i love her dearly and am a bit disheartened by the pinefox's indifference! just reread all of slouching towards bethlehem and read play it as it lays in the last month. i keep meaning to start the white album but i almost don't want to run out of vintage didion so quickly so i'm putting it off.
i think there's a lot more emotion in her writing than people assume -- that hatchet job linked to upthread makes no sense at all to me. i've never gotten the sense that didion's laconic style was meant to signify condescension toward her subjects. that essay on self-esteem is one of the most succinct and powerful essays i've ever read.
the only other thing i've read is political fictions, which is great and all but hasn't stuck with me like the earlier stuff (except for the review of newt gingrich's book, so hilarious mean it's almost hard to get through).
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 18 November 2010 23:52 (thirteen years ago) link
- didn't know who iago was -
That's ok. He is among the most impenetrable of Shakespeare's characters.
― Aimless, Friday, 19 November 2010 01:43 (thirteen years ago) link
It's not Didion book related, but I'm loving this:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/letter-from-manhattan/
Didion's takedown of Woody Allen, after he went serious in the 70s.
― Romeo Jones, Wednesday, November 17, 2010 7:09 PM Bookmark
This is great and unfair at the same time. If it were written by anyone less than Joan Didion it wouldn't work. Yes, Woody Allen films have a certain quality of being stuck in a hyper-precocious adolescence at times, but that's also part of their charm, and I don't buy that she's uncharmed by them. Besides, I think it's a little disingenuous for a professional serious essayist to criticize someone for pondering meaning. I mean most people go to offices every day and do work they don't even like -- they stopped sitting in cafes with notebooks a long time ago.
I get the feeling "I'm too mature for this" has been her posture for a lot of her life -- though it's exactly that posture that makes Slouching Toward Bethlehem so sharp.
― portrait of the artist as a yung joc (Hurting 2), Friday, 19 November 2010 03:51 (thirteen years ago) link
Didion's political writing -- Miami, After Henry, Political Fictions -- was immensely influential on me.
― look at it, pwn3d, made u look at my peen/vadge (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 19 November 2010 03:54 (thirteen years ago) link
As a novelist, though, she gives the impression that she hasn't read a new one since college.
― look at it, pwn3d, made u look at my peen/vadge (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 19 November 2010 03:55 (thirteen years ago) link
JD, I don't think my feeling is indifference - more repeated disappointment. I think I've written this up so many times over the years, on this board, that I probably shouldn't go over it again. But to recap, I think she's been lucky in her admirers (including, maybe, you!); I think she radiates a kind of glamour and cool; I think she writes about interesting subjects sometimes; she always seems like someone that one would be interested in and want to read.
But I also think, in practice, that her level of actual insight isn't often that high; her prose is unadventurous, a mannerism that stops her needing to try things, find words, take risks; and yes I think 'condescension' / superiority / 'I'm too mature for this' is far too much a default setting in her writing. Also I've read 2-3 novels and they really weren't worth much more than a dime - I couldn't see why she persevered with them.
And yet, I still think of her as a writer that I like.
(I only say all this again cos the admirable JD prompted it)
― the pinefox, Friday, 19 November 2010 11:41 (thirteen years ago) link
thinking about the prose again: how many great phrases, striking bundles of words, do you come across in reading Didion? can anyone remember any? I think perhaps she has little lyric sense; there isn't much semantic bounty or verbal music; she's the opposite of a Pynchon (whom I also frequently find exasperating for other reasons); and writing in her sort of plain style has been a way of legitimating this - or has sealed it, encouraged it to happen, put her unseen lyric gift to sleep.
― the pinefox, Friday, 19 November 2010 11:49 (thirteen years ago) link
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 (thirteen years ago) link
Did you ever find that?
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 13:18 (thirteen years ago) link
I've been reading her Paris Review interview to celebrate Pancake Day. She says certain things with a very impressive all-American coolness. But she also says things that aren't very impressive.
She says that when she's writing a novel, she starts the day by retyping the whole thing from p.1, or p.20 or so. That makes it seem the more remarkable that her novels don't seem to include any good writing - unless it was all excised by the endless rewriting.
Her interviewer crawlingly says that DH Lawrence 'didn't know anything about women at all'. Didion says: 'No, nothing'.
Now, I don't like Lawrence. In some ways he is among my least favourite writers. But he was a human being in the C20 who was married to a woman and travelled the world with her; who had intense relations with his mother and perhaps other women. He wrote a lot about women (and men). Is it plausible to say of such a person that he 'didn't know anything about women at all'? What kind of discriminate literary judgement is this? You might as well say I don't know anything about books at all, even though I've lived around them all my life.
Of course, the duller truth is that women are different from one another. You can know one woman, and not know another. You can know some things and not others. That was probably the case with DHL.
My contribution for International Women's Pancake Day.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 13:24 (thirteen years ago) link
You might as well say I don't know anything about books at all, even though I've lived around them all my life.
maybe you don't!
i don't know; it seems a fairly standard hyperbolic statement. we could translate it as "d.h. lawrence's work takes a great interest in the relations between the sexes, but that interest, which qualified him as a remarkable writer on the subject to his contemporaries, makes him seem all the more egregious on the subject today; and it's fair to say that he seems entirely wrong-headed on the subject of women."
or we could accept the shorthand in its cattiness; it's not really joan didion's job, or anyone's -- unless, say, they're a lawrence scholar, or writing a survey of twentieth-century fiction -- to be immediately responsible to have developed opinions about d.h. lawrence ready and to hand.
― thomp, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 14:06 (thirteen years ago) link
well, I think it is true that most of us are ignorant in lots of ways about physical objects and processes (including eg books). This is a condition of which I always feel fairly aware.
But again, there are lots of things to know about books, levels of knowing. There are some things that I know about some books. It wouldn't be plausible to say I don't know anything about any books.
I think your paraphrase is very convincing, and much more sophisticated and interesting than Didion's / interviewer's statement (because you posit a connection between DHL's strong interest and his possible errors) -- until the last clause. I don't know whether we can assume that he seems entirely wrong-headed on this subject. We'd probably need to work a bit to remind ourselves exactly what he did think or say.
Again, I feel a bit doubtful that there is a 'subject of women' - that idea seems like part of the problem. But, maybe DHL did believe in it, and maybe that could be one way that he was wrong.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 14:13 (thirteen years ago) link
It wouldn't really have struck me much (these interviews are full of daft put-downs etc) - but she just doesn't come across very well in the interview as a whole. I always feel that Didion thinks she's a much better writer than she is - a strange effect.
But there is a fine sentence or two about sunsets on the West Coast which exemplify her American authority.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 14:19 (thirteen years ago) link
that's probably a pretty canny thing to say, and a good point from which to start investigating the subject of 'lawrence and women', if we choose to, if we're in some place to do so.
on the other hand, i don't really see that a passing topic (books didion wrote on as an undergraduate!) in an interview about writing nonfiction is a place where said subject really needs to be investigated: it seems a ridiculous level of precision to demand of anyone, that anything said about anything needs to hew that true to reasonable statement, to accuracy of expression. i'd probably have to give up on ever talking about books again, if that were the case.
(xpost)
barthelme put 'all the paris review interviews' on a list of things his students should study. i feel like they belong on a list of things no one that wants to write should ever, ever read, almost.
― thomp, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 14:23 (thirteen years ago) link
Didion is one of my favorite journalists and stylists, but I've long suspected she hasn't read a novel since the sixties.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 8 March 2011 14:25 (thirteen years ago) link
This is what Didion said that made a bit of an impression on me.
"There's always something missing about late afternoon to me on the East Coast. Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Here it just gets dark."
A positive thing to do with Didion would be just to quote lines she's written that one thinks are good.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 8 March 2011 16:37 (thirteen years ago) link
Great quote. The Year of Magical Thinking is a wonderful place to start. The deep seriousness actually goes with gusts of adventure, even fun, occasionally.Especially when she dreams about swimming with her daughter, or (apparently in the real-life waking world)exasperates a doctor with her self-taught sense of medical author-a-tah (as South Park's Cartman would put it). She's getting out of the house!
― dow, Sunday, 13 March 2011 20:17 (thirteen years ago) link
Although gravity (with those gusts) might be a more accurate description than "deep seriousness."
― dow, Sunday, 13 March 2011 20:21 (thirteen years ago) link
her novels don't seem to include any good writing
off-sides!
― horseshoe, Sunday, 13 March 2011 20:35 (thirteen years ago) link
I think her position is "if I've already got Henry James and Joseph Conrad what do I need with other authors"
― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, 13 March 2011 20:36 (thirteen years ago) link
my gf takes that line. it's kind of infuriating but also kind of impossible to argue with
― thomp, Sunday, 13 March 2011 20:37 (thirteen years ago) link
― the pinefox, Tuesday, March 8, 2011 11:37 AM Bookmark
"I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition, but one I found troubling." (The White Album)
― for real molars who ain't got no fillings (Hurting 2), Sunday, 13 March 2011 20:59 (thirteen years ago) link
"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends." (Slouching Towards Bethlehem)
seems like that one is the standard go-to quotation for Didion, but it's still so great.
― Romeo Jones, Sunday, 13 March 2011 22:29 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah that would be mine, too
― horseshoe, Monday, 14 March 2011 01:02 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't especially remember it. Surely the go-to qns (ie the most famous) would be
'we tell ourselves stories in order to live'
and the first para or so of the 'slouching towards B' essay which really is striking, even to a sceptic like me.
I like bits of 'on the morning after the sixties' and 'goodbye to all that' also.
― the pinefox, Monday, 14 March 2011 10:41 (thirteen years ago) link
I find her most interesting in chunks. I mean, I know that's exactly what the publishers have always been shooting for -- but 'The White Album', e.g., does gain a lot of interest from being 'Didion does the 70s'. I think, too, that read with some mind to the fact of her mental state the thoughts, sentiments, expressed therein make more sense to a reader than if one tries to consider them the feelings of a vast, dispassionate brain -- I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that, now, having written it.
I'm not sure I don't get more out of John McPhee or Ellen Willis, say, as guides to the culture. But Didion's stuff maybe has more to do with the interplay of 'trying to be a guide to the culture' and 'trying to maintain your own individual psyche'.
― thomp, Monday, 14 March 2011 10:53 (thirteen years ago) link
curious about what you meant aactually by "feelings of a vast dispassionate brain".Some of the more topical stuff can be so so, but I have a place in my heart for her languid writing on hotels in Hawaii or growing flowers in Malibu
― licorice oratorio (baaderonixx), Monday, 14 March 2011 16:56 (thirteen years ago) link
The great strength of her later nonfiction is her iron stomach & unblinking gaze when she uses quotations - I attribute this to her lifelong admiration of Hemingway, her desire for the words to do 100% of the work when possible. From "God's Country," about Bush, which ran during the 2000 election:
This was a man who, when the Texas economy went belly-up in the mid-1980s, joined a group of Midland businessmen who met once a week under the guidance of a national group called Community Bible Study, the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case "seeing the truths of the Bible lived out in the lives of leaders and class members." The participants in Bush's class were "baby boomers, men with young families," a former member told Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post. "And we suddenly found ourselves in free fall. So we began to search for an explanation. Maybe we had been too involved with money. Maybe we needed to look inwardly and find new meaning in life."
― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, 14 March 2011 17:40 (thirteen years ago) link
She is quite good at that, I agree - but doesn't it largely rely on the daftness and inaptness of the things the stupid or wicked people say?
― the pinefox, Monday, 14 March 2011 19:32 (thirteen years ago) link
but her juxtapositions are done with perfect timing
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:34 (thirteen years ago) link
btw her Reagan essay "In the Court of the Fisher King" is LOL funny.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:36 (thirteen years ago) link
Sure but it's the way she frames it - her skill for decorating the frame within which the pre-existing horror will be displayed is remarkable. "the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case " and then the quote: it's like she's knotted the most economical noose. She also has (and whether this is a virtue or not depends on your outlook) a gift for the very subtle sneer - I can't say just how "the class format of which includes the twelve-step technique of personal testimony, in this case" manages to convey ridicule/disbelief, but it does
― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:42 (thirteen years ago) link
As I've said before (probably way upthread several times, years ago), I have often found a weakness of her writing to be the unsubtlety of the sneers (albeit done in this blank-looking style).
But that would be mainly in relation to the earlier work, I think. If she uses her time and ability to attack very nasty right-wing US politicians - something she seems to have done much more of in the last 2 decades or so - then that's fine by me, really.
― the pinefox, Monday, 14 March 2011 19:48 (thirteen years ago) link
She attacks lots of Democrats too: I remember one devastating paragraph about Bill Clinton in her (masterful) essay on the impeachment.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:49 (thirteen years ago) link
I've never understood what's so special about joan didion
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:52 (thirteen years ago) link
like whenever I read her work I'm like ok this is alright what else
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:53 (thirteen years ago) link
We've just two days explaining it!
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:53 (thirteen years ago) link
I will now scroll up
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:54 (thirteen years ago) link
You might read "Political Fictions," a collection of her political essays. It does include her attacks on right-wing politicians, including Bill Clinton.
― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:54 (thirteen years ago) link
^^^ you beat me to that crack
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 14 March 2011 19:57 (thirteen years ago) link
not trying to troll here but when the pinefox said that her prose was unadventurous, yeah, I agree with that, that's probably the biggest stumbling block in me getting into her work, that's just my thing though, like, I look at it, and just think, yeah ok this is pretty american, these are some thoughts some people have
― puff puff post (uh oh I'm having a fantasy), Monday, 14 March 2011 20:00 (thirteen years ago) link
love this:
these are some thoughts some people have
― the pinefox, Monday, 14 March 2011 21:01 (thirteen years ago) link
just so we have our parameters defined, whose prose is "adventurous," and how?
― five gone cats from Boston (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Monday, 14 March 2011 21:09 (thirteen years ago) link
^ im wonderin
― just sayin, Monday, 14 March 2011 21:18 (thirteen years ago) link
I'd read an interview of Bret Easton Ellis where he sings Joan Didion's praises, and so I read a few passages, and I was a little shocked at how much he just wholesale appropriated her style, and why not? It's a pretty effective style. People should steal it more often.
― Philip Nunez, Monday, 14 March 2011 21:34 (thirteen years ago) link
yeah sure, and that's actually a good way of putting it. hell, she certainly doesn't beat you over the head with any grand authorial voice. her prose is usually very unshowy, and she has a way of articulating the intuitive and even the banal but makes those thoughts fresh in a way that makes it seem like you are both in your head and out of it (or in the head of someone else that has these kind of banal though/connections and at the same time out of of that person's head). Her style is very Hemmingway (and by extension, Carver-esque) but she updates it in that the style reflects this condition that we all feel like we are living in a fiction/ dream that somehow doesn't line up with the fiction/dream that we see all around us, but still kind of does, or maybe we just still wish it did ... and this all makes us alienated from ourselves yadda yadda yadda .... so we "tell ourselves stories in order to live" in order to pinch ourselves and gain control and understanding and order but it never totally works so we keep doing it.
(And if Joan Didion were saying the above yammer she would do it much more effectively obv)
And her viewpoint is very American, very West Coast and I wonder how may people that are not so into her are not American and/or whether that makes a difference.
And for everyone who hasn't read her fiction, I would say pick up "Play It As It Lays" (very short and reads quickly too). Her fiction-writing style is also very cool and minimal and even reporterly, but also looser and plays up the dreamy haziness and it even has its experimental moments (one of her main things is switching between 1st and 3rd person).
in that "yeah I get it, so what the hell is so great a bout this" kind of way, but to me it's much more feminine
And maybe it is an American thing.
― Romeo Jones, Monday, 14 March 2011 22:54 (thirteen years ago) link
ha ha ... didn't mean to post those last two sentences
― Romeo Jones, Monday, 14 March 2011 22:56 (thirteen years ago) link
That is an interesting, suggestive-looking defence of Didion. Your sense of 'we are living in a fiction/ dream that somehow doesn't line up with the fiction/dream that we see all around us' seems to be quite true to an element of her work.
The idea that she is very American etc is interesting too, though I would like to hear what 'very West Coast' means in a writer. Perhaps English people say 'very Northern' and others don't know what it is supposed to mean; or perhaps they do know.
I didn't know I'd said she was unadventurous, but then it turned out I had. Of course the word doesn't matter much, or could be less precise than I wanted. Romeo says she's unshowy. That might be getting at the same thing. Certainly there are lots of ways of being a good writer. So, can a prose writer really be adventurous at all?
I thought about it, and I think I can name three who have been: James Joyce, Roland Barthes, Paul Morley -- all of whose writing has thrilled and moved me a good deal.
― the pinefox, Monday, 14 March 2011 23:03 (thirteen years ago) link
[btw I am English and on reflection I don't think I know what would be meant by 'very Northern', beyond differences in accents.
Probably only Stuart Maconie understands or credits this ontological divide]
― the pinefox, Monday, 14 March 2011 23:56 (thirteen years ago) link
I think that there's often an adventurousness to "unadventurousness," to prose characterized by its economy and seeming simplicity. Pinefox, stuff that you consider adventurous seems to be more maximal vs. the minimalness of Didion/Carver/Hemmingway (and his iceberg theory). Well, maximal certainly applies to Joyce and Pynchon (who you mention upthread). Barthes is pretty minimal for a cultural critic but I don't think he can be compared to Didion so well; two different projects. (I haven't read Morley, so no comment there). Funny that the 3 minimal authors I mention are all American (and even all-American .. ha). I don't think this style is necessarily American but it's probably more American than European and I really can't think of any British minimalists off the top of my head. Camus and Peter Handke would qualify as European minimalists I think.
As far as my "west coast" comment is concerned. There's definitely a kind of US west/east coast binary. It's really hard to get into that without making a lot of cringeworthy generalizations. And, unfortunately, California, and particularly LA/Hollywood are the big West Coast metonyms, and East Coast is often reduced to New York City and New England and the rest of both coasts are kind of different things that get left out and/or placed elsewhere. But anyways, West Coast ... long days, big vistas, highways, cars, movies, Manifest Destiny, gold rush and get-rich-quick, American Dream, the (obv bullshit) idea of American Utopia, deserts, sunshine, sexual freedom and transgression, anonymity (and making oneself new), and, later, counterculture and drugs ... that kind of thing ... and there's a disillusionment/aftermath to all that and it informs Didion's work. And, and this is I think what I was getting at really, I find Didion's style to be particularly West Coast in its spareness and imagery. I'm thinking mostly here of "Play It As It Lays" which is a Hollywood novel and has a lot of restless and purposeless highway driving and the alienation-from-self and fiction/dream thing I was talking about, and all of that isreflected in the style.
Of course, Pynchon is West Coast too ... so West Coast doesn't necessarily equal minimal.
And I think I only have a really vague idea of what "Northern" means, btw. I mean I guess there's, historically, the industrial and working-class-ness of some Northern cities, right? I dunno. Maybe someone can enlighten.
― Romeo Jones, Tuesday, 15 March 2011 00:14 (thirteen years ago) link
Hilton Als (who?)
oh he put out one of the best essay collections i’ve ever read a few years ago, called white girls. pretty regular new yorker contributor
― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Sunday, 26 June 2022 19:04 (one year ago) link
Yeah, was gonna say that. Haven't read his intro or anything else in the collection, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Where I Was From, which I mentioned upthread, are contributions to world literature, though cost her almost almost all her writing and other life, a lot of loss and endeavor to get there.Seems fitting, since WIWF is from the California Children of the Pioneers mythos, very gradually seeing all through that, closer and closer to home.
― dow, Sunday, 26 June 2022 19:37 (one year ago) link
Thirding White Girls
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 26 June 2022 20:07 (one year ago) link
I know it's late but you can read that WA piece - and a lot of the older NYRB articles in general - by putting the URL in the Internet Archive and going to the earlier incarnations. It's actually quite short by NYRB standards.
― gjoon1, Monday, 27 June 2022 22:43 (one year ago) link
Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.
This is a great observation! Something that's annoyed me that I haven't seen put into words before. Didion's not the only writer who does this. And obviously it's a staple of reality show editing.
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 10:05 (one year ago) link
What annoys you about it? Curious.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 28 June 2022 10:07 (one year ago) link
Thanks, poster Chuck Tatum. I had to think a bit before I could articulate this small observation.
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 10:53 (one year ago) link
xpost
Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 11:00 (one year ago) link
Imagine someone (not) reacting to you like that in real life and it’s clear why it’s annoying.
― 29 facepalms, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 11:02 (one year ago) link
the style referred to entered journalism (or anyway this is my under-informed guess) via the younger new yorker style-switch from a youthful over-admiration of henry james to the golden-bowl guilt phase of absorbing imitating and parodying hemingway and his mentor gertrude stein: whose combined shtick was (a) less is more, let the subtext sing in the air stripped of any DO-YOU-SEE-style announcement* plus in particular stein's penchant for repetition as a device for variation of mode
*where "not saying it" is a mark of shared sensibility: we needn't comment-explain bcz we all already get it (which narrowing of the "we" -- as chuck above suggests -- is actually kind of a betrayal of journalism i guess, certainly a super-complex ethical-aesthetical line that the NYer created and then made its early home in )
yes i am meant to be cleaning my kitchen floor and not at all on this thread, yell at me next time i post plz
― mark s, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 11:02 (one year ago) link
"less is more" = leaving out the (b) = stein's use of repetition as a forensic device
― mark s, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 11:03 (one year ago) link
I'm relieved to see that I broadly agree with Mark S, though without knowing enough about New Yorker magazine history.
I like his reference to a "betrayal of journalism".
― the pinefox, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 11:12 (one year ago) link
― Chuck_Tatum
This is true, but this approach starts to ebb around the 1980s. It's why I admire Miami and the later work over the more famous early stuff.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 28 June 2022 11:39 (one year ago) link
I think it's important for the writer of features and reviews to know when to let the quote have some space around it, for the reader to fill, having established context. The writer also has to be choosy about quotes, not just pick the best or worst lines, but also not just stringing a lot of lines together, beyond just enough of the latter to give the idea, if that's what the artiste mainly does. I've had some hard times with that kind of writing, but it's worth doing, I think--of course some readers, incl. some editors want every damn thing spelled out. I even had one editor who told me to "spoonfeed," in so many words. I don't go around that joint no more.
― dow, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 17:40 (one year ago) link
As a reader, I find it offputting to have the writer jumping in there to explain everything, unless I'm reading an instruction manual or dispatch from a country/situation I've barely heard of etc.
― dow, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 17:42 (one year ago) link
I'm not talking about leaving space in "hard journalism," that is. The harder it is the more I want to be told about it.
― dow, Tuesday, 28 June 2022 17:48 (one year ago) link
anticipation: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/arts/design/joan-didion-hammer-museum-hilton-als.html
― youn, Thursday, 6 October 2022 21:41 (one year ago) link
Who cares if she staged the photo in the article for a Williams Sonoma photo op? She tried to write.
― youn, Thursday, 6 October 2022 21:43 (one year ago) link
betrayal of journalism my ass---in all the things I've read, some of her later writing, she provided the context, and so do the better New Yorker writers, rather jump in there with commentary, lecture points, that Gopnik Thurman etc "polymath" ponderosa
― dow, Thursday, 6 October 2022 23:56 (one year ago) link
She did warn people not to forget she's in the room (as they tended to because she was so small and quiet, she said), because she's there to getcha (that was earlier though, I may never get back that far)
― dow, Thursday, 6 October 2022 23:58 (one year ago) link
LOA wrapping up the trilogy this fall:
https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537871-185x300.jpg
I am excited to read the stage version of Magical Thinking
― Rich E. (Eric H.), Friday, 23 February 2024 17:58 (one month ago) link