Joan Didion

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.)

as has been stated several times itt, miami is the greatest

i was so annoyed when a few years ago they published a collection of shitty writers’ essays about leaving new york and actually called it “goodbye to all that”

Making my way through this old take on why Didion is not good and while I've never cared to dig deep enough this does scan to me.

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html

so why didn't I remember what was surely a salient fact to Lucille Maxwell Miller if not to Ms. Didion? The reason -- and I ask you to understand that this is directly related to lavender pillows and matching lavender orchids -- is that Didion was not in truth engaged in reporting about Lucille Maxwell Miller; Didion was reporting on Didion's sensibility, which in this essay, as in all her essays, assumes more importance than, say, the existence of the electric chair. What happens in this essay is that Lucille Maxwell Miller is convicted -- by Didion - - of wearing polyester and Capris, of living in a house with a snack bar and a travertine entry, of speaking in cliches, of having a picture window and a family room and a husband nicknamed Cork, of frequenting the Kapu-Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, and of never having eaten an artichoke. Lucille Maxwell Miller's real sin -- a truly, as it turned out, mortal one -- was to live in a subdivision house in the San Bernardino Valley and to hope to find "the good life" there, instead of in Brentwood Park or Malibu. Unlike those heroines of Didion's novels, Lucille Maxwell Miller never floated camellias in silver bowls to stave off encroaching madness or corruption -- no such exquisite desperation for her; she found a "reasonable little dressmaker" instead. The crime for which Didion indicts Lucille Maxwell Miller is of being tacky -- of not, that is, being Didion. This, you see, is where the lavender pillows come in: the body of Lucille Maxwell Miller's husband -- burned black -- offends Didion less than the fact that Lucille Maxwell Miller wore hair curlers. It isn't Didion's sense of morality that has suffered a blow, it's her sense of style. . . . Which is why, although I have nothing in principle against pretty houses or lavender love seats, Ms. Didion's lyrical angst strikes me as transparently ersatz. What I mean to say is Didion writes about Lucille Maxwell Miller -- and her loyal baby sitter, and her friends, and her admittedly silly lover -- as if they were mutants. No; she writes as if her subject were the Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest.

No; in fact, her subject is always herself.

That strikes me as quite a misguided take.

Did Susan Sontag face this kind of thing in her time?

(I like what I’ve read of SS but haven’t read it all; for whatever reason it can be difficult for me to really embrace:)

All it gets right: Didion's limning of a sensibility, which...is not a flaw?