Dennis Kucinich Speaks At Gore Vidal Memorial Service--Really.

The oddest paragraphs in today’s newspapers–or the most amusing–were found in the article about the memorial service for Gore Vidal.

But the oddest speaker at the event, and probably the one Mr. Vidal would have relished most, was an impassioned Dennis J. Kucinich, the congressman from Ohio and two-time presidential candidate, who in tribute to Mr. Vidal’s verbal gifts, read a long and somewhat mystifying passage from Act IV of Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”: “Language is a perpetual Orphic song/ Which rules with daedal harmony a throng/Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.”

He also recalled that he first met Mr. Vidal in March 2003, when he was contemplating a run for the presidency, and asked for advice. “You’ve got to do something about your hair,” Mr. Vidal told him. “It’s dreadful. I can’t bear to look at it.”