Joan Didion

In 50 years from now(or now for that matter), if a person were to read both Didion and Harrison, ignoring all of the hype and critical opinion surrounding Didion, and just read them both as objectively as possible, they would find Harrison a much better, more substancial writer, Imo... yes, her hatchet job is a little over the top, and jealousy may have been a factor, but there is also quite a lot of truth to her arguments, Imo... If one were to read her collection of essays "Off center", you would see that Harrison is a very brilliant writer, and that unlike Didiom, she is very 'common sense' oriented and down to earth... Didion give the impression, Imo, of being a lofty, out of touch, arrogant, snobbish, judgemental elitist, while Harrison gives the impression of being smart, witty, compassionate, articulate, reasonable and earthy... Harrison was a left wing feminist, but she was also very suspicious of dogma and ideology on either political extreme... she is certainly opinionated, but she tried to be as reasonable and fair as possible, at the same time... It's sad that she died in 2002...

what's ironic about Didion's article about Woody Allen, is that many of the same criticisms that she spouted about Woody Allen could be equally said to apply to her...

Maybe in the early days. She barely makes allusions to other writers and in the last ten years has stripped her prose of any bombast.

i dont hear much referentialism in her early days either?

Didion give the impression, Imo, of being a lofty, out of touch, arrogant, snobbish, judgemental elitist

This is about as wrong as wrong gets.

definitely didion's body of work should be dismissed because she's not "earthy" enough

i dont hear much referentialism in her early days either?

I mean, I complained upthread that she seems to have stopped reading novels in the late sixties.

earthy vs lofty is one of the lamest binaries ever.

I agree with you, jd.

I do not dislike Didion but found Harrison more impressive. But there aren't many Harrison readers here?

sounds like my politics are closer to harrison's than didion's (to the extent that i can make out didion's commitments) but i don't ever need to read anything else harrison wrote

pwn didion

for those not familiar with Harrison, here is a bit of info about her... I wish it was possible to post more of her essays, but they don't seem to be avaliable over the internet at this time, unfortunatly...

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-lierary-criticism/harrison-barbara-grizzuti

It is true that she does seem to have a propensity to sort of "attack" the rich and famous and powerful... She also wrote hatchet jobs on Jane Fonda, Billy Graham, Oprah Winfrey etc... yet, perhaps the rich and famous and powerful deserve to be critisized...

sorry, there was a misspelling in the last post:

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/harrison-barbara-grizzuti

as literary hatchet jobs go, i don't think it's a patch on renata adler's 'the perils of pauline.'

hey hurting did you ever find that quote about the 50s generation? if it's the one i'm thinking of, it's actually from the white album:

"we were the generation called 'silent,' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the era's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. we were silent because the exhiliration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate."

or perhaps that's not the quote you were thinking of at all. still a good one, though.

have been re-reading all the pre magical thinking non-fiction this week as collected in that big everyman's omnibus that came out a few years back and this thread has been very interesting to read through. while i am probably more a horseshoe/aero partisan than a pinfoxian skeptic, i wonder if pinefox ever did bother with the later nonfiction. she nevers loses her essential didion-ness, but the early essays (which i revere for reasons as much personal as literary) do seem (as others here have said) as much about working out her own shit (paralyzing fear leading to inaction) at a time when to-the-barricades action was the "proper" response, coupled with a natural skepticism. from salvador on, there's still that deep fatalism, but with a newer (and less solipsistic?) (not using solipsism as a neg here, btw) view that social justice might not totally be an incompatible mug's game for a life lived in a constant state of existential dread and the we're-all-gonna-die search for a point that might not (probably won't) be there.

I think that is the quote I was thinking of, unless she expressed the same idea elsewhere.

have been re-reading all the pre magical thinking non-fiction this week as collected in that big everyman's omnibus

same here, inspired by this thread

I found myself annoyed as I read Slouching Through Bethlehem by a few passages that use understatement to shore up savage judgments, but the overall impression is of a very young person who through scary intelligence and self-discipline learned to see and write like someone older and wiser. One of the cool things about that omnibus is watching her grow into that person. By Salvador, which I'm reading now, she seems fully in command of her powers and more aware and accepting of her weaknesses, and she makes a terrifying witness.

Am I an outlier for preferring the After Henry-Miami-Political Fictions phase of her career? I understand that stylistically she needed to sort herself out in STB and The White Album.

no, i dont think it makes you an outlier. she certainly got *better* as a writer, thinker, reporter. i think stb/wa, aside and/or plus their merits as writing, have also become her canonical books because they're "documents of the 60s/70s" or whatever, and i'm not sure the 80s/90s have the same hold (yet!) on the public imagination. plus for certain people (like me) who fancy themselves writers while also trying to mentally sort themselves out, then stb/wa have a certain special hold.

As a recorder of the moods, inchoate longings, and designs of a period, she sounded like no one else, but I flip through STB and TWHA when I want what I look for in the later volumes: affectless asides about the Doors, the Reagans, Hollywood, etc. At the beginning she chose, in my view, subjects as correlatives for her confusion.

haha yeah i cant imagine someone of didion's intelligence choosing to hang out at a doors session except to find the zero point of lassitude and futility of that era.

the first thing i ever read by didion was the 3-4 paragraphs about the doors session in 'the white album,' taken out of context and put in a cheap-o book of rock articles, where it read kind of funnily in between articles about sabbath's first tour and james brown's legal problems.

to the person who mentioned Ellen Willis in the above thread... thanks! I just finished reading her latest collection of essays and reviews about Rock music, and loved the book... I was vaguely aware of who Willis was, and had read some a little of her writing, but being reminded of her compelled me to buy the latest collection... so thanks again! Sadly, Willis died in 2006...

BZ has all the best lines in Play It As It Lays: "You're not exactly a shot of meth tonight anyway."

I got A Book of Common Prayer for $3 in the Borders liquidation sale (I could see this sentence in a Didion essay). How does it compare with the other novels?

It's remarkably disappointing and mediocre.

hey team didion: can anyone point me in the direction of a all-of-a-sudden-while-at-my-folks-place-for-the-holidays-very-relevant JD quote i'm looking for? there's something - it coulda been in the last one - that she said about using the best plates, and how everyday is the day you should use the best plates. is this ringing any bells? she may have the edge over me in having phrased this well.

thank you in advance from me and my plate hoarding family

― schlump, Saturday, 25 December 2010 17:21 (9 months ago) Bookmark

just for anyone else for whom this has very occasionally been frustrating:

Didion once said she believed in using the good silver every day, because "every day is all there is."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09donadio.html?pagewanted=all

The NYT review of Blue Nights.

http://www.theawl.com/2011/10/the-cordial-enmity-of-joan-didion-and-pauline-kael

New York Review of Books weighs in. I only read the first page of the review, I've got the book but haven't gotten to it yet - it sounds incredible.

this is a very terrifying, painful book.

my sister is going to hear her read (tonight?) in DC! i am afraid to read this book, guys.

you should be! staring contest with the abyss imo.

i read the year of magical thinking five years ago, and i'll probably grab this one later today

this might be a trivial observation, but when "the year of magical thinking" came out, i remember realizing that the cover spelled out a coded "JOHN," made out of highlighted letters in Didion's name and the book's title. it felt poignant and primal and almost incantory. when i saw this book had a similar cover, i looked and saw that there were highlighted letters again: this time they just spell out "NO."

so basically this book has made me weep and i literally haven't opened it yet.

so my sister says the new book is not that good, but also, as a data point on the whole is joan didion a mean girl question upthread, my sister said she was incredibly lovely and kind at this reading she went to.

like, personally, to my sister and others attending.

aww. i am going to the nypl thing in a week or so, psyched.
i saw this book today in a store, i'd kinda planned to wait til the reading to pick it up (if they even do that at nypl? or they loan it you?, or?) but am tempted to try to grab it first.

the JOHN/NO thing is deliberate & v neat imo, there's a story in some article somewhere about the designer mentioning it to JD, who'd missed it

The recent KCRW Bookworm interview with Didion is worth a listen.

silverblatttttttttttttttt

caitlin flanagan is one of the larger reasons i no longer subscribe to the atlantic (and she definitely shouldn't be accusing anyone of being a 'tired espouser of the most doctrinaire . . . political opinions'), but:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/the-autumn-of-joan-didion/8851/?single_page=true

To find the details that these women loved so well that they remembered them verbatim, he would have had to pass over most of Joan Didion’s extensive nonfiction body of work and go back to the beginning, to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968, and to The White Album, in 1979. If you love Joan Didion so much that she fundamentally changed the way you think—and there are many who feel this way—the books that did this to you are those two and no others.

one need not read past this nonsense claim, really

yeah. i read that, because the awl linked to it, taking up the criticism of didion and dunne as parents in particular. i admit it's less horrible than other things caitlin flanagan has written and yet.

maud newton's comments on the awl's link to it seem p much otm to me:

Maud Newton (#600)

Flanagan writes about Didion's parenting as though Didion herself doesn't see any problem with her parenting. In fact, her self-flagellation is the most intense and unsettling thing about Blue Nights, which for my money is a much more powerful piece of writing than The Year of Magical Thinking.

And the bit about the young Didion's anxious behavior at a dinner party and inappropriate wearing of a Chanel suit says far more about Flanagan and her own mother, it seems to me, than it does about Didion.

Maud Newton (#600)

@deepomega I'm not saying Didion is beyond reproach, nor do I think Didion herself would argue that she is. Nevertheless, Flanagan's tone and approach rankle me, as they almost always do.

re: flanagan's tone, that lady has never met an adverb modifying an adjective she didn't like. "viciously well-read" "hysterically sycophantic" she lays it on a little thick.

xp
lol <3 aero

horseshoe I tried to read emma by jane austen

oh no did you hate it?

I was talking about how much it sucked to a friend, I kept mentioning it, day after day, then she told me clueless was based off of it so I can't hate it that much

I was flying for about 40 hours total and I had ulysses, emma and a brautigan book I had read already, but then I lost ulysses on one leg so I was stuck w/ emma or real steel starring hugh jackman

also, that caitlin flanagan article. i mean, she's not wrong about the experience of reading didion as a woman, exactly, but i'm not comfortable with her take on what being a woman is. and this is a pretty fucking limited account of Didion's genius imo: "Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has." that article feels like it's participating in the same essentialist romanticization of womanhood that flanagan's father was when he said, "there's something weird going on with joan didion and women," except i guess maybe flanagan takes women more seriously than her father did. maybe.

clueless is the most austenian austen adaptation also i hate u >:[

no no I like clueless