excited to read more of joan didion, i absolutely adored her storytelling

Do Joan Didion som sa zamilovala pri čítaní jej románu Play It As It Lays. Od tej doby som si chcela prečítať jedny z jej celosvetovo známych esejí. Do rúk sa mi túto jar dostala zbierka The White Album, v ktorej sa autorka sústreďuje na Kaliforniu alebo celkovo aj USA 60. a 70. rokov minulého storočia. Učiť sa o tejto dobe plného zmien bolo z pohľadu sčítanej žurnalistky zaujímavé. Dozvedela som sa veľa o spoločenských, politický a environmentálnych hnutiach. Zistila som, ako vyzeral Hollywood a vyššia trieda privilegovaných belochov. Aj keď bol tento náhľad do sveta Kalifornčanov zaujímavý, viacero esejí mi nevravelo nič. Esej o kilometrovom úseku diaľnice, múzeu či priehrade mi prišli také nedosiahnuteľné, ako keby ja som chcela Američanovi hovoriť o Sitine, budove Filozofickej fakulty Univerzity Komenského či Popradskom plese. Joan Didion má teda množstvo materiálu, ktorý asi nikdy nepochopím, s ktorým sa nikdy nestotožním, no stále môžem aspoň obdivovať jej štýl písania a nápadité rozprávanie.

116th book for 2018.

I don't get why everyone loves Didion's writing so much.

She comes across as a rich outsider, who rejoices in being snarky about everyone else. Here in her collection of essays from the late-1960s/early-1970s she's snarky about the black panthers, 2nd wave feminism (enfeebling of women!), the movie industry, the music industry, and even carpool lanes. She drops names like crazy (saying she's a co-godparent with Roman Polanski didn't date well), and mentions more than once the shrimp cocktails she's eating in room service.

There are occasional essays here that dated better, in particular her discussion of a Vietnam solider's burial in Hawaii, but not enough to make reading this collection worthwhile

Now having read several of her books, I am convinced that people have mistaken her snide remarks and self-important style for actual intellectualism, which is sadly lacking in this and other collections of her work.

1-star.

I am continuing my reading of Joan Didion's complete work in the order of publication. The White Album is a book of essays written mostly in the 1970s. The best of them is the title essay, The White Album," followed by the (mostly) travel essays in Section IV. I think no one in 20th century America wrote more interesting essays than Joan did.

What I like most about her nonfiction is her avoidance of taking a stand. As a result, what she writes does not date like the work of other authors whose opinions themselves seem dated. For instance, there are a few paragraph about a recording session of The Doors at which Jim Morrison is late. When he finally arrives, everyone else in the room avoids making any eye contact with him. It is a classic moment, and one could see that The Doors were just about finito.

Overrated. I was surprised to find this book so superficial and tedious. Judging by this book alone, Didion's repution exceeds her talent.

There are some nice turns of phrase and the occasional insight but most of her essays are underwhelming. Didion's style is repetitive, which annoyed me because it's just lazy spending so much time repeating and enumerating things. She likes to use fancy words but it doesn't make her look intelligent. She overuses "inchoate". The very last chapter (on life guards and orchid growers in Malibu) was the best one.

Didion as a narrator often radiates apathy. She's not interested or interesting. She manages to make the sixties and seventies sound dull, which is a feat in itself. Of all the things one could talk about when speaking of Hawaii, she chooses to focus on rich people in a hotel. Why should I care? Because she happens to be one of them? She also drops names of well-known people she rubs shoulders with, like that in itself is a newsworthy story. She mentions Roman Polanski a bunch of times, Eldridge Cleaver. Any other rapists we should know about? She mentions Sammy Davis jr., whose girlfriend was raped by Bill Cosby in I believe this time period. There's a story to tell here all right but Didion doesn't tell it.

The lowest point was her rant on the women's movement. It was interesting how she snapped out of her usual sullen detachment to berate these women. Yes, how dare they aspire to be happy, these Marxists acting like little children. According to Didion all feminists are Marxists having a tantrum and they can only see things in black and white. She claims in a decidely black and white essay. Writing this she was so angry she forgot to use actual arguments, to present evidence that's more than anecdotal. It takes a particular kind of self-delusion for women like Didion to use their platform to shit on feminists when they themselves are standing on the shoulders of generations of women's rights activists without whom they wouldn't have had their platform to begin with.

Maybe Didion should have tried participating in one of those feminist consciousness-raising sessions. It might have broadened her horizon, let her out of that stifling bubble of privilege she always moves in. Or at least have some empathy for the people who dared to take decisions she wouldn't. But she just kept flying to Hawaii to stay at the rich folk hotel instead of filing for divorce. Look in the mirror, Didion.

My first time reading Didion. I love the way she puts herself in her writing. I sometimes distrust writers who portray others while keeping themselves out of the picture, it seems kind of cold, all that objectivity. Didion seems to go the opposite way, and I find this much more stimulating, and personal. I particularly loved her writing on California, Bogota, and Doris Lessing. I will be reading much more by her.

CI RACCONTIAMO STORIE PER VIVERE



C’è chi trova lo stile di Joan Didion irritante e artificioso, e la accusa di prendersi troppo sul serio, di mettersi sempre al centro della narrazione.
Io no.
A me piace la sua enfasi, mi piacciono le sue ripetizioni, il suo cominciare e finire periodi consecutivi con frasi identiche, l’uso che fa della congiunzione e (come direbbe Martin Amis, batte perfino una canzone di Leonard Cohen), il suo ritmo magnetico, la sua melodia, la sua ricerca di un’eco, il suo incedere a colpi di ‘mi ricordo’.
Amo la sua scrittura evocatrice che rispecchia sempre la sua personalità.
Scrive e riscrive, batte a macchina ogni frase e ogni pagina più e più volte, come cominciò a fare da adolescente con Hemingway, costruisce un incedere, compone una musica di parole.

C’è chi la trova snob e priva d’ironia.
Io no.
A me piace da matti questa donna che dall’alto del suo metro e cinquanta per quaranta chili scarsi affronta assassini, presidenti, star e passanti mentre mi spiega cosa mette in valigia e mi racconta il suo referto psichiatrico.
Trovo molto ironica la sua presunta mancanza d’ironia.
E mi pare che il suo essere al centro della scena e del racconto apra prospettive nuove e conceda spazio, trasformi gli oggetti in soggetti, moltiplichi le angolazioni da cui guardare alla stessa cosa.



The White Album è una raccolta di saggi e reportage giornalistici, del tipo che hanno reso famoso nel mondo il cosiddetto new journalism (Capote docet).
Didion considera la nonficton come la scultura, e cioè dare una forma al lavoro di ricerca, d’indagine. Mentre la fiction è come dipingere, acquerelli, pennellate che anche se cancellate e riscritte rimangono in trasparenza.

In queste pagine non c’è inizio, e neppure finale: in mezzo ci sono tante storie, e c’è la storia di Joan.
Fino al punto di raccontare i giorni passati a letto con malditesta micidiali, l’emicrania che la tortura sin da piccola, le cefalee, i test che ha fatto in una clinica psichiatrica di Santa Monica, il referto finale.



Scrivere della realtà, un po’ della politica, soprattutto della cronaca, della vita sociale, dei costumi, delle cose di tutti i giorni - farlo con fantasia intelligenza acume e ironia, curando moltissimo lo stile - mettere tanto di sé, la propria personalità e anche la propria vita, i propri gusti e disgusti.
Perché da bambina voleva fare l’attrice, e poi capì che scrivere è un tipo di recitazione, e cioè mostrarsi a un pubblico di lettori per pronunciare battute, solo che il dialogo è tuo e non scritto da qualcun altro, solo che stai interpretando te stessa e non un qualche personaggio.


Al Pacino in “Panico a Needle Park” di Jerry Schatzberg, 1971, uno dei film sceneggiati da Joan Didion insieme al marito John Dunne. Dunne, la cui morte Joan racconta magistralmente in “L’anno del pensiero magico”, era lo zio di Griffin Dunne, attore protagonista in “Fuori orario” di Martin Scorsese e in “Un lupo mannaro americano a Londra” di John Landis.

In queste pagine istantanee dell’anima: la casa che i Reagan si fecero costruire a spese dello stato, il sistema delle acque in California, una session di registrazione dei Doors che non comincia perché Jim Morrison non arriva, la coltivazione delle orchidee, Georgia O’Keeffe, le Black Panthers, gli assassini della setta di Charles Manson, la villa museo Getty, Doris Lessing, le Hawaii, Bogotà, Holliwood, Malibu, il vento e gli incendi, il femminismo, i bikers movies, le autostrade e il tipo di guida che richiedono…

I write a lot about sentimentality. Or, rather, how much I dislike sentimentality, in literature. (How annoying, my need to drone on about it. I apologize! And I apologize in advance for my future rants and repetitions on the subject.)

It's true. I can't stand it. Can't stand the experience of an author leading me to his or her beating, fluttering heart, via conveyor belt. FEEL THIS, says the author, oh, isn't it sweet?? Doesn't that make you want to cry? Cry, please, and here's a hand embroidered hankie. My mother stitched it, on her deathbed, at the tender age of 26.

It doesn't even need to be that obvious to get my panties in a knot. It just needs to be a finger, gravely pointing - look, look at this very meaningful thing, the thing I'm writing about, clutch it like a teddy bear, sleep with it at night, sniffling into the pillows. I don't want that finger pointing. I give the finger to finger pointing.

So here I am with Joan Didion, my first time with Ms. Didion, by the way, and gall darnit. She's got to be the least sentimental writer ever, or one of them (alongside Jerzy Kozinski), and I'm not having the sister-from-another-mother experience I anticipated. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving her compact style. I'm loving her powerful intellect. I'm loving her plugged in connections (she sat in on a recording session with The Doors, for goodness' sake). I also love the last line of each of the essays in this collection - always a succinct, knock-it-right-out-of-the-park summation that leaves you in admiration of the way this woman writes.

But. I wonder, often, when she mentions things like her diagnosis with MS as a passing comment that carries as much importance as the weather, seven Tuesdays ago... does this woman feel anything? How strange. Well of course she does. She's a human being. Her omissions say probably a great deal. But these essays are very hit and miss for me.

They are "hit" when they touch on subjects that interest me - the 60s counterculture, the Getty Museum, Georgia O'Keeffe and Doris Lessing - but they "miss" when the subject isn't inherently meaningful to me. LA highways. The Hoover Dam. I find my eyes crossing a bit at her over intellectualizing of these mundane topics. Even her criticism of the Feminist Movement (how dare women want childish dreams like fun, love, and fulfilment in their lives?) falls pretty flat for me, despite its daring and perhaps unique viewpoint, coming from an empowered woman.

I think it's because Joan Didion the person doesn't enter the equation much. Joan Didion's brain does, and that's a beautiful thing. But it leaves the reader in a strange place. If you aren't interested on an intellectual level about what Ms. Didion is writing about, it's unlikely that her writing will engage you. At least, that was my experience.

There's a part of "In the Islands" in which she discloses that she, her husband and daughter are on vacation in Hawaii for a week. They are there in lieu of filing for divorce. They are kind to each other. They lay on the beach. They don't say things they might have said. It's uncomfortable. Oh, I sighed. Finally, a portrait of this person's state of mind. She has a state of mind! It was a huge relief and propelled my reading forward. Never mind that the following bits about Hawaii then slowly ground my interest to a halt. Never mind the skimmed pages (I'm not proud of that, by the way). My interest resumed again a few essays later, when I learned the author suffers often from debilitating migraines. Ah! There she is again! The relief! She shares about the blinding pain, and how when it finally subsides:

"...There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings."

It turns out this reader who laments sentimentality has learned that it's actually a necessary component. Don't tell me to care, definitely don't do that. But show me somehow that you do. Then, I'm all in.

Her essays bring back thoughts and memories of my own experiences growing up in the 60s and 70s. Very much enjoyed this series of essays.

3.25 stars

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live" is the well-known first line of this collection, and of the title essay, and it has probably played a role in my avoiding Joan Didion until now. I had always attributed it to a somewhat sentimental conception of writing and reading, but now I'm glad I gave her writing a chance, and glad I decided to reread the title essay. In one section, she imagines a woman standing on a ledge on the sixteenth floor of an apartment building; on my first reading, I thought that Didion didn't attach importance to whether or not the woman would jump, or why, but to "the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge."

On my second reading, I realized that she is not making an argument, exactly, but describing an emotional state (or an existential crisis, let's say, that threatened to become permanent), roughly coinciding with the late 60s, in which she could no longer invest life with meaning- no longer tell herself stories, in other words. She cannot convince herself of any particular reason why the woman might jump, or not. And this explains why I was disappointed on my first reading of the essay- it is not really "about" The Doors, Eldridge Cleaver, The Black Panthers or Manson, as I had originally thought, but about Didion's inability to draw connections among them, to find any coherence in the world around her- almost the opposite of a story, in other words. This turns out to have been the perfect approach to The Doors, whom she describes sitting among "masses of wires and banks of the ominous blinking electronic circuitry with which musicians live so easily", and Jim Morrison:

...unspecified tensions seemed to be rendering everyone in the room catatonic...The curious aspect of Morrison's arrival was this: no one acknowledged it. He spoke almost in a whisper, as if he were wresting the words behind some disabling aphasia...Robby Krieger picked at his guitar, and said that he needed a fuzz box. The producer suggested that he borrow one from the Buffalo Springfield, who were recording in the next studio. Krieger shrugged. Morrison sat down again on the leather couch and leaned back. He lit a match. He studied the flame a while and then very slowly, very deliberately, lowered it to the fly of his black vinyl pants. Manzarek watched him...There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever.

The 60s- the decade she lived through and therefore, as a writer, wanted to chronicle- end before she can understand what's happening, and then all that's left are some Scientology tracts and a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land in a closet in an abandoned seaside home. But isn't that the way time always seems to pass?

Didion has a cold detachment that is sometimes condescending and off-putting (in my opinion, at least). She has a certain way of dryly quoting others that seems to expose the hidden vacuity at the center of their endeavor, and this sometimes seems unjustified. In "Good Citizens" for example, she describes being at a club owned by supporters of Eugene McCarthy about a week before the California primary:

The Beverly Hills Eugene's, not unlike Senator McCarthy's campaign itself, had a certain deja vu aspect to it...the gesture towards a strobe light was nothing that might interfere with "good talk"...[and] there at Eugene's I heard the name "Erich Fromm" for the first time in a long time, and many other names cast out for the sympathetic magic they might work...

Well okay, but there's no pleasing some people. What kind of light would have been sufficient to avoid cliche? And is it really so bad if a light helps to facilitate a "good talk"? Maybe you had to be there, but I just don't get it. Meanwhile, if a reader (like me) happens to really like Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, he's left to shrug his shoulders and understand that he's just not sophisticated enough to know why we should all instinctively roll our eyes at the mention of Erich Fromm- fair enough if you think he's worthless, but maybe you should engage with him, explain why. It serves here as lazy shorthand for something that I think you would have had to be part of this particular milieu to get. At her worst, I remember that Didion was a big influence on Bret Easton Ellis- on his laconic style, which has always seemed derived from the assurance that nothing really matters, nothing means anything, and it would take too much energy to look into anyway.

On the other hand, it is this same detachment that allows Didion to write so lucidly about folly, about sound and fury signifying nothing, about people who seem to be refugees from their own time- like the young professionals at something called The Jaycees' 32nd Annual Congress of America's Ten Outstanding Young Men:

There was the belief in business success as a transcendent ideal. There was the faith that if one transforms oneself from an "introvert" into an "extrovert", if one learns to "speak effectively" and "do a job", success and its concomitant, spiritual grace, follow naturally...

It was a cry in the wilderness, and this resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on was a kind of refuge. Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time for "turning attention", for "problems" and "solutions." Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way any more...It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.

Or the leader of a Pentecostal church, busy getting his followers ready for a drive from California to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where God has promised they'll be safe from a coming earthquake, in "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik":

He seemed to be one of those people, so many of whom gravitate to Pentecostal sects, who move around the West and the South and the Border States forever felling trees in some interior wilderness, secret frontiersmen who walk around right in the ganglia of the fantastic electronic pulsing that is life in the United States and continue to receive information only through the most tenuous chains of rumor, hearsay, haphazard trickledown...they participate in the national anxieties only through a glass darkly. In the interior wilderness no one is bloodied by history...

Or fans of biker movies, in a passage that wouldn't have been out-of-place in Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels.

There is always that instant in which the outlaw leader stands revealed as existential hero. There is always that "perverse" sequence in which the bikers batter at some psychic sound barrier, degrade the widow, violate the virgin, defile the rose and the cross alike, break on through to the other side and find, once there, "nothing to say"...bike movies are made for all these children of vague "hill" stock who grow up absurd in the West and Southwest, children whose whole lives are an obscure grudge against a world they think they never made.

In short, she's very attuned to the dissonance among ideology, action, and the psychological motivations that drive people towards those actions, very good at something she ascribes in "The White Album" to Evelyn Waugh: "scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people absorbed in odd games."

It would be nice to believe that this detachment is a purely psychic orientation towards life, a free choice made in a closed system, but I'm not sure it ever is. In Didion's case, she explains in "In Bed" that she suffers from migraines that leave her totally incapacitated multiple times a week, and in "The White Album" that it is during her period of existential crisis that she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Pain is isolating. Pain, unless perhaps you are a Buddhist monk or MMA fighter, engenders solipsism. This is a very unpleasant thing to think about, but there seem to be many factors that complicate the idea that we are free to choose our orientations towards life. As Didion writes, "my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind." But who can say which is the cause and which is the effect?

The more I read of Didion, the more I thought that her occasional tone of condescension might be the result of identification. This seemed confirmed in the short and moving "On the Morning After the Sixties", in which the explicit subject is separation between the individual and the outside world, the passage of time and history:

I am talking about...the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man's own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise...We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, or masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate. To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation...we would make some money and live on a ranch. We would live outside history..

I'm glad that I reread this essay as well. On my first reading, I assumed that I was reading an argument. Now I see that it's an exploration of a worldview (perhaps the hardest one to see, the most mysterious- one's own, not arrived at through any conscious or self-contained process), one that she has more ambivalence about than I first realized, although she does take a stance:

Only one person I knew at Berkley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkley killed themselves not long after. Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recovery which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of America's three-year executive training program. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish that I could...

I'm not sure it's the right one. When I compare her with a contemporary like Mailer, they seem like two sides of the same coin. Mailer threw himself into everything, tried to be everywhere, participated in the game to the fullest. In other words yes, perhaps it's all a game- might as well go for broke. Or as Mailer once put it, "a true actor enjoys his life in any station." That at least seems a little more, well, fun.

Flip the coin a second time, however, and maybe you get Chomsky or Baldwin on the other side. In this case, Didion's worldview could seem especially impoverished. Protesting Vietnam, for instance, may not have changed man's fate in the sense she's talking about, and in fact I don't believe that anything can, but it did change the fates of individuals. And yes, it's probably true that any social action I ever take part in will be "just one more way of escaping the personal"; but even if that's the case, even if Didion has correctly pinpointed the genesis of all human endeavor in a desperation to escape (which sounds uncannily like Erich Fromm, by the way), maybe in some cases the variant of escape is more important than the motivation. There is something distasteful about her formulation: "Yes, I would risk my freedom and my life trying to better society with the rest of you, if only I weren't smart enough to realize it's all for naught..."

And yet I can't help feeling that she is probably right to be wary of our odd games. I can empathize with her, which I think is why I found this short (4 pages) essay so affecting. I would also like to join the world, the barricade, deal myself into history, sit down at the table with Mailer knowing the stakes, knowing that I might be wrong- what else is there to do? But I also share Didion's hesitation- you might be wrong.

In the similarly short "At the Dam", she tells us that, at seemingly arbitrary moments in her life, she receives visitations from the Hoover Dam; in New York, in Los Angeles, it materializes in front of her, and she hears the turbines. On one visit (she visits the dam, that is), she writes,

I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.

And that is about as good a description of her writing as I can imagine.

ms. didion exorcises her angst by dissecting her life and society in the most clinical, intellectualized way possible. well i suppose that technique must work for someone. a modern classic, still relevant and probably will remain so forever. but not exactly an endearing experience.