Joan Didion

I’m rambling on here but Joan Didion (and a lot of other authors from that mid-late 20th century era) offer a sense of literary time travel. If you’re interested in how some adults in that era lived and thought and acted, this is a social window into a world that we might only understand through generalized history, or statistics, etc. Yes, the dead past.

It's been many years since I read it, but Year wasn't entombed in its narcissism like so much self-help and ten-steps-to-happiness guides with which Americans are obsessed. Circling around the subject -- her daughter -- is damn effective in the same way that drawing circles around a letter grade makes it stand out.

i don’t remember blue nights well enough to argue effectively in its favor but like… we are mysteries to each other

Blue Nights may be the toughest read. It’s been a while for me but I remember it more as a memoir about aging towards the end.

All I remember are the references to fried chicken.

some writers have this tone and rhythm that's intoxicating, whenever I read her I would find myself thinking sentences that were derivative of her

I get that way with some rappers, MF DOOM or Sean Price or Migos, there's something addictive about the cadence that gets stuck in my head

so I dunno I'll let the better read people hash our what it all meant but she had a Distinctive Thing, which how many people who write ever have?

whether or not she was a good person or w/e that cool detached style and how observational she was was something that I was happy to visit on occasion

That strikes me as quite a misguided take.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, December 24

OTM... though it does say a lot about the taker. I read the whole thing and her commitment to the bit is impressive.

Didion was quite unusual as a writer in being more popular at the end of her life than ever before. Though partly I think the popularity was shallow, based on an idea of her, from people who had seen a programme about her but not read much.

― the pinefox, Friday, December 24, 2021

the canonization of a writer's writer in the Instagram era has always been... weird. but there are legit possibly more people now who know her as the Smart Grief Lady than remaining cargo cultists wearing through their third copy of The White Album.

corollary: on today's evidence via social, Didion UC Riverside 1975 is the new DFW Kenyon 2005

Lots of funnies here.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/23/joan-didion-in-her-own-words-23-of-the-best-quotes

there's that UC Riverside

“the grave’s a fine and lovely place, but none I think do there embrace”
- Joan Didion

i was so annoyed when a few years ago they published a collection of shitty writers’ essays about leaving new york and actually called it “goodbye to all that”

Also the title of a fine memoir of WWI by Robert Graves.

a fine memoir of WWI by Robert Graves which I've read twice and is sitting on my shelf right now.

joan didion fucking ruled, i’m sorry: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/10/11/theyll-take-manhattan-3/

but why him? why not pick on someone her own size? (what about him provoked her?) secrets of the dead ... (why I fear losing my mother)

Various people have linked to, quoted or cited this essay: 'Joan Didion: Only Disconnect' by Barbara Grizzutti Harrison. I have only just read it. My sense is that it was really a review of THE WHITE ALBUM, which also (LRB-style) took in the rest of the oeuvre to that point.

As such, it does *not* reliably stand as a commentary on Didion's work *after* 1979 - some of which might be a quite different matter.

As a commentary on Didion's work *up to* 1979, I think it's harsh, sometimes off-target, sometimes tonally misguided -- yet also partially accurate; suggestive; perceptive.

I think Harrison is right to suspect that Didion, in this work, isn't such a great stylist. More importantly, I think she's right to say that Didion's emphasis is repeatedly 'conservative' in being disdainful about anything leftist, progressive or inclined to collective action to improve the world. This attitude is very recognisable across conservative writing. As Twitter poster Elvis Bunuelo (whose tweet encouraged me to read the essay) commented: Didion was an interesting reactionary writer, especially interesting because people rarely pointed out that she was reactionary. Perhaps that's overstatement. I still think the later Didion might be significantly different from the earlier. But _as a statement about the earlier work_, I think it's partially accurate.

So, I don't wholly buy Harrison's critique, but it also contains far too much accurate material to be merely dismissed.

It remains the case that one of the best things ever written on Didion was by Martin Amis. But Amis's repute is now so bad that people, perhaps understandably, won't be keen to believe that.

the title essay in slouching towards bethlehem has always been my least favorite part of it

the white album seems more tuned to ‘70s apocalyptic dread than any particularly reactionary philosophy but i am relying on memory here

surely not giving a woody allen stan the satisfaction of a detailed reply is not joan didion bullying a reader

i've seen a lot of people assert that didion was reactionary, not just in her skepticism toward leftists but in general. but i don't really see much evidence of that in her work. it's certainly odd and upsetting that she not only voted for goldwater but seems to have continued to admire him; she mentions that in the introduction to political fictions. but it also seems like a weird anomaly in her life: nothing in any of those later political essays strikes me as being written from a conservative perspective, quite the opposite really. and yeah, she wrote for national review in the early 60s, but so did garry wills. i don't think liking john wayne movies necessarily means much. (i like a few of them myself.) that said, i can also completely understand why ppl would be put off by the goldwater thing. i read an interview with renata adler once where she was gushing about her friendship with henry kissinger and i've always been a little put off reading her work by that.

srsly where's the evidence she was conservative or even wrote as a disaffected or disillusioned conservative? She doesn't much like Bill Clinton, but she limits the contempt to a paragraph in Political Fictions in an essay perfectly limning what Tim Russert's Washington DC lookd lik.

My own sense that Didion was, in some ways, at some times, somewhat conservative -- has nothing to do with John Wayne (whom I love), nor Bill Clinton, not even Barry Goldwater (though that does sound very relevant).

Rather, it's about the conservative tendency in her earlier writing (ie: mainly in STB and TWA) which is, as I suggested just above, sceptical of progress, social change, ideals, radicalism, you name it. Her attack on feminism is one, extreme example of this, but even if you took that away as an anomaly, the mood would inhere. Barbara Harrison cites case after case of it. What Harrison helped me to remember is how Didion tends to displace and dismiss political projects and progressive goals in favour or personal or private life, or sheer contingency that can't (as radicals would like) be planned or improved, or existential void -- and so on.

These claims risk becoming general and thus unsustainable, but as I say, Harrison cites numerous specific examples, and it does recall my own experience of reading that period of Didion.

However, I also sense that the later political journalism (which people here have mentioned several times) is rather different. I wonder if one would really need to say that there were different eras of Didion, and it wasn't all just one thing.

it's as if we want to justify disliking her

it's okay if y'all do!

Skeptical of humankind's capacity for progress more so than the goals, etc.

which makes her more liberal than the average ILXer

whaaat? that distinction has absolutely no meaning in application xp. and that's just ridiculous, alfred. i doubt anyone here would have voted for barry goldwater.

in any case, the pinefox and barbara harrison are clearly otm.

it's as if we want to justify disliking her

it's okay if y'all do!

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 30 December 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Be easy to just dislike her with no reasons huh?

which makes her more liberal than the average ILXer

I'm saying the average ILXer sees no capacity for progress.

Be easy to just dislike her with no reasons huh?

― xyzzzz__

like me and liver!

it's okay if y'all do!

I had my tongue in cheek when I made the remark about disliking her; apologies if it didn't come off.

This is the Harrison piece, right? https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

Reading her post-1980 material collected in After Henry and Political Fictions, I suspect Ronald Reagan broke her brain, like Reagan did for a lot of elites. Even old-time socialists like Irving Howe, who'd spent a lifetime anticipating a conservative reaction, wrote mid-decade about underestimating its strength.

pinefox has been terrific, especially the last post

her articles at https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/joan-didion/ are a good window on her real-time reactions to Reagan and subsequent administrations ...
I think as she got older her knowledge of US politics and policy deepened and she dropped the small-c contrarianism that weakens some of her early essays

Thanks for that link. (I think her conservatism might have started out like that of The Village Green Preservation Society (as an existential reaction to chaos and disorder and a desire to preserve what she valued and cherished) and that conservatism might connote something different now that there is the possibility of association with the evolving establishment reaction to the far right in the U.S. and in Europe, as well as the xenophobia, racism, and fear. I think maybe she was more forgiving as she got older. The "Oh, wow." made me think of defensive tactics adopted my little old ladies in urban settings, but she was much younger then.)

(I don't think she was hostile or fearful, but rather skeptical and pessimistic and had the inclinations of a reporter.)

(Inadequately researched conjectures regarding Allen and conservatism ...

Allen regretted that he didn't go to college. Didion regretted that she was not accepted by the college of her choice and eventually took it into perspective. [1]

Didion moved to Manhattan as an adult and was an outsider to the East Coast intellectual establishment. Allen had the advantage of having grown up there and was naturally familiar with the East Coast elite's cultural references. Both were not above namedropping. They addressed overlapping audiences from different temperaments.

Both valued merit and bought into meritocracy, which has not survived globalization and the global concentration of wealth and power. Economic insecurity has not provided a sufficient cause to unify the left, which remains fractured for want of unifying beliefs other than concerns about livelihood and the social contract that in themselves do not seem sufficient. I don't think anyone knows the answer to this yet.)

[1] https://wowwritingworkshop.com/on-being-unchosen-by-the-college-of-ones-choice/

(Conjecture: Didion objected to, or found distasteful, Allen's treatment of his female characters and roles but had not yet worked out her own stance on feminism.)

people always ignore or are rude about the novels which I always feel are the best things she did

I consider her a novelist foremost. she's better known for her nonfiction because it's easier to treat. the novels are slippery and masterful examples of the form; with the exception of the last one, each is better than its predecessor. democracy is one of the great books of the 20c.

democracy's the one i haven't read, guess i'm doing that this year

... as the granddaughter of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house in my own particular Welbeck Street I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress, and ego may be a similar accommodation. A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure, and so, for all I know, is technique.

dope

"birds exploded in the air"

Still haunts me

Basically in agreement with the thread consensus here on her earlier work having some reactionary and conservative impulses in it but it's not mentioned enough how much her later writing goes totally against that - imagine any conservative writer covering the Central Park Five the way she did.

Much like with my Midwestern cousin who lives in Santa Monica, I attribute at least some of the "conservativism" to where Joan lived (and, in her case, when).

Ross Douthat's column in the NY Times today is about the conservative (small-c) side of Didion, and argues that the early stuff is the best:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/joan-didion-conservative.html

Columns very much in character.

Much like with my Midwestern cousin who lives in Santa Monica, I attribute at least some of the "conservativism" to where Joan lived (and, in her case, when).

― Max Hamburgers (Eric H.), Wednesday, January 5, 2022 4:15 PM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

like 80% of this country has always been and will always be small-c conservative, we're a settler colonial state. light lol at the impulse to handwave it though, like she's a beloved aunt. i guarantee joan didion didn't care anything about you and i or anyone with less power than a school board member.

i didn't mean to pick on you, eric, sorry. i should just avoid this thread tbh.

If revering Didion despite (or, really, outside of) politics is cause for me to be picked on, pick away.

One more essay on the inadequacies of Didion.

The result of Lakewood’s economic collapse, according to Didion, was a generation of youth with no prospects whose blind rage, pent up and convected, exploded into the shameful spectacle of the Spur Posse, a vile pack of Lakewood High troglodytes who achieved nationwide notoriety for their sexual abuse of girls as young as ten, getting in fights, dealing drugs, committing burglaries, setting off a pipe bomb on someone’s front porch, etc. (and later, angling to get paid to tell their ugly tales on ugly television shows like “NightTalk with Jane Whitney” and “Jerry Springer.”)

“Trouble in Lakewood” is about ten thousand times better than “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”—better researched and thought out, better observed and better written. The latter piece draws a frankly kind of unbelievable portrait of dumb, unwashed hippies who fed acid to their five-year-old kid and spent the whole day eight miles high, responding to most of the author’s questions with “Wow.” God knows how Didion found people quite as messed-up as these. I am a Seventies kid myself and I am here to tell you that people got high a lot back then, but I never even heard of anyone getting as wasted as Didion’s hippies do, outside of underground comix. It’s incredible that all of them didn’t just die in a big heap from all that acid and meth… okay, one of them lands in the hospital with pneumonia.

In any case both essays, written thirty years apart, are getting at roughly the same thing, namely that the American Dream is a myth and a fraud because the tough pioneer spirit that animated Didion’s own ancestors, and also John Wayne, is dead; and now these gross, unworthy new people, such as hippies and illiterate mall-shopping Lakewood matrons, deserve what they get—more or less.

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show. It is the calf-bound, gilt-edged bible of neoliberal meritocracy. The weirdest thing about it is that this dyed-in-the-wool conservative woman (she started her career at the National Review) somehow became the irreproachable darling of New York media and stayed that way for decades, all on the strength of a dry, self-regarding prose style and a “glamor shot” with a Corvette. The toast of Broadway and the face of Céline, decorated by Barack Obama himself, Didion is the mascot of the 20th century’s ruling class (both “liberal” and “conservative”)—that is, people who “went to a good school” and know how to ski and what kind of wine to order, and thus believe themselves entitled to be in charge of your life and mine, and just… planet Earth. Almost every college-educated person in the United States d’un certain âge (that’s the kind of phrase we liked to use) is to some degree responsible for this, insofar as we accepted it—or did, maybe, until 2016, when the failures of the “meritocracy” finally came home to roost. Or not roost, rather, so much as attack like we were Tippi Hedren.

https://popula.com/2018/10/15/the-center-held-just-fine/

“Trouble in Lakewood” is about ten thousand times better than “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

A child wrote this sentence.

i mean we all have our icons. i've spent a lot of time lately reevaluating mine, which becomes oversharing and/or overstepping too easily for me.

xp and that graph expresses it well. behind all of the well-observed detail is, frankly, a poor understanding of what motivates and animates people, beyond the quest for power. also, no offense to brad, but the quote above about the hills being a manifestations of stress is garbage imo, really reveals a fundamental lack of interest in what animates the earth beyond it being, again, a reflection of ms. didion's own anxiety.

xp ok, i will definitely pick on that shitty aristocratic myopic little style nitpick sniffing attitude, fuck that shit lol

wow from mild to wild in one post. need to bow out of posting here obv, but i appreciate seeing critiques posted itt.