Joan Didion

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

patricia lockwood makes an excellent case for her in the introductory essay to this book, and i think, pretty objectively, joan didion gave great interviews, so it's prob worth buying: https://bookshop.org/books/joan-didion-the-last-interview-and-other-conversations/9781685890117

Where I Was From is notes from her lifelong trek through legacies of illusion, coming to grips with the Californias of heroic individualism and artificial paradise of water and land politics,the white pioneer destiny, fed to the childhood heads of her generation and so many before, some since: familiar enough in sum, but she fills in the details of her experience and others', from ancestors barely avoiding the fate of the Donner Party, to delusions of some Jack London characters and her own, in River Run, also the real-life citizens of Lakewood, shining suburban island tied to military contracts during the Cold War and after or "after," lots of other people and ties: the rhythmic development of all this is amazing (and "was" from is right, right as she can make it, with no desire to break with the people, places, and things she's loved, though memory is most of that now---prob no illusion of breaking entirely with the other stuff, the mad insidious bullshit, but she seems to be sitting there waiting at the end, having gotten this far.)

I finished LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN: a 2021 collection of essays. Information about the essays is poor: the book should have a simple list indicating the provenance and context of each, but only has a date after each.

The Foreword by Hilton Als (who?) is bad.

The first 6 are short essays from 1968. They may be the best material in the book. They don't outstay a welcome. Didion is at a certain kind of peak here - in the simple sense that she was a "great documenter of 1968 CA", or whatever.

"Why I Write" is a 1976 talk on her writing and imaginative process. "Telling Stories" is a 1978 recollection of writing short stories in the 1950s and 1960s, and notes that has written none since and doesn't feel comfortable with the form.

"Some Women" (1989) starts off about photographic studios and models in general, then turns into an essay about photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Possibly this would be explained if we had the context, eg: maybe this was really always presented as an essay about Mapplethorpe.

"The Long-Distance Runner" is about director Tony Richardson. It appears to be the foreword to a posthumous memoir by him. It's quite interesting to learn that Didion and her family were so close to Richardson, who was making films way back before she was known as a writer.

"Last Words" is a longer essay about Ernest Hemingway, on the occasion of the publication of a posthumous work. It contains elements of appreciation and even of "close reading", and may be somewhat significant in clarifying her adherence to, admiration for, Hemingway, in style and narrative outlook. She then spends much time criticising people for publishing writing (including letters) that Hemingway didn't choose to publish.

"Everywoman.com" (2000) is a very of-its-time, late-90s / dot com sort of era, article about Martha Stewart - a very successful businesswoman who I believe has been very popular in the US but has never made such a dent in the awareness of my own country. Didion spends time rather needlessly arguing with others for their complaints about Stewart, as a way to get her own contrary view forward. The view is rather simple: people (women) like Stewart because she is a successful businesswoman and they'd like to be like that. The materials of this essay - lots of corporate-speak - do not make for a good text when transposed into Didion's typically inclusive rendition, ie: one in which she repeats corporate phrases and titles as fully and repetitively as possible, as though to laconic effect.

Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.

She also occasionally goes in for the notes of faux-naiveté or lyricism that others have found in her writing. That woman, quoted upthread here, who trashed Didion in about 1979 was good at seeing how repetitive her style was, not just in its flatness but in the particular tactics that she used to relieve the flatness. One that I don't like is her, I think the word is, paratactic style, when she says "and ... and ... and", as though this is a canny literary effect, or as though it conveys being, as an ilxor once said, "overcome by unexpected emotion". I find it rather adolescent, and certainly mannered. The sentences from Hemingway that she quotes admiringly are precisely like this, so she is fairly open, implicitly, about having taken this stylistic idea from an admired precursor. I don't think it's great in Hemingway either.

Didion has a mystique of writing. She talks quite preciously or pretentiously about the experience of writing, the task of the writer, the nature of writing, and so on. One of her claims is that writing is always aggressive (p.44), which is only plausible or true at such a level of abstraction or generality that it has little purchase. It might be more productive to consider how Joan Didion's style, specifically, is sometimes aggressive, while tending to dissemble this.

When I mention a mystique of writing, the best antidote to it that I can think of it might be a long-ago LRB review by Ian Sansom, basically saying that writers like to go on about how hard writing is but actually it's easy compared to other kinds of work. Perhaps a partial truth, but just as useful as Didion's. That review is here:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n23/ian-sansom/whamming

In these remarks I have tended to focus on the annoying and poor aspects of Didion's writing, but it may be fair to say that first half-dozen essays, which are quite brisk and do report on actual things, have more worth than that.

Hilton Als (who?)

oh he put out one of the best essay collections i’ve ever read a few years ago, called white girls. pretty regular new yorker contributor

Yeah, was gonna say that. Haven't read his intro or anything else in the collection, but The Year of Magical Thinking and Where I Was From, which I mentioned upthread, are contributions to world literature, though cost her almost almost all her writing and other life, a lot of loss and endeavor to get there.
Seems fitting, since WIWF is from the California Children of the Pioneers mythos, very gradually seeing all through that, closer and closer to home.

Thirding White Girls

I know it's late but you can read that WA piece - and a lot of the older NYRB articles in general - by putting the URL in the Internet Archive and going to the earlier incarnations. It's actually quite short by NYRB standards.

Didion writes with the plainness, and / or carefulness, that we expect from her. I quickly come to realise, again, that one of her typical effects is to report what people say, within this flat style, and thus make them look silly or vainglorious. I ask myself why this effect is achieved and I think: well, it's a bit like letting them speak, then, rather than responding, applauding or reflecting, just leaving silence, and thus making them appear to "fall flat". This, roughly, seems to me one of the characteristic strategies of her whole career.

This is a great observation! Something that's annoyed me that I haven't seen put into words before. Didion's not the only writer who does this. And obviously it's a staple of reality show editing.

What annoys you about it? Curious.

Thanks, poster Chuck Tatum. I had to think a bit before I could articulate this small observation.

xpost

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

Imagine someone (not) reacting to you like that in real life and it’s clear why it’s annoying.

the style referred to entered journalism (or anyway this is my under-informed guess) via the younger new yorker style-switch from a youthful over-admiration of henry james to the golden-bowl guilt phase of absorbing imitating and parodying hemingway and his mentor gertrude stein: whose combined shtick was (a) less is more, let the subtext sing in the air stripped of any DO-YOU-SEE-style announcement* plus in particular stein's penchant for repetition as a device for variation of mode

*where "not saying it" is a mark of shared sensibility: we needn't comment-explain bcz we all already get it (which narrowing of the "we" -- as chuck above suggests -- is actually kind of a betrayal of journalism i guess, certainly a super-complex ethical-aesthetical line that the NYer created and then made its early home in )

yes i am meant to be cleaning my kitchen floor and not at all on this thread, yell at me next time i post plz

"less is more" = leaving out the (b) = stein's use of repetition as a forensic device

I'm relieved to see that I broadly agree with Mark S, though without knowing enough about New Yorker magazine history.

I like his reference to a "betrayal of journalism".

Perhaps it's the unprocessed need for the writer to seem smarter than the people they're observing. I guess there's a line between allowing someone the space to damn themselves (which is fine) and unfairly making someone seem like a phoney (which might say more about the author than the subject).

― Chuck_Tatum

This is true, but this approach starts to ebb around the 1980s. It's why I admire Miami and the later work over the more famous early stuff.

I think it's important for the writer of features and reviews to know when to let the quote have some space around it, for the reader to fill, having established context. The writer also has to be choosy about quotes, not just pick the best or worst lines, but also not just stringing a lot of lines together, beyond just enough of the latter to give the idea, if that's what the artiste mainly does. I've had some hard times with that kind of writing, but it's worth doing, I think--of course some readers, incl. some editors want every damn thing spelled out. I even had one editor who told me to "spoonfeed," in so many words. I don't go around that joint no more.

As a reader, I find it offputting to have the writer jumping in there to explain everything, unless I'm reading an instruction manual or dispatch from a country/situation I've barely heard of etc.

I'm not talking about leaving space in "hard journalism," that is. The harder it is the more I want to be told about it.

anticipation: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/arts/design/joan-didion-hammer-museum-hilton-als.html

Who cares if she staged the photo in the article for a Williams Sonoma photo op? She tried to write.

betrayal of journalism my ass---in all the things I've read, some of her later writing, she provided the context, and so do the better New Yorker writers, rather jump in there with commentary, lecture points, that Gopnik Thurman etc "polymath" ponderosa

She did warn people not to forget she's in the room (as they tended to because she was so small and quiet, she said), because she's there to getcha (that was earlier though, I may never get back that far)

LOA wrapping up the trilogy this fall:

https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/9781598537871-185x300.jpg

I am excited to read the stage version of Magical Thinking