Joan Didion

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.

One more essay on the inadequacies of Didion.

i got mad at this essay at the time because maria bustillos fucking sucks

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.

huh i thought it a well-poised analogy about thought vs. style but ok be an asshole

mute joan didion on twitter and fucking spare us

you've already decided how you feel about her and you're contorting her work to your decision, which is fine, we all do it, but it's like i can't even fucking appreciate how democracy is written

forgive me if i especially don't take the bustillos takedown seriously if it's published on bitcoin-powered content farm

fuck, god, who cares, i'll think again before posting itt

I'm not sure I want to stop admiring really good sentences because of shortcomings in the politics of the people who wrote the sentences.

Like, it never occurred to me to view Joan Didion as a paragon of how to live or how to be or what to believe about stuff. She was a person who sold sentences. They were really good sentences. I like good sentences, and I had money, so I bought them. I have never needed to agree or disagree with her about anything. I gave her some money and she gave me some words. Win-win.

Similarly John Lennon is a person who sold noises. I like a lot of his noises, so I bought them. That doesn't imply endorsement of everything he thought and did and was. It's a transaction and we both came out all right as a result of that transaction. He got money and I got noises.

ms. didion

Joan if you're feelin' nasty

That kind of aristocratically cavalier carriage has no place in a future world that will regard Didion as a minstrel.

i would question the contention that a pov appreciating an analogy didion made is the one that's unwelcome in this thread.

also curious who "us" is and what exactly they should be spared of, and why.

xp what makes really good sentences? what are the limits of style? when can function be criticized if form is so apparently valuable?

as far as value goes, this is very revealing imo:

Like, it never occurred to me to view Joan Didion as a paragon of how to live or how to be or what to believe about stuff. She was a person who sold sentences. They were really good sentences. I like good sentences, and I had money, so I bought them. I have never needed to agree or disagree with her about anything. I gave her some money and she gave me some words. Win-win.

xp lol to alfred

I'm not sure I want to stop admiring really good sentences because of shortcomings in the politics of the people who wrote the sentences.

see also: Alfred, on Scalia

If I ever expressed admiration for that poisonous fuckwit's prose, I must've been two gin and tonics in.

You asked the bartender for another jiggery pokery.

(It sounds like her essays and other writings are due for rereading (with an open mind outside labels).)

ok, for one thing, i was quoting from one of her novels, democracy, which i just started reading, which in its second chapter immediately scales back to reveal the author (identified as joan didion but as everyone knows all postmodern author reveals are extremely suspect) and all of the novels she didn't write about the characters (and their extensive family histories) to clarify what the novel is/has been reduced to instead. part of this involved analyzing her own process, and how the novel was suggesting itself through environments and images more than people (very similar to how a book of common prayer begins with the literal immateriality of the landscape it takes place in). one may balk at the very device, i get it, but she is not mistaking landmasses for stress, ffs, she is deliberately connecting them to the process of writing the novel, which, idk, doesn't evince a lack of interest at all to me (and it feels disingenuous to me to suggest didion wasn't interested in this, but you seem to know her motivations better than i do), the metaphor and the meaning are shoring each other up. i think she was particularly good at doing this without ever getting overwrought or obvious about it, and that's why many of her sentences are good

again there's the freeway scene in play it as it lays and so much is going on just in the description of driving in california that refracts through the particular nervous breakdown her character is going through. it's not minimalism but it's the kind of restraint that speaks volumes. you can call this a lack of content i guess or one of her characteristic instances of not knowing what anyone is thinking or feeling ever but i don't think that's the case

didion and i don't align politically at all but neither do i with thomas mann so it's just a meaningless distinction. good writing is a product of curiosity breaking through into understanding. in books like miami she does that. in certain essays she totally fails

maria bustillos wrote an essay about pick-up artists for the awl that makes her look very bad, and on a rhetorical level she sucks shit compared to joan didion. her house is shattered glass. i'm with eric

mute joan didion on twitter and fucking spare us

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZQaLmme-eg

fuck off xyz

thanks for filling in the context there, brad, i see what you're saying now. i do think she was singularly good at conveying a feeling, a kind of vertigo, related to being in the modern world and, idk, the feeling of alienation that comes from it, from not being able to do anything about it. i realize this is a personal comparison and ymmv as far as how it holds up, but i was into joan didion and radiohead at the same time in my life and for similar reasons. and youn is otm, i'm giving diminishing returns here by not actually reading or revisiting the work.

(does anyone not sell anything and how can you know that they are not?)

one of her characteristic instances of not knowing what anyone is thinking or feeling ever

One of the reasons people find Didion compelling is that she not only knew this, she was willing to say it out loud. Relatively few writers/artists/intellectuals have straight up informed us that they have no fucking clue what's going on, and yet still have interesting things to say.

In her case it is on page 11 of The White Album. Literally on the first page of the first essay in one of her most well-known books, she reveals that she's utterly lost. The mere fact that so many people kept reading, past that page, is a testament to her skill - whether as a prose stylist, or as a chronicler of an age, a place, a time, a sensibility, a cultural milieu.

xp to youn that is a point for sure, everyone is hustling to a degree, but i tend to be more sympathetic when the author acknowledges it and uses it as a bridge to the reader. there's something related to the mystique around form in abstract expressionism in didion and how she talks about her style. i think one could be uncharitable towards abstract expressionist artists like rothko and pollack for reasons that feel similar to how one can look for limitations with didion.

it never occurred to me to view Joan Didion as a paragon of how to live or how to be or what to believe about stuff.

this is me. it's possible to appreciate her style and to find value in some fraction of her accumulated thoughts without treating her as a beacon illuminating the righteous path

All of this guarantees that if Bret Easton Ellis passes before I do I’ll need to avoid social media for a good solid two months.

Thomas Mann is a good comparison: an essentially conservative spirit, a 19th century burgher marooned in Weimar and Nazi Germany, who confronted his conservatism with evermore fantastical subjects for books.

fuck off xyz

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

fuck, god, who cares, i'll think again before posting itt

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

J.S. Bach's politics were probably pretty shitty but Brandendburg #4 is a bop

I remember the driving scene perhaps through pop culture references of which those in academia appear to believe one ought to be ashamed but perhaps also through the desperation of typically being able to rely on someone else to drive and the endless CA freeways and unexpected traffic and apparently kind-spirited sheriffs in central CA who encounter drivers in the middle of the night and the weird way CA seems to occupy many points of its history in space.