Joan Didion

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!

lol sorry i am obsessed with this thread and didion and the pinefox. obviously.

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

harrison touches on this in her essay but i think theres something - i guess it goes beyond snobbishness - in her 'depression', a quality of disdain or yes, condenscension, about 'people' that i find off-putting? id like to describe this better but its been a long time but i think she uses her despair as a way of codifying certain prejudices, of building these monuments to her own 'taste' or 'style', idk.

i guess its interesting to think of that as its own 'ethic' but again: i think 'distance' is useful in helping see/present ppl distinct from the writer but i also think it can obscure, make ppl hard to see truly?

i think she has one of those brains that is not just very good but also sort of compulsive about finding... flaws? i guess? in herself, in her surroundings, etc. and this can make her sympathetic to her subjects... but it also makes her kind of terrifying.

tbh i am sort of reverse-engineering her because she reminds me a lot of my girlfriend, and i know my girlfriend a lot better than i know JD

also i think part of the problem is that 'a book of common prayer' is the one thing that i remember best & its certainly not a work to judge her as a writer on? i dont think her detachment/irony works that well in fiction of this kind? everything w/ qns mark tonight idk

i think she has one of those brains that is not just very good but also sort of compulsive about finding... flaws? i guess? in herself, in her surroundings, etc. and this can make her sympathetic to her subjects... but it also makes her kind of terrifying.

i think this is otm. another way of saying "scrupulous."

i haven't actually read that much of didion's fiction...i remember democracy, which i liked. i am kind of a stan, though, and not to be relied on.

this Harrison person's reading of "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" is so bad

heh i just read the first line of the essay

that my charity does not naturally extend itself to someone whose lavender love seats match exactly the potted orchids on her mantel, someone who has porcelain elephant end tables, someone who has chosen to burden her daughter with the name Quintana Roo

i mean talk about empty-headed snobbery! but w/v

i know she picked the worst possible way to start that essay. she just seems like an asshole tbh.

she just doesn't seem like a good reader of Didion to me; she's all worked up that Didion is concerned with surfaces, and she is, but it's a way of getting at stuff. Harrison misses all the stuff.

omg i'm just posting all the same things i posted to ilx 5 years ago :/

thinking about it more i think some of what you admire, horseshoe - the refusal to really psychologize or reduce - is what makes her fiction unsuccessful for me. like, the characters in 'common prayer' have a sort of uncanny valleyness to them, the exist as impossible simulacra. i mean i think thats partly intentional ("i have not been the witness i wanted to be") but think this manqué quality extends beyond being purposeful.

that whole first paragraph of the harrison just makes me feel like omar telling weebay "when u come at the king, you best not miss." if you are going to try and murk didion you have to BODY her because otherwise people reading your essay are just going to be thinking about how good didion is at doing exactly what youre failing to do.

i haven't read the book of common prayer, but i don't think she refuses to psychologize; she just does it fitfully, tentatively and obliquely. it works in democracy which i think is semi-autobiographical and also largely about the trickiness of and gaps in memory. (i guess harrison must hate it.)

but maybe i am undermining my case for didion as an ultimately sympathetic interlocutor. TBH i kinda like it when she is being a mean girl! imo the 60s sort of deserved it. xp

i also think if you write an essay accusing Didion of being all style no substance and thereby invite comparisons between the style of your own essay and Didion's superior style, well, you've kind of played yourself. or is that exactly what you just said, max. otm.

yes that is exactly what i just said, i just used violent metaphors and compared it to the wire

when i say she's sympathetic, it's because i believe she cares about the people she writes about. i don't exactly think she's sympathetic in the sense of being likeable. her meanness is purposeful.

whenever i think about didion at length i realize i am comparing her to jane austen in my mind. not sure if this is really accurate at all, but i love both those mean ladies.

xp lol i should go to bed

heh, all i meant is that when people object to didion over her meanness/snobbishness i want to go in two directions--i want to say both, "well, DUH, that's why i like her," but also, "she's actually not that mean or snobby"

i always want to say joan didion is a snob because she's actually better than everybody else

but yeah, i don't really think she's a snob, just awkward. omg how do i keep saying the same thing?

i always want to say joan didion is a snob because she's actually better than everybody else

― horseshoe, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 3:04 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm. you are otm all over this thread!

but i don't think she refuses to psychologize; she just does it fitfully, tentatively and obliquely

yeh, sure, you put it better: she refuses 'to get inside their heads'. which i can see as a virtue in her reporting! certainly that kind of empathizing can involve submerging someone in an entirely alien terminology (lol, projecting)

i admire harrison's essay for not really attempting any 'elegance' but just coming at it blunt & ugly. the lavender thing was terrible tho, yeah.

her meanness is purposeful

yes, sometimes! & the 60s did deserve it! but sometimes i just feels like smallness to me, rather than real objectivity.

haha maybe the pinefox will wake up soon & carry this torch for me, but i think im ~done~

i wish someone had revived a thread abt an author we all liked :/

no, it's good that all these smart people dislike didion. but it means i will never stop obsessing about her. or sleep.

i think this is my favorite joan didion mean girl moment

[re: her takedown of woody allen in the nyrb]

To the Editors:

What piques screenwriter Joan Didion so much about those large, enthusiastic audiences Woody Allen gets is that they seem to recognize themselves in lives that Didion finds unimportant. People who live such lives are unimportant to Didion because they “go to restaurants and ask one another hard questions” about “relationships,” something only “adolescents” still discuss much. Evidently where Joan Didion lives problems of love and psyche evaporate in a haze of margaritas by age twenty-one and folks can get down to the real business of living—which is what, by the way, if it isn’t the self or others? Losing weight? More likely, it’s vocations. Careers. Movie deals.

Didion complains that Woody Allen is stuck in the “fairly recent” notion of finding or making or inhabiting the self, as a central obsession. She’s right that it’s recent: those who trace it back to Augustine are exaggerating, a little. But surely the literature of “recent” centuries is richer for the works of people who’ve made this same faux pas. It’s what modern narrative art is mostly about, and Didion is sophomoric (“adolescent?”) in complaining that Woody Allen hasn’t managed to rehabilitate pre-modern modes of being, such as “attaining grace.” Didion would make a vice out of the fact that Woody Allen keeps to the side of the street he knows best—the sign of a tyro, by the standards of Hollywood, where a “writer” is someone who can dish out visions of the Gold Rush, the Boxer Rebellion, or the Lower East Side with equal competence. She calls the narrowness of Woody Allen’s focus “self-absorption.” Another word for it is modesty.

Admittedly there’s nothing modest about the list of things he lives for in Manhattan, but that’s not what Didion doesn’t like about it. Instead she notes that it’s “modishly eclectic,” which is a too deft way of saying that the list isn’t governed by any particular fashion or set of fashions. Here Didion’s need to attack the mindlessly modish audience (for roller-skating in crumpled linen, is it?) overcomes her intellectual honesty. The “Jupiter,” as she knows, is not at all a stylishly unfamiliar symphony—I think I’ve heard it in the Park—nor is a passion for “Potato Head Blues” likely to win you fancy friends. Didion may resent Woody Allen’s public display of his connoiseurship—and a (gorgeously) indulgent scene it is, too—but she shouldn’t pretend she knows his tastes to be modish when she can’t, because they ain’t. For instance: she says that the point of listing Sentimental Education is to obviate a gauche reference to Madame Bovary. A subtle discrimination, indeed! To know which of these two novels is hipper than the other betrays a suspiciously keen eye for what’s in, what’s out. Keener than Allen’s.

Which brings me to his defense on one last point, and here I’m answering not only Joan Didion, but also my friend Michael Wood, who in these pages [NYR, June 29, 1978] made the point that Allen doesn’t know as much as he implies about the bulk of his literary references. Probably there’s truth in this; that bulk is rather large. But when an allusion is apt—and even illuminating—it deserves credit even from the knowing. And the concerns of Sentimental Education have an eerie relevance to the concerns of Manhattan. In Frédéric Moreau as in the character Woody is endlessly playing, strength of feeling isn’t a source of action but rather an enfeeblement. By reminding us of the barely sympathetic, weak Frédéric, Woody Allen is reinforcing not the central character but those others in the film (or in the audience) who doubt his strength, his maturity, his authenticity. To say that this similarity in the themes of the two works is just accidental might be quite correct, but it would also be an instance of not crediting on the screen what we wouldn’t hesitate to find—and maybe praise—in a flawed but intelligent novel.

John Romano

Columbia University, New York City

Joan Didion replies:

Oh, wow.

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

i mean sometimes i just admire her as a master zinger, frankly

yeah, that's classic.

she's right that manhattan isn't a serious movie in the way woody allen aspires for it to be, but she does come off sort of joyless in the review. such a good movie!