Joan Didion

has her newt gingrich piece been linked here lately

max linked it in i think the primary thread

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/the-teachings-of-speaker-gingrich/

finished blue nights after taking it out from my library

they put an insert slip in the front of the book that sez "Help other readers! Evaluate this book" & has rows headed by: age/gender - comment - rating (out of ten)

i wrote - 32 M - made me terrified of ageing - 7/10

this is sad but i lol'd at this

I've been trying to fight my way through this because of the book tour. I don't actually want to do the book tour, because it's tiring and ... it's a book tour. Then I keep thinking: If you didn't go on the book tour, you would have failed, and so this question of doing the thing -- going to the airport, getting on the airplane, going to Toronto, where you don't want to go ever in your whole life -- is on some level necessary. Otherwise you have failed yourself.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/03/joan-didion-cancels-la-appearance.html

just picked up blue nights from the lib. i accidentally requested the large print edition, and it's all a bit distracting to have the book in such huge font, and with boldface in lieu of italics.

no she insisted it be published like that, it's to make its insights into ageing more tangible

the audiobook is narrated in the tone of voice you would use to speak to an elderly, hard-of-hearing father-in-law

I wasn't crazy about BN :(

how so, alfred? not that you can't differ, only a friend read it & seemed to not like it for the exact reasons i thought it was really successful

She's often at her most powerful inserting those perfectly timed caesurae. A few motifs here are sensual (e.g. the fried chicken). But she didn't transform the material like its predecessor did.

i'm liking it so far. had to stop reading on the train because i was getting too emotional. same thing happened to me when i tried to read magical thinking on a plane. should just read it at home with my cat.

mmm. sensual is a good way to put it. the friend who wasn't so into it talked about being bemused by things like seeing her red shoes at the altar, why that was relevant, radiant. i think it really neatly succeeded at two things; first, though it wasn't intending to, painting a kind of elliptical portrait of quintana through those fragments, fleshing out these parameters that she existed in between, unavoidably conjuring someone, half-sullen and always young. and secondly phrasing all of those recollections, sensuous or stray, as what they were to didion, now; incomplete, snatched memories, every part of the thing itself gone, each remembrance the only clay she had left to play with*. & i felt it was more about those than the first thing, that inasmuch as we were meant to be responding to what she remembered it was just as a solipsistic thing, displaying what that debris was to JD.

xp, i can see how reading it in public might be kinda trying, rayuela

*i just read this daniel clowes thing, where he talked about his mother dying, how it'd be like if someone told you you could never see the ocean again - could have fun, but just would never see the ocean. i've never read proust or anything but i like those things that are trying to process what memory feels like, where it fits.

finished reading 'the year of magical thinking' just now and i liked it quite a bit, much more than i have anything else of hers. there are places where i think its sort of clunky or flaccid but the spell she casts over her life was so immersive and resonant to me the the dinners at candide with wasp dougherty the faded spode china the rewrites at the wilshire and the flights to cartagena and they way it flowed around her mourning, her daughters illness... she herself hints that shes romanticizing things but it reads like an elegy for a disappearing american leisure class. im not sure its supposed to, and the parts directly dealing death are good but seemed less vital than the other stuff, this idea of a life of grace and good linen

i found the 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live' collection and 'blue nights' in a thrift store (the same one where i got 'the year of magical thinking' so i guess someone was cleaning house) and im fairly impressed so far. i went to the park after work and sat in the grass and read the first three essays in 'slouching', it sortof kills me that she opens with that yeats poem. i think i can see some of what max and horseshoe are talking about upthread like there are some lines like the one about 'going back to hairdressing college' or the way she repeats and dissects the stories of the cast and crew on the john wayne western that would seem condescending bordering on cruel out of context but become almost admiring in the flow of the essay.

like shes so clear-eyed and cool and ambivalent as a way of managing this deeper despair. her description of the california mindset and california lives you can just ~~feel~~ her paying the wages of national headache and notional dread, its so brittle but precise.

Wait till you get to the political content in Miami and After Henry -- her peak.

things have been in and out lately and i got sort of tired of her reactionary bad temper and cold, nervous fingers picking at the embroidery of other peoples lives but man 'goodbye to all that' is just so fantastic i read it and gave up. i had already read about the 50 yards of theatrical silk somewhere else, probably here itt but who knows, but the essay accumulates so many similar details that match exactly my own experiences and feelings and articulates these all so clearly and rightly that i felt displaced, unmoored. so ive just sorta put her aside and gone back to struggling through the second half of 'underworld', so it goes.

I can't believe I was so hard on poor old Joan.

haha oh man

'the white album' for all its flaws detachment isnt really one. its voyeuristic w/out being insightful, theres a sense of her saving all her compassion for herself, of a despair bordering on the theatrical, the self-regarding. but its also incredibly compelling as a way of documenting the depressive state. or something.

i finally finished 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live', i liked the political stuff w/o thinking much about it i could sort of wave it away and see it outside myself, like as 'stuff' i guess. there are a lot of good posts early in this thread i feel late the party or like im wearing last years clothes now but im glad i finally read her and made my testament

i really enjoyed yr posts lamp, thought i couldn't quite figure out what was motivating you to continue so thoroughly while ambivalent about her. particularly enjoyed this as it has the kind of drunken gallop of a david lehman poem:

finished reading 'the year of magical thinking' just now and i liked it quite a bit, much more than i have anything else of hers. there are places where i think its sort of clunky or flaccid but the spell she casts over her life was so immersive and resonant to me the the dinners at candide with wasp dougherty the faded spode china the rewrites at the wilshire and the flights to cartagena and they way it flowed around her mourning, her daughters illness... she herself hints that shes romanticizing things but it reads like an elegy for a disappearing american leisure class. im not sure its supposed to, and the parts directly dealing death are good but seemed less vital than the other stuff, this idea of a life of grace and good linen

― Lamp, Tuesday, 24 April 2012 06:33 (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.euronews.com/images_news/img_606X341_ikea-monkey-canada-toronto-1112.jpg

amirite?

lmao

i cannot, in all honesty, take credit for this observation.

http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lyqdtx9dR31qzh8wko1_500.gif

not too far from the madding crowd?

http://payload59.cargocollective.com/1/4/128429/3489413/6a00d8341c526553ef0131100836a6970c-800wi.jpg

http://www.oystermag.com/joan-didion-stars-in-c-line-ss15-campaign

Didion on Salinger, 1961:

However brilliantly rendered (and it is), however hauntingly right in the rhythm of its dialogue (and it is), Franny and Zooey is finally spurious, and what makes it spurious is Salinger’s tendency to flatter the essential triviality within each of his readers, his predilection for giving instructions for living. What gives the book its extremely potent appeal is precisely that it is self-help copy: it emerges finally as Positive Thinking for the upper middle classes, as Double Your Energy and Live Without Fatigue for Sarah Lawrence girls.

ouch

ms. didion has her standards

terrible review imo, but i'm biased

Well, "Franny" zings collegiate male dorks, bulls-eyes, yet almost in passing, in a way that probably got even collegiate male dorks going, "ooooo, zing!" At a time when very few other male writers were doing that, it seems. At the same time, with the same effective understatement, he shows the quiet breakdown, the implosion of Franny. She can't tell her ahole boyfriend (who's snobbish with a jock classmate, then crude & irritable with her) what's wrong; she has to excuse herself to go collapse in the Ladies Room, in a lady-like way.
But in "Zooy," she's lying on the couch, mostly just listening while her older brother casts about, lecturing and telling anecdotes and trying to find just the right thing to snap her out of it. So yeah, that's where the self-help bit comes in, but I also take it that Salinger is lecturing some of his followers, incl. correspondents and people showing up on his doorstep, about not getting too hung up on idealism and questing etc. lecturing himself too, maybe.

I found "Zooy" somewhat off-putting even in high school, even though I could be like that with my own sister (and the letter he reads from Budd put me off reading Seymour: An Introduction Raise etc to this day, alas). So can barely imagine how a young woman in 1961 might have been put off by it, but still think she's a bit too harsh (despite readily acknowledging the power of his writing).

letter from Buddy, that is, one of their older sibs (F and Z are the youngest of their tribe, which we now learn includes several characters in the previous Nine Stories, my fave JD by far. Wonder what Didion thought of it?)

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/3029684-in-a-room-lined-with-bookshelves-quintana-roo-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=OCUJ5gVf7YdJQI2Xhkc2QCAwsgIaw2ppHSUpExLXi2Msaz7S4x03Ipnq9LsB%2FU2ZBdi88Ll0p5FlH1GjT0fSr8rIShQEbvRqg97RusSOs9k%3D

I checked out Play It as It lays from the library a couple of days ago, but not sure when, or if, I'll launch into it.

I don't think that Didion statement on Salinger is very wrong.
But I think Salinger was a better novelist than her.

In one sense, the book is "about being older," she said, and the knowledge accruing from that.
Which was what? an interviewer asked.
Didion's answer made her sound like a child once more, heeding her mother's warnings. "Be a better person," she said. And then, as if the weight of all her losses was borne in upon her--her father's false-cheery calls for a drink, her mother's sad indifference, the valleys' rage to incarcerate the state's kids: "Nobody can ever be nice enough."

she was beginning research on a book abt kobe bryant in fall 2003!

harrison ford flew her to la on his private plane when quintana suffered her fall, etc

http://blog.nola.com/susanlarson/2009/04/large_joangroup.JPG

jd lookin like poochie

Started to put this on the ILE Didion thread, but here tis:
"California Notes" (from unpublished coverage of the Patty Hearst trial for Rolling Stone; the genesis of Where I'm From, she says here)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/california-notes/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Didion%20California&utm_content=NYR%20Didion%20California+CID_971bb5f3e315687e7e3154ac1d117c1e&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=California%20Notes

Where I Was From, that is.

i'm really unmotivated to finish play it as it lays for a book club that is stagnating partly because of my lack of enthusiasm. the occasional moment of dark humor offers some respite but the rest is so thin that when it tries to be somewhat serious it falls pretty flat. also, weirdly conservative and maybe not-so-weirdly homophobic?

i know it's really short, i could finish it in an hour, i need to just suck it up for the sake of friendship instead of procrastinating for another week.

South and West, ehhh---maybe? Long-ass intro re current political:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/forgotten-accounts/

new Netflix doc on her by griffin dunne up tday

https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961

An essay on Didion:

And here I remember the manifold ways in which Didion’s image has been co-opted by our literary and cultural landscape, the tote bags, the Netflix documentary, the essay collection and even a writing contest at the University of California at Berkeley named after what is perhaps Didion’s most famous essay, “Goodbye to All That.” “Goodbye to All That” is a fine piece of writing, but to rest her reputation on this and The Year of Magical Thinking and two or three other selections from Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the first sentence of The White Album is, in a career as formidable and disruptive as Didion’s, not only to deflate her accomplishments but to cast her unwittingly into that most plaintive and immovable invisibility: the invisibility of the thinker whose ideas are hidden in plain sight.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ygpk64d9dwxn4hm/Joan%20Didion%20-%20A%20Travelogue.pdf?dl=0

What a shit year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/books/joan-didion-dead.html

She and Kael and Sontag are my three favorite writers of this or any other era imo.

Goodbye to all that.