Gore 10, Solomon 0

Almost every Sunday Deborah Solomon conducts interviews with a variety of people, in reputation large and small, in the New York Times Magazine. Limited to one page they rarely have much depth and are usually only there because, like a dog intimately licking itself, they can be. I wish I knew how to attach stuff in a blog because Ms. Solomon has an interview with Gore Vidal in today’s issue and it’s worth anybody’s while to make the effort to read it.

Mr. Vidal toys with Ms. Solomon like the big, curmudgeonly cat he is (the interview is titled, perhaps deliberately, “Literary Lion”) and he not-so-gently nips her perky backside, drawing blood in a fairly casual way. You’ve got to hand it to her, though, because he not only takes her down a peg, he undercuts her entire ladder, but she soldiers on despite his distaste and he is, obviously, only putting up with the entire process because he has a new book coming out this week. Since her column concludes with “Interview conducted, condensed and edited by…” her sense of humor has to be terrific or, conversely, she only glimpses the forest for the trees and is as stupid as a box of (blonde) hair.