Joan Didion

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.

It occurs to me that Sontag also passed late in December (the year escapes me now), after the year end “people we lost” remembrances had run.

2006 Paris Review interview

Didion was quite unusual as a writer in being more popular at the end of her life than ever before. Though partly I think the popularity was shallow, based on an idea of her, from people who had seen a programme about her but not read much.

That particular kind of appreciation goes rather well with a season of mourning and celebration - literally people online are writing 'goodbye you unique angel', an attitude that Didion herself never had. She was a highly unsentimental writer - but then, I, lamentably, have still not got round to reading her famous late memoirs, which might contradict me on that.

I wonder if people will now recall her remarkable polemic against feminism from, I think, the early 1970s. There is probably a genuinely interesting discussion to be had around it. Maybe she changed her mind.

It occurs to me that almost all good writers are in some degree, at some point, comic writers, but Didion's work betrays very little humour. I can't recall a single moment of great comedy. Compare Pauline Kael, let alone Nora Ephron or Lorrie Moore. Maybe the coolness of the prose militated against comedy, and maybe it sublimated the comic into something a bit different: unspoken, implied sarcasm.

Returning, in effect, to the first point: I think Didion's repute, the idea of Didion, is inseparable from her image -- from numerous, often repeated, specific photographs. Having her picture taken for Vogue with her Corvette Stingray in 1968 was one of her greatest artistic decisions. I don't mean, sarcastically, that she was 'just image', or 'style over substance'. Why not think the style was pretty substantial? It's not easy to look that good. Many of us never manage it. In this aspect of her management of her public identity, she actually resembles, of all people ... Samuel Beckett, a great poseur whose photographic likeness has for decades accompanied our sense of his work.

idk I laugh out loud when she dissects Reagan, Poppy Bush, Gingrich, etc.

Alfred otm, the pieces collected in Political Fictions are hilarious (in a very disillusioning way)

she’s very funny in her novels imo. think maybe sometimes ppl miss it bc of all the bad stuff happening

The humor is very dry and subtle.

I’m honestly relieved that her detractors either missed the news or have restrained themselves online so far.

(On Facebook anyway, I don’t know what’s being said on Twitter really.)

not really prepared to deal with hot joan didion takes in the next few weeks myself

no writer had a more profound impact on me, even though i know approx three billion writers, many of them bad, who would say the same thing. unparalleled on a sentence level, uniquely talented at bringing you into the quotidian dramas of a world you weren’t previously interested in (cf. her essay on water systems in the white album), maybe the only writer who fundamentally understood and could convey what it’s like to drive on a highway in california. for all that people think of her as this relentless, reflexive personal essayist i find all of the pleasure in her writing comes from describing very small experiences that people tend to only unconsciously register

The emphasis on the personal has baffled me the last 24 hours. Maybe b/c I came to her through the later work and didn't read her novels first?

I only really know her earlier work - and don't see it as especially personal.

yeah i think it’s a popular but shallow reading of her, or rather it’s all based on that one section of slouching towards bethlehem: why i write, goodbye to all that, etc.

I think 'Goodbye to All That' is just about the best thing by Joan Didion that I have ever read!

(Again: I still need to read tons of the late work.)