Joan Didion

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I thought *play as it lays* was very poor, probably the worst Didion I've read.

Ha, well, yes, I think we're going to want to shake hands and agree that men of society are often found to differ in their tastes - I consider Play It As It Lays one of the definitive works of modern fiction, on par with any of the finest novels of the 20th century

yeah, nothing beats play it as it lays for me -- i read part of it years ago and didn't get it and finally went through the whole thing in one sitting during a horrible, much-delayed, overnight flight a few months ago and it left me feeling a bit like i'd just witnessed a murder or something.

among other things, it's maybe the best description of what it's like to be clinically depressed that i've ever read.

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mmm pizza

whoa that book-bench thing is sick as hell! i hate like... holding pages... down...

man you gotta respect the pinefox & I am saying this from the heart. he knows he does not dig Joan Didion, but he continues to engage her. this is what actually being into literature/writing is about imo, instead of the hedonism that seems most prevalent to me, the view of reading as pure pleasure-seeking. I don't think there's anything at all wrong with reading what you love (except insofar as Catholicism impels me to condemn any pleasure-seeking to some extent) but I think really engaging stuff that puts you off is the mark of an actual lover of words so my hat is off to the pinefox.

yeah pinefox is one of the best

that is not pizza, surely

i think it is a pancake, is there a thread where americans laugh at the british idea of what constitutes a pancake yet

It looks like a crepe!

crepe is just french for pancake imo

crepe w/ lemon + sugar for sure

Yes, it is a pancake, which I think is possibly identical to the French crepe with lemon and sugar.

I don't dislike the US version of pancake but on balance I think I prefer ours (or the French). But I am now finding it hard to remember just what the US version is like. One way that I don't agree with the Americans is that they eat pancakes with meat; I think pancakes should be sweet.

I am very surprised and touched by those who have complimented me on my reading as a result of my pancake image.

just wanna say how awesome it is that pinefox, when confronted with people complimenting him on his pizza when he is actually clearly eating a crepe, continues to engage with them. doesn't just say, what kind of pizza has lemon on it.

a little lemon is actually great on pizza

just gonna wait for this thread to become a five thousand post trainwreck in response to that, pretty sure ILX is built on pizza fascism

"cheese and lemon actually go together really well. like those snacks you'd have at parties as a child; a little hunk of cheese and a little cube of lemon on a cocktail stick"

We could ask our friend Joan.

I am writing this because I want to say that there are many flavours of pizza. I have experienced several of them, and while this is not without its interest, it is not what I wish to express here. I wish to say that a little lemon can be acceptable on a pizza. I discovered this at a pizza restaurant in San Francisco. This may not seem important, but it has continued to seem important to me. I have been trying to understand why this should be so for the last twenty-two years, but I am not sure that I am any closer to the answer.

You made that up.

actually will be kinda bummed if interesting author discussion gets tabled for jokes

I think pastiche is a form of understanding.

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stick it

actually will be kinda bummed if interesting author discussion gets tabled for jokes

― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, March 26, 2011 5:02 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Just got another Didion book in the mail actually. "The Book of Common Prayer." Probably won't be able to get to it for a few months though.

Give it a couple of decades.

I am writing this because I want to say that there are many flavours of pizza...

I just want to say how awesome this parody was, esp "a pizza restaurant in San Francisco".

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/oct/11/theyll-take-manhattan-3/

I found this rather brutal attack on Didion to be interesting and persuasive, even though I still mildly enjoy some of Didion's writing... I absolutly LOVE Harrison's writing since discovering this essay...

http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

yeah thats talked abt upthread iirc

there's a bit of unfairness and misreading inherent in any hatchet job. didion herself once wrote a piece on woody allen's 'manhattan' that was just as unfair as the harrison piece. that essay is good at ridiculing didion's writing style and making fun of her as a person in a quasi-witty way (i guess -- i didn't actually find it funny), viz a viz:

Didion is like a latter-day Scarlett O'Hara: she will think about whatever it is she thinks about tomorrow when she dabbles her toes in her pool, all the while calling attention beguilingly to the hairshirt she has fashioned for herself . . . which may explain why so many male critics find her adorable.

but when i read something that drenched in self-regard, i feel like i'm learning more about the writer than the subject.

Can anyone find me a quote from Slouching? I can't find my copy. I think it's toward the beginning of the title essay and the basic thrust is that the pre-hippie generation was conformist and career-minded not because they were blindly accepting but because they were skeptical about alternatives.

but when i read something that drenched in self-regard

kind of describes the Lamp posting style tho no

^^^see we can do this all day

I have to say I enjoyed reading both Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Although I really didn't like how she wrote about Joan Baez in "Where the Kissing Never Stops". I just thought that was too much smoke up the ass.

I loved Run, River and Salvador but didn't care for Play It As It Lays at all-BLEHK. Haven't read more Didion.

When I compare Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's "Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses" and "Italian Days" to anything Didion wrote...I favor Harrison by far.

^^^see we can do this all day

well i certainly believe that you have nothing better to do, sure

fifty years from now Harrison is a name cloaked in absolute, total obscurity, remembered by no-one save her direct descendants, while people will still be reading Joan Didion for her tremendous sentences & unimpeachable tone and gift for pacing, rhythm...in short, her style

meet me here in fifty years and pay me if you want any action on this proposition

*looks at joan didion through smoke* xp

its mostly lol that u have a dogg in this fite, i mean since when can u read books?

idk i didnt think harrison's essay was particularly self-regarding (or funny?) & did a decent job sketching didion's empty-headed snobbery. i suppose she takes herself (or really her politics) quite seriously, & i can see mistaking that kind of self-seriousness for arrogance.

Harrison raises some pretty sharp and on-point criticisms of Didion there, to the point that I don't know if I will be able to experience Didion the same way next time I read her. At the same time, I think she makes her case a little too forcefully though and it weakens the argument.

idk i didnt think harrison's essay was particularly self-regarding (or funny?) & did a decent job sketching didion's empty-headed snobbery. i suppose she takes herself (or really her politics) quite seriously, & i can see mistaking that kind of self-seriousness for arrogance.

― neti pot, kombucha, how to die alone (Lamp), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 6:16 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wait who's clowning who about reading books

i can see how people read didion's self-conscious distance as "empty-headed snobbery" but to me it just reads as a manifestation of her own insecurity and depression

d-40 if i bow my head in defeat now, will you just stop posting on this subboard?

i think she also expresses that pretty plainly

i kind of imagine her as the narrator of 'peoples parties'

i can see how people read didion's self-conscious distance as "empty-headed snobbery" but to me it just reads as a manifestation of her own insecurity and depression

― ☂ (max), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 2:22 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah i think it's this and her version of ethics, too. i think i said so upthread somewhere.

i mean kind of nakedly so, actually. the clinical quality of her writing can seem cold and condescending but i think its also about being genuinely afraid of investing herself more in... politics, say. or whatever.

ive only read the white album and slouching toward bethlehem though.

i kind of imagine her as the narrator of 'peoples parties'

― arachno-misogynist (D-40), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 2:24 AM (54 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yes, totally, she and joni are both of the same school of relating (slash not relating) to people

especially in the 60s so many of her peers were doing some version of what she does in slouching toward bethlehem, reporting on real people, but doing it in a way that trampled the boundaries between the journalist and the subject; the journalist got to pretend to be in the subjects head in sort of an invasive, exaggerated way. she never really does that, and i think her self-consciousness is about announcing her presence in the story and preserving her subjects' stories as separate and their own. it reads very scrupulous to me.

it reminds me of how "shy" can very easily come across as "intimidating." though ill admit that sometimes the insecurity/distance is indistinguishable from snobbery/condescension

xp yes, totally.

i think she's hyper-aware of the "problem" of a journalist's detachment from her subjects and she's really worried about the condescension inherent in romanticizing them (compare her to Capote on this, for example). She often strikes me as really sympathetic to those she writes about, especially when they're women, for example in "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" (I love that essay) and the one about Joan Baez. But it's an intellectualized, detached sympathy for sure: I think that that's in part a function of her personality (she's often talked about her shyness and how hard calling up people for interviews is for her) and in part an ethical decision. again, compare "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" to In Cold Blood on this.

-- horseshoe (horseshoe), Sunday, 12 November 2006 19:06 (11 months ago) Link

fucking capote

well said! i agree!