Joan Didion

If I ever expressed admiration for that poisonous fuckwit's prose, I must've been two gin and tonics in.

You asked the bartender for another jiggery pokery.

(It sounds like her essays and other writings are due for rereading (with an open mind outside labels).)

ok, for one thing, i was quoting from one of her novels, democracy, which i just started reading, which in its second chapter immediately scales back to reveal the author (identified as joan didion but as everyone knows all postmodern author reveals are extremely suspect) and all of the novels she didn't write about the characters (and their extensive family histories) to clarify what the novel is/has been reduced to instead. part of this involved analyzing her own process, and how the novel was suggesting itself through environments and images more than people (very similar to how a book of common prayer begins with the literal immateriality of the landscape it takes place in). one may balk at the very device, i get it, but she is not mistaking landmasses for stress, ffs, she is deliberately connecting them to the process of writing the novel, which, idk, doesn't evince a lack of interest at all to me (and it feels disingenuous to me to suggest didion wasn't interested in this, but you seem to know her motivations better than i do), the metaphor and the meaning are shoring each other up. i think she was particularly good at doing this without ever getting overwrought or obvious about it, and that's why many of her sentences are good

again there's the freeway scene in play it as it lays and so much is going on just in the description of driving in california that refracts through the particular nervous breakdown her character is going through. it's not minimalism but it's the kind of restraint that speaks volumes. you can call this a lack of content i guess or one of her characteristic instances of not knowing what anyone is thinking or feeling ever but i don't think that's the case

didion and i don't align politically at all but neither do i with thomas mann so it's just a meaningless distinction. good writing is a product of curiosity breaking through into understanding. in books like miami she does that. in certain essays she totally fails

maria bustillos wrote an essay about pick-up artists for the awl that makes her look very bad, and on a rhetorical level she sucks shit compared to joan didion. her house is shattered glass. i'm with eric

mute joan didion on twitter and fucking spare us

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZQaLmme-eg

fuck off xyz

thanks for filling in the context there, brad, i see what you're saying now. i do think she was singularly good at conveying a feeling, a kind of vertigo, related to being in the modern world and, idk, the feeling of alienation that comes from it, from not being able to do anything about it. i realize this is a personal comparison and ymmv as far as how it holds up, but i was into joan didion and radiohead at the same time in my life and for similar reasons. and youn is otm, i'm giving diminishing returns here by not actually reading or revisiting the work.

(does anyone not sell anything and how can you know that they are not?)

one of her characteristic instances of not knowing what anyone is thinking or feeling ever

One of the reasons people find Didion compelling is that she not only knew this, she was willing to say it out loud. Relatively few writers/artists/intellectuals have straight up informed us that they have no fucking clue what's going on, and yet still have interesting things to say.

In her case it is on page 11 of The White Album. Literally on the first page of the first essay in one of her most well-known books, she reveals that she's utterly lost. The mere fact that so many people kept reading, past that page, is a testament to her skill - whether as a prose stylist, or as a chronicler of an age, a place, a time, a sensibility, a cultural milieu.

xp to youn that is a point for sure, everyone is hustling to a degree, but i tend to be more sympathetic when the author acknowledges it and uses it as a bridge to the reader. there's something related to the mystique around form in abstract expressionism in didion and how she talks about her style. i think one could be uncharitable towards abstract expressionist artists like rothko and pollack for reasons that feel similar to how one can look for limitations with didion.

it never occurred to me to view Joan Didion as a paragon of how to live or how to be or what to believe about stuff.

this is me. it's possible to appreciate her style and to find value in some fraction of her accumulated thoughts without treating her as a beacon illuminating the righteous path

All of this guarantees that if Bret Easton Ellis passes before I do I’ll need to avoid social media for a good solid two months.

Thomas Mann is a good comparison: an essentially conservative spirit, a 19th century burgher marooned in Weimar and Nazi Germany, who confronted his conservatism with evermore fantastical subjects for books.

fuck off xyz

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

fuck, god, who cares, i'll think again before posting itt

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, 5 January 2022 bookmarkflaglink

J.S. Bach's politics were probably pretty shitty but Brandendburg #4 is a bop

I remember the driving scene perhaps through pop culture references of which those in academia appear to believe one ought to be ashamed but perhaps also through the desperation of typically being able to rely on someone else to drive and the endless CA freeways and unexpected traffic and apparently kind-spirited sheriffs in central CA who encounter drivers in the middle of the night and the weird way CA seems to occupy many points of its history in space.

!

i know i am kip to an annoying level but this thread revive has been a bummer in the wake of her death, that the only discussion was excavations of her “small c conservatism”

like, really?
“RIP Thomas Hardy its sad that he only wrote about farms”

i was hoping for celebration of her or gain some more insight or i dunno.

not that the current discussion isn’t interesting or worthwhile, or that the purpose of ilx is to entertain me. idk.

as you were

Wait til you see the shit that's been dredged up in the Betty White thread.

:(

I hear you VegemiteGrrl. When she died I went to the shelf to go find my favorite passage but couldn't decide. Like, her body of work is world-class in the aggregate. But any given sentence doesn't really convey the overall quality when taken out of context. There's a bit about "an extravagance of orchids" and the "birds exploded in the air" which I think both come from the Malibu essay, but neither would be impressive on its own. Miami also has some fine dry writing in it, but only when viewed within the thread of the prose.

"like, really?
“RIP Thomas Hardy its sad that he only wrote about farms”"

Is writing about farms by definition conservative or something?

no i just meant myopically reducing a writers output to one thing

Lol no. Hardy wrote novels about people in his time. But we are talking about (mostly) Didion's non-fiction.

And Didion's politics otoh could make her non-fiction unreadable if she looks at people the way bustillos says she does. Saying "but her sentences" is a get out clause for fiction some of the time, less so for non-fiction.

I also don't see how Bustillos being a worse stylist (or the platform they got their essay published in lol) invalidates their readings. It's just putting Didion on a pedestal and not dealing with what they say.

I couldn't take Bustillos seriously after, like so many people with hot takes, she omits discussing Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions, all examples of reporting which by its nature observes and -- what most reporters don't do because American j-school practices are still shit -- judges.

She does mention The Year of Magical Thinking because, whaddya know, it's a memoir, hence a sign of her insularity.

I'll repeat: Didion stopped being that Californian diarist in the 1980s. She engaged the world. She criticized the Reagan-Bush year's heinous foreign policy in Central America -- she wrote a book about the El Mozote massacre when the Beltway press was fawning over Reagan's syntactical lapses.

I can accept -- hell, I would accept payment to write -- a critique of her work in its totality, not specious bullshit that stops with The White Album and her fiction.

I guess Bustillos excoriated 1993's “Trouble in Lakewood,” which I haven't read in years, but from what I remember she draws the wrong conclusions.

Brad is otm about Bustillos’s critique of Didion. I’m not saying her politics don’t merit critique, but Bustillos performs a very weird reading of “Trouble in Lakewood.” I also just think Didion is tricky, politically speaking, particularly when she overtly starts covering American electoral politics.

i'm sure there are persuasive critiques of joan didion out there, i'm not an uncritical admirer, but that maria bustillos essay is not good. i mean:

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show.

i mean, this is profoundly more offensive than anything i've ever seen joan didion write! and i'm not sure if bustillos meant this to be facetious or not, but wtf at this:

I never even heard of anyone getting as wasted as Didion’s hippies do.

I don't concur with the view that the Joan Didion thread should only be about celebrating Joan Didion because the writer died last month. The thread has been going since 2007, and was initially composed of statements reposted from 2006 -- that is, ILB has been talking about Didion for years and years, and (if anyone can be bothered to go back and read it) 'we' were ambivalent, divided, etc, then, as 'we' are now.

The fact that this thread keeps coming back is, for me, consonant with how I happen to feel about her, namely: however much I sometimes dislike her, am frustrated or disappointed about her, I can never quite put her away and dismiss her. She has an uncanny capacity to stay the course as an item of reflection. In a sense that is my primary experience of Didion - an interest that never goes away.

I think the statement, often repeated, that 'she wrote very good sentences', is overstated. She wrote in a particular way. I am still not convinced that she was much better at writing than most other writers. And there are some other writers who write in more ambitious or flamboyant ways (Nabokov would be the extreme, but even ILB darling Patricia Lockwood would qualify in her own way) whose 'sentences' might be of more interest to consider as such.

I don't really agree with the idea that you buy Didion's 'sentences' and ignore what they say, or the views they express. The sentences, the content, the views, go together. There are probably talented writers in the Spectator (well ... maybe), but I wouldn't buy them. The analogy with music doesn't hold up very well because compared to language, musical is a relatively abstract medium.

I agree with the view that the later Didion (c.1980s, 1990s) is probably politically different from the earlier. I've been saying it over and over!

In the critiques of Didion, I find the idea of 'class status' strangely overplayed - that has never been an issue in her for me, really - and I also think that the idea that she is 'nostalgic for a golden age of better values' is very overstated or not very apt. (Both Harrison and Bustillos seem to emphasise both these ideas; I'm not very convinced by them.) I see little nostalgia in her -- again, an unusually unsentimental writer.

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

― the pinefox, Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Well put.

I think she wrote good sentences in that she was unsentimental but evoked sentiment in the reader, in her novels and essays and articles.

more like groan didion

more like joan didifart

the pinefox: Is it possible that you don't recognize the markers of class in CA where money is new and a recent history is tied to land and frontier stories? Not that I know myself but the markers are interesting ...

and she’s explicit about them! anyone who wants to make a performance of like pulling back the curtain to reveal that author of Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album writes from the perspective of “establishment” California and about politics (both left and right) with both privileged fascination and privileged contempt is a priori suspect given that she comes out and says this repeatedly.

obv she gets older, sees more, comes to a different kind of understanding about what’s at stake and for whom. we haven’t mentioned Salvador in this context but it’s a moment for sure.

I think the motives of the seller were being questioned rather than the aptitude of the buyer or the existence of buyers who do not also consider quality and purpose.

I agree that music is a relatively abstract medium, but popular music is often written with lyrics intended not to be abstract and that is what is often discussed here. I think good writing can evoke response that is non-literal.

re: Didion's famous exchange with the Woody Allen fan, I don't like her response, though I also think the film is bad. My question is: has anyone read her actual review? Could anyone post it here?

OK, the review is here
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/08/16/letter-from-manhattan/

But much of it is subscriber-only.

From reading the first paras I'm somewhat entertained but not very convinced, as the critique seems rather applicable to Didion herself. Maybe she was, for this reason, the ideal reviewer.

the critique seems rather applicable to Didion herself

I don't know if I agree here! I also only have access to these opening paragraphs, but reading them over her accusations are: cultural accesorising (an interesting one as arguably much of our culture has become this!), infantilism and self-obsession. Out of those three the only sin I could see someone saying Didion has is the last one, but even there the very nature of her work means she is constantly confronted with things that are alien to her and requiring at least some curiosity to analyse, while Allen's world, being fiction, can afford to be more insular.

Nedlene Grendel: random guess - they don't want to explain themselves for doing something that cannot be justified to their audience for technical reasons only that point to skills appropriate for contests of dominance

Will give this a listen

For your listening pleasure, here's our deep-dive on Joan Didion's conservatism—her Sacramento roots, her early writing for National Review, why she loved Barry Goldwater (and hated Ronald Reagan), and much more. Our guest? The great Sam Tanenhaus. Enjoy!https://t.co/04u8xopsb2

— Matthew Sitman (@MatthewSitman) January 13, 2022

really enjoyed that

Yes, terrific podcast.

really excellent discussion, thanks for sharing