Heather Nielsen

A lot of people have

commented that his novel 1876 about the disputed election there really anticipated the way in which the 2000 election would be perceived and, you know, the disputed election there.

But I think also very much now in 2020, a lot of people will say, what would Gore Vidal have thought about

What would he have thought?

If he hadn't already died, he would have died of apoplexia, I think.

Because it's interesting, and people have quoted the things that he used to say about George W. Bush and then said, look at these same terms, the ways in which Donald Trump, you know, George W. Bush looks so reasonable and intelligent and articulate by comparison.

Yes.

Not very often, to be honest.

Most of the reading I do is more or less directly related to teachings.

But one of the things I did read which is not related to teaching earlier this year was a new novel by the American writer Jay Parini.

who was a protege of the late Gore Vidal's.

And Perini is a very prolific writer in a lot of different genres.

And if Australian listeners are familiar at all with his name, it's probably because of the film called The Last Station, based on the last days of

Tolstoy's Life, which starred Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren.

That film was based on Perrini's novel.

That's really how he kind of got famous to a certain extent in the United States.

But he does a lot of biographical stuff and he experiments with genres, which of course is something we're going to be talking about in relation to Homeland Elegies as well.

So something I've been thinking about is this

experimental kind of blending of memoir and fiction and the essay and so on.

And so this new novel by Jay Perini called Borges and Me is about his own experience with the famous Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges when Perini himself was a student in the 1970s and trying to avoid being drafted