festival of Books, and I recall seeing him somewhere a year or two ago where he mostly sat planted in a chair, slightly confused. In his final television appearance (at least, the final one I saw), on Bill Maher’s show on HBO, Mr. Maher was uncharacteristically gracious in trying to overlook Mr. Vidal’s slippage. I say all this by way of noting that I doubt anyone is surprised that he’s now died, and to recall the comment a friend made after we’d both seen that HBO show: “He needs to die now.” I like to think that Gore Vidal would have appreciated the candor.

A quick scan of my bookshelves reveals 13 volumes of his works, plus others that I’ve read that I know are misshelved: I read “Creation” and his omnibus of essays, and “Kalki” and “Myra Breckinridge” and I don’t see any of them there. All tolled, I’ve read many thousands of pages of his work, some of them twice, and have earned the right to say that he was not a prose stylist. (And so, don’t believe any obits that would have you think so.) What he was was a popularizer — someone who knew history, both ancient and modern, better than you did, and could spin an entertaining yarn about it that conveyed his firmly held opinions. That’s what he did in print, and that’s what he did on television, frequently with Johnny Carson but often with others: make a middlebrow audience feel smarter. To read Gore Vidal was to make connections between past and present, and between people here and people there, that you otherwise would have missed, and to think afresh about things that everyone else had considered settled.

This middlebrow reader will miss him. Not because I agreed with him (sometimes yes, sometimes no), but because his writing was informative, his opinions were usually countervailing, and his style was always entertaining. And also because he’s our last great literary celebrity, someone who was widely read and widely bed.

Merrill Perlman on “Why ‘Amercia’ needs copy editors.”

Many years ago, I was a copy editor at a daily newspaper. Since leaving that post in 1988, I’ve remained a copy editor — but in my mind only, and without getting paid. It’s impossible to ignore how badly writing standards and proofreading practice have slipped, in all areas and in all forms. It’s not that people have gotten dumber — as Perlman notes, it’s that the Internet has sped up the transmission of information, and that print publications have laid off the copy editors (and many digital outlets never hired them in the first place). Over the years on this blog, I posted some of the most glaring errors I found, errors of typing and errors of fact, because I was astonished that they’d actually gotten published in places such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. But at some point, I just stopped. There were so many of them that it no longer seemed remarkable. If you see one cow while you’re driving through Pennsylvania, it’s notable. But when every hillock is festooned with them, everybody stops talking about it. That’s what’s happening with errors.

If the “incredible offer” made to me by The New Yorker to subscribe for “only” $64.99 a year doesn’t strike you as so incredible either, you can do what Michael Tsai recommends: Call them and pay only $39.99 a year.

I just got a “Rate Reduction Notice” from The New Yorker magazine. Evidently, as a “preferred subscriber,” I am entitled to “specially reduced rates” when I extend my subscription now. In this case, my special rate reduction would put me at $64.99 for the year — an incredible savings of $216.54 off the cover price!

My first question when I got this was: Why am I a preferred subscriber — are there subscribers who are unpreferred, and why am I better than they?

My other questions, of course, were: when is my subscription up, and what did I pay last time?

Here’s when my subscription lapses: August of next year. And here’s what I paid last time: $39.95.

Whether or not it pays to read The New Yorker, it certainly pays to read their promos carefully.

The Onion is moving its editorial offices from Chicago to New York. As they peel away for another city, much of the editorial staff is staying behind, and they’ve been in skirmishes with ownership about benefits, going so far as to try to find a new buyer. That’s all according to this piece in The Atlantic. I love the sharp-witted satire of The Onion — it’s one of the few sites I consistently repost on my Facebook page. I hope this move and change in staff doesn’t leave a lot of Onion fans crying.

Here’s what you can do about an issue that plagues many of us: how to keep up with The New Yorker.

The Tyranny of The New Yorker Magazine from Yuvi Zalkow on Vimeo.

Laurie Winer, on the demolition of the Los Angeles Times by Sam Zell. It’s a tragedy, writ daily.

Early this evening, just before running down to Moving Arts for the latest set of readings from my playwriting workshop, I finished Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Sense of an Ending. I was deeply struck by the book, which among other things concerns 40 years’ of misunderstandings by our narrator and his immediate circle. Things that happen during school days and immediately afterward are reinterpreted decades later with emotionally devastating results for the protagonist. Much of the book concerns emails back and forth between that protagonist and a former paramour. And tonight, before those readings, I received an email that showed just how deft and resonant the novel is.

The night before, I had gone to a reading by my friend, and also my grad-school professor, David Scott Milton. David’s new novel, Iron City, has just been published by another friend of mine, Christopher Meeks, who is also a former student of David’s.  I took my 9-year-old son Dietrich with me, and bought him a couple of books to keep him occupied and also distracted from what I imagined, judging from David’s previous work, would be a  reading from a novel with lots of sex and violence (an assumption proved right, as the detective in his novel haggles over money with a bar full of prostitutes. Dietrich asked me later what a prostitute is and I told him, “A person who has sex for money,” to which he replied, “Oh, that’s right.” No doubt I had already explained this to him. Or he’d heard it on TV. Or on the playground. Who knows? There’s no sense in saving anything for adulthood any more.) At the reading, I also saw one of my own former grad students. I was surprised to see her, but went up to her and embraced her and said hello. Immediately after the reading I looked for her, but couldn’t find her; evidently she had left right away, and somehow I knew it was because of me. When I got home, I emailed her:

Subject: Nice seeing you tonight.

Nice seeing you tonight, however briefly. I looked for you afterward — wanted to find out what you’ve been up to — but you had left.

And, as I said, tonight, just after finishing the Barnes novel about misunderstandings and misinterpretations, I got this reply:

Hi, Lee,

Thanks for writing this… I felt that you didn’t want to talk to me, and it saddened me.

Always too sensitive… the only good part about that is that I can write.

So she had seen something in me, something in my face, that she read this way. And, to some degree, she was right in seeing what she’d seen, but wrong in the interpretation. Here’s what she had seen cross my face:  Oh no, what’s her name? Yes, I was glad to see her — but I was mentally fishing for her name.  Once I had it, I was even more eager to see her, to prove that of course I remembered her and wanted to speak to her and now had her name, but she had gone. I remember her distinctly, of course, and believe I was her thesis advisor (or was that David?), I remember her plays and many other things, but for a moment I couldn’t remember her first name, and didn’t want to embarrass her or hurt her feelings, and she mistook that for something else, and that misapprehension actually did hurt her feelings.

David is 77. When I was his student, from 1988 to 1990, we would play racquetball; he was a better shot, and had a better serve; the only way I could win was to run him to ground, to wind him, because he was 28 years older than I. Now someone in his 20s could do this to me. After his reading, we talked briefly. I told him that I’d seen X. He said, “I was trying to remember her last name.” I said, “Really? I was trying to remember the first one.”

In Julian Barnes’ book, the protagonist is shaken to discover that not only was he not the person he believed he was early in life, he may not be the person he now believes himself to be. If character is changeable, and if our self-perceptions are wrong, how are we ever to understand each other, if not ourselves?

There are two phrases that mean nothing to almost anyone else, but which have stuck with me most of my life: “Glx sptzl glaah!” and “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

The former is the baby-speak cry of Sugar and Spike in the comics of the same name by Sheldon Mayer. When the babies talk, all the parents hear is gibberish. But we lucky readers are privy to the rather sophisticated notions and outlandish schemes of these toddlers. If you’re wondering if this was unacknowledged source material for “Rugrats,” I suspect so. The first season of “Rugrats,” before rampant commercial needs overwhelmed creative impulses, was often wonderful. “Sugar and Spike” was consistently wonderful; even as an adolescent reader of mainstream superhero comics who groaned when some relative would mistakenly give him a “Richie Rich” or, God forbid, “Archie” comic, I was devoted to “Sugar and Spike.” And soon, very soon, you too will be able to share the joy:  an archive edition will finally be released by DC Comics next month.

(By the way, I bought the issue above right off the stands in 1970. I was 8.)

“Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges that I first read almost 30 years ago. It concerns a massive conspiracy by intellectuals to plant the false idea that there is a secret world called Tlon, with a nation called Uqbar. Inserting this false information into encyclopedias and referencing it elsewhere helps to, in essence, create the actuality — just as the creation of fiction implants ideas in readers that sometimes become reality. (Who invented the satellite? Well, the notion came from Arthur C. Clarke.) The fact that this phrase has stuck with me for 30 years proves the point.

In other words, both phrases are about imaginary languages and secret meanings.

Which takes me to today’s Google Logo (shown above). I was thrilled beyond measure to see that it was an homage to Borges, born 112 years ago today. More about that Google doodle, and how  Borges’ thinking led to the creation of hypertext links, can be found via this hypertext link.

To some degree, we are all of us privy to secret languages all around us every day, even when spoken in languages we purport to speak:  the thrum of jargon and subtext and obscure reference. It’s amazing we can understand anything. To some degree, this is what all of Harold Pinter’s plays are about:  that we understand nothing, while understanding everything all too well.

This little photo on Facebook is generating some traffic. It’s a shot of books in the backpack of a U.S. soldier deployed in Afghanistan. We can’t make out all of them, but I applaud the thinking behind two of them:  Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (which must be required reading in every college literature or creative-writing class, because everyone I know in one of those has read it) and “The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.”

I would add “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut (and not, notably, “Slaughterhouse Five,” probably best left for reading when one isn’t actively deployed).

What would you add, if you were fighting a miserable war in a terrible faraway clime?