Maybe like 3.5?

joan didion’s most iconic essay collection, and a good place to start if you’re unfamiliar with her work/essay collections in general. the book is split into 3 sections, the first being mainly about california in the 60s, the second being pieces of a more personal nature, and the third being about places she’s travelled to. there are some shorter pieces in this that really help you to make progress in the book while introducing you to joan’s distinct style of prose. where i find this collection really shines for me is in the way didion invokes a sense of time and setting in many of these pieces. that often wins out over her description of people and events for me.

my favorites from each section:
1. some dreamers of the golden dream - about the trial of lucille miller, who was convicted of murdering her husband in san bernardino
2. on keeping a notebook - explores the idea that we keep notebooks to keep in touch with ourselves. also really enjoyed on going home, which dives into family dynamics and memories and the ways that they evolve over time
3. goodbye to all that - recounts her experience of moving to new york in her early twenties

Audiobook….(6 hours and 53 minutes long)….
…..read by Diane Keaton (‘outstanding’ as the voice narrator)
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was first published in 1968.

It was very engaging listening to Diane Keaton read sentences …with her wonderful enunciation choices……
yet reading these essays and articles would allow more time to pause-linger-and digest Joan Didion’s prose deeper…..(I’m sure of it)…
But….
still laidback from a recent Hawaiian vacation…
…soaking in our warm pool while rain ‘poured’ heavily…
Diane Keaton’s voice came through our outside Bluetooth speaker.
It had its own type ‘lingering’ pleasures in itself.

I grew up in this era — which Joan Didion writes about.
I lived here. Still live here. I am quite familiar with the counterculture during the 60’s in the SFBay area — including Monterey and Carmel —Palo Alto - Kepler’s book store in Menlo Park, Stanford- the music jazz festivals - Bob Dylan- the folk ways - the peace movement….etc.

PARTS WERE FUNNY…

MY OWN LOOKING BACK….
As a confused-late-bloomer-aware-teenager myself by the end of the 60’s….from being a gymnast pom-pom wholesome innocent ….
…..who remembers Peter-Pan collars - Kelly green with pink clothes …. matching shoes with handbags…..
I can still remember my own ‘shock’ ‘sightseeing’ and smelling the Haight Ashbury district back in the 60’s [it’s high-end chic today]….but in the 60’s, most parents didn’t want their kid anywhere near the hippie drug scene….(my mom gave me the piercing-killer looks and lecture— STAY FAR AWAY from Haight Ashbury > and DON’T have sex until marriage)….
We knew several ‘nice Jewish kids’ in our community who over-dosed on LSD. I was too afraid - PETRIFIED actually to take drugs….and I didn’t know how to be a flower child. (Admired the artistic talents though from those who made it look natural).
My fashion was too basic (clean cut boring)….
I failed from MOM’S - sex-lecture.
By age 21, enough was enough! I thoroughly enjoyed my first summer obsessively having sex several times a day — had to make up for lost years….
My first words after my first experience —
“That’s it!!!!!….what’s the BIG DEAL?”
Richard said….”hm….not the response he hoped to hear”….but then promised— “it would get better”. It did >> that summer….in Yosemite under waterfalls - etc.
But about the forbidden - anti Haight Ashbury in the 1960’s for ‘good girls’
Interesting—
…..years later, our older daughter lived in the colorful neighborhood—a half block up from Haight Ashbury ….until she moved to Los Angeles.
It gave me a subtle historical pleasure.…..

So….BACK TO THIS BOOK….
….knowing plenty about the 60’s era….
I felt the ‘audiobook format’ worked great for me….and that Diane Keaton was an added treat to listen to. Paul loved it too — chuckling often.
Paul joined me first in the pool….(that Diane Keaton pulled him in.
THEN…..
…..later at our kitchen table while we were making pottery planters from ‘disenfranchised’ tile squares….we kept listening to Diane do her thing —- READ WONDERFULLY….
It’s been an ‘art-project-couple-of-days’ here at home - mixed with rain-warm-water-soaking…..

THESE ESSAYS INSPIRED all kinds of conversations - of …..old memories!!!

Listening to this book with Paul was DEFINITELY ADDED FUN (“The Good Old Days”, he said)…..
Ha….the guy who ‘built’ and was living in a Tree House in Santa Cruz when I first met him …..
When I saw Paul’s gorgeous TREEHOUSE artwork and the stained glass windows ….I thought….”yep….a productive hippie”…..[worked for me]….
Paul went through Jewish conversion at age 9….when his mother married an Orthodox Jew (a couple years after the death of his dad)….His adorable Bar Mitzvah photos are in a photo book in our house.

MORE ABOUT THESE ESSAYS….
The title essay, ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’, examined how society was failing…..[hippies - drugs - anti-establishment]….
Other essays include Joan Baez, John Wayne, influences from Howard Hughes…… etc.
Didion wrote about families, lifestyles, marriages in Los Vegas, misplaced children, morality, home, commune’s, sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, insightful observations about Southern California, and New York City……etc.

Joan Didion had a reputation as one of the greatest writers in the literary world….”master observer”…..
And perhaps it was her gifts of perception, observation, and personal reflections about herself (autobiographical essays), along with her literary writing skills….that made her one of America’s premier writer.

I read “The Year of Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights” yeas ago,(I still own the physical books)….and maybe I should them again — because I don’t remember appreciating her work — not substantially….
In fact …..if my memory is correct - there were aspects of her writing that didn’t sit enthusiastically jolly with me…..
Yet….I DID enjoy these essays….(a non-acid-enjoyable joint-listening trip)…..
So…did Joan Didion change? — [I don’t think so] — but I think I ‘have’.
I’m interested in reading more of her books now -
MUCH MORE than I was years ago!!!

Yep…..”Slouching Towards Bethlehem” has inspired me ‘towards’ …..reading several other of her books (both more essays and her novels).

NEVER a hippie chick: I was too ALL AMERICAN (but I did borrow my friends white go-go boots a few times)….
By the end of these essays…..I was a NEW JOAN DIDION fan……

I absolutely cherished these precious essays…

And last:
May Joan Didion Rest In Peace!

joan forever!

i still like didion's longform (longest form?) writing the best, but in truth no one was doing it like her and no one is doing it like her and no one ever will.

absolutely one of a kind.

bottom line: the very best.

-----------------
tbr review

the best you can look is if you're carrying a copy of this book around as you browse at an indie bookstore

Technically, Joan Didion writes well, very well. On the sentence level, as they say, she's impeccable. Yet I remained unconvinced reading this. This book drips with nostalgia and fear. Of warm childhood and early youth memories, juxtaposed with (the then) present-day troubles.

n   "The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled.”n

This book mostly reports on what seems to be the worst fears for Didion and her audience then: kids getting high on hallucinogens, wives murdering their husbands, the heros once infallible succumbing to illness just as anyone else would (John Wayne, unsurprisingly). Perhaps it's because I'm distrustful of nostalgia, and perhaps it's because I’ve read James Baldwin's essays from this era, that I'm not convinced that the worst thing that was happening in America in the 1960s was hallucinogens becoming popular or the hippie movement or the random unfaithful wife murdering her husband.

There's no effort to explore the reasons for “things falling apart”, but a great effort is made to observe them, coldly in certain cases in what I presume to be journalistic objectivity. Nostalgia is sedative, and a glorious not wholly accurate past serves its purpose when the future seems bleak and the present frightens. And, honestly, I doubt the readers of Vogue and the other places where these essays were published would have wanted a genuine exploration of chaos that erupted during that era. Instead they got well written reportage on California. Undoubtedly Didion’s anxieties must have been real, but this book, at the very least, seems out of touch. The essays “On Keeping A Notebook” and “Goodbye to All That” were very good though.

I read this essay collection – Joan Didion’s first – earlier this year, but of course I had been hearing about it for decades. It and other Didion books like The White Album are famous in a way that few such collections are. And you can easily see why. The best of these pieces open up the possibilities of the essay form, and they show off an enquiring, questing, rigorous mind.

I’ll never forget the book’s opening essay, “Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream,” which on the surface seems like an account of a real-life case of adultery and murder in San Bernardino County. Didion pays attention to scenes you wouldn’t get in an ordinary true crime account: the era, the place, the noir movies everyone must have watched. There’s one remarkable passage where she walks you – or, more likely, drives you – through a neighbourhood, listing all the store names and slogans, and the details accrue and tell you as much about the milieu and atmosphere in which the crime will take place as any CSI report.

Other memorable essays include an affectionate, nostalgic profile of an aging John Wayne; a piece on Carmel, CA neighbours protesting a school for nonviolence run by folk icon Joan Baez (oh how Didion quietly captures her sanctimoniousness); and the bold title essay, set in the counterculture scene in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighbourhood which, in a couple dozen pages, got me to understand more about the movement than a dozen movies and novels.

And there’s the lovely, elegiac (and often quoted) essay, “Goodbye To All That,” about Didion’s few years living in Manhattan as a young woman before she moved to California. It will make you think about your own dreams, aspirations and life-changing decisions.

Not all the essays are as remarkable as these. Some feel perfunctory or overly oblique. But what a voice. What a prose stylist. And, if the comments from my female journalist/writer friends are any indication, what a role model.

“We tell each other stories,” to quote Didion, “in order to live.” Although these stories are over 50 years old, they still tell us so much about what it’s like to be alive.

Beautifully written essays from way back in 1967 from a journalist who successfully captured the essence of America as it woke from its idealistic dream into the deep feeling that all was not all right.

Maybe this is old news for today's world, but I can still express my appreciation for one of the best non-fiction writers of the age, exposing sensationalist murders, the seedy underbelly of the Flower Power movement, and the failed idealism of many other movements... and modes of thought not limited to merely people... but the kind tied directly to place.

Hello, America. Take your blinders off. It's time to see the world as it really is.

”My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

n  n

One of the cornerstones of friendship is developing some level of trust. It might be possible to be friends with Joan Didion, but the very thing that makes her a wonderful dinner companion, her wonderful insights into the human condition, will also be the very thing that will make it difficult to develop an intimacy like one should with a best friend. She talks about this difficulty in one of the essays in this collection. “‘The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people,’ she said. ‘The hardest is with one.’”

She was asked to write an essay about John Wayne, and she wrote this fantastic scene of having dinner with him. I didn’t know what to expect. Was she going to fall in bed with him? Was she going to cut Wayne up into little pieces? Love him or hate him, the man was always consistently himself. The Duke always had to be the Duke. There was no down time from being the American icon of western films. I enjoyed this very Didion observation that she makes about Wayne: ”For a while it was only a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s.”Wayne was renowned for getting everyone at his table drunk, and Didion was no exception.

These essays focus almost exclusively on California. Though, I wouldn’t call this collection an ode to her home state. Let’s just say the Bureau of Tourism for California didn’t choose to use any of her unflinching observations about the state. Her family has deep roots in California. They were early pioneers who invested in land and did very well. She realized this upbringing gave her a different perspective of life. ”I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.”

I will admit I have put off reading Joan Didion because I thought her essays might prove dated. From the very first essay I was disabused of that notion. These pieces are all from the 1960s and, nearly without exception, are as relevant today as they were when they were written. Couldn’t this comment be as insightful about our current situation as it was in the 1960s? ”Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”

I was expecting elegant writing, and certainly I got that, but what surprised me was the muscular nature of her prose. She hits you in the stomach, follows that with an uppercut, and she may not even let you get off the canvas before she hits you again. She might be small, but she is certainly scrappy. Her writing is as tight and crisp as a tuned piano wire. After I finished the book, I read that she had spent hours typing Hemingway’s prose into her typewriter to try and capture some of his style. This Hemingway connection runs counter to my perception of Didion, but maybe it is just an example of how difficult it is to wrap your arms around her and say this is Joan Didion. She would slide away from you and reemerge across the room in dark glasses with a smoldering cigarette trapped between her fingers, uplifted in the air, the smoke forming a question mark. Can you ever really know someone like Joan Didion? She is quiet. She is unassuming. She lets people talk, and when they mention something of interest to her, can’t you just hear her softly saying...tell me why you believe that?

These essays were trending subjects in the 1960s, but now they have, with infinite grace, metamorphosed into historical record. For those who follow my reviews, I can assure you there will be more Joan Didion in my reading queue over the coming months.

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It is a sunny spring afternoon and Spud, Dwayne, Sue Ellen, Bob and me are sitting in Golden Gate Park getting turned on. There are hippies everywhere, as far as the eye can see, all joining hands in one big community of Love. Not far off The Dead are playing one of their endless songs before a group of gyrating girls who can’t be a day over fourteen.

“Hey Dwayne,” Bob says, “don’t bogart that joint, help a brother in need.”

“Sorry man,” Dwayne says, “I wuz thinking about sumthin' I read in the Saturday Evening Post. Creep Forward, Jerusalem. Any of you cats read it too?"

"Yeh," says Bob, "Chick seems to think because she hung out with some junkies on Haight she’s an authority on the drug situation there.”

“What drug situation?” Sue Ellen says, bloodshot eyes sticking out of her head like two radishes in an overgrown garden patch.

“Five-year-olds on acid, man.”

Dwayne laughs and says, “Oh that ain’t nothing, I fed my pet turtle STP once. Critter thought it wuz God Almighty or something, man, I kid you not.”

“Get outta here, you never fed any turtle any drugs, not if I’m the president of the United States of America,” Spud says.

“I swear to you I did. That turtle started bobbing its little head to the tune of a mystery band and sounds came out of its throat, man, all tortured, like it wuz doing an impression of James Brown.”

“Ha ha, far out!”

"Dig this: after a few minutes of James Brown shenanigans it flips over onto its shell and starts doing this spinning trick, very slow at first, then faster and faster like a reverse top, and the shell gets to spinning so fast it levitates a whole foot off the ground, yogi style, and hangs there a full minute. Then suddenly a voice comes booming out of it like the voice of Doom: 'Dwaaaaaaayne,' it says, 'I am your faaaaaather. Everything, Dwaaaaaaaayne, every word you’ve ever spoken, every thought you’ve ever had, every vibe you’ve ever felt, every kiss you’ve ever kissed, every love you’ve ever loved, every chord you’ve ever played, every girl you’ve ever laid, everything, Dwaaaaaaaaayne, was born in the womb of my gullet. My gullet is the origin of what you are, Dwaaaaaaaayne. Without my gullet, you’d be a bullet without a gun, a son without a father, water without rain, pain without dying, a lion without…'"

“Your pet turtle is starting to sound like Allen Ginsberg, man,” Bob says. “Here gimme that, you’re bogarting again. What wuz I saying anyway? Oh yeh, I saw that Didion chick down on the Tenderloin the other day. She wuz wearing a long black trench coat and holding a tiny notebook in her hand. Had a shifty look in her eye. Got bad vibes from her, man. Thought she wuz a narc—or worse, a nun. Turns out she wuz just some journalist taking notes for an article she wuz writing about our so-called lost generation. Wonder what BS she’ll come up with next. She don’t know shit from Shinola about us and I reckon she’s a hundred years old too. Says can’t any of us speak proper English, but let me tell you something: Dwayne’s pet turtle, high or sober, could write a better English than what I seen in Crawling into Soddom or whatever that piece of crap I read was called.”

At this Bob inhales deeply and gazes off into the distance, to where the Golden Gate Bridge, colossus-like in red steel girders, bestrides the magnificence of yet another setting sun.

Slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, the twenty essays of Slouching Towards Bethlehem develop Joan Didion’s dominant impression regarding life in late-20th-century America generally and 1960’s California specifically; and that dominant impression is grim indeed.

Didion, who began making a name for herself as a writer in the 1960’s, through her essays about the counterculture of that era, is always aware of cultural conflict in the California of that era, as when a Salinas matron in “Where the Kissing Never Stops” challenges the very existence of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence by saying, “We wonder what kind of people would go to a school like this….Why they aren’t out working and making money” (p. 42).

In stark contrast to the money-minded perspectives of that Salinas matron, one hears the words of Ira Sandperl, who founded the institute with Baez, saying that “Basically we wanted to turn an unviolent movement into a nonviolent one” (p. 52). His words take on additional pathos when one considers how very violent the 1960’s later became.

Celebrity culture, an important part of California life, is also a core subject of a number of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. "John Wayne: A Love Song" situates Wayne’s legendary status as Western-film icon against his final battle with cancer: “[W]hen John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams. It did not seem possible that such a man could fall ill, could carry within him that most inexplicable and ungovernable of diseases. The rumor struck some obscure anxiety, threw our very childhoods into question” (p. 30).

In a similar vein, Didion’s “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” named for the location of Howard Hughes’s “communications center,” moves to a consideration of the reasons for the contemporary fascination with Hughes’s famed reclusiveness: “That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes…tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake…but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy” (p. 71).

And the title essay, a tough-minded examination of the hippie drug culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, begins with a direct reference to Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” the apocalyptically-themed poem that inspired the book’s title (“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”), and offers Didion’s most direct evocation of the book’s themes:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers….It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. (pp. 84-85)

Any reader expecting to see an idealized, “Summer of Love” portrayal of life in Haight-Ashbury is likely to be bitterly disappointed. In a landscape where the use of marijuana, LSD, amphetamines, and heroin is omnipresent, there are many stories of broken and ruined lives; as a Beat Generation veteran puts it in a mimeographed newsletter that he distributes throughout the district, “Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam” (p. 101).

California has often served as a distillation, a quintessence, of the American Dream – and often, Didion’s reflections on California can be taken on reflections on American life and culture generally. Such reflections come to mind with regard to Didion’s “On Morality,” an essay that begins with a lovely bit of description: “As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot. In fact, it is 119°. I cannot seem to make the air conditioner work, but there is a small refrigerator, and I can wrap ice cubes in a towel and hold them against the small of my back” (p. 157).

Didion further explains that “With the help of the ice cubes I am trying to think”, and that the reason she is trying to think is that The American Scholar has asked for her thoughts on the nature of morality. Accordingly, she writes about a recent and fatal auto accident right there in Death Valley – one where a witness stayed by the body of the young man killed in the accident, so that it would not be eaten by coyotes: “You can’t just leave a body on the highway….It’s immoral” (p. 158). Didion sees this incident as being illustrative of what she calls “wagon-train morality,” meaning “a ‘morality’ so primitive that it scarcely deserves the name, a code that has as its point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good” (pp. 158-59).

How much of that morality of survival for survival’s sake, of “I’ll look out for me, it’s your job to look out for you,” might be at the heart of the American version of individualism? It is a disturbing question to reflect upon, particularly at a time when almost half of the population of the United States cannot be prevailed upon to wear a mask in the midst of a global pandemic that spreads through the micro-droplets that people breathe out – because, you see, wearing a mask would be an infringement on some people’s “liberty” and “freedom.” Meanwhile, as of this writing, the United States of America continues to lead the world in novel coronavirus/COVID-19 cases (52,510,978) and deaths (833,029). Where is our definition of “freedom” taking us?

And “Rock of Ages,” written in 1967 when Alcatraz Island was no longer a federal prison but had not yet become a San Francisco tourist attraction, offers a wistful look at a site that “is covered with flowers now: orange and yellow nasturtiums, geraniums, sweet grass, blue iris, black-eyed Susans. Candytuft springs up through the cracked concrete in the exercise yard. Ice plant carpets the rusting catwalks” (p. 205). There is a wistful, quirky quality to the way Didion describes the abandoned fortress – “the gun turrets empty, the cell blocks abandoned” – and remarks that “It is not an unpleasant place to be, out there on Alcatraz with only the flowers and the wind and a bell buoy moaning and the tide surging through the Golden Gate” (p. 205). Nowadays, of course, there would also be tourists.

Moving from San Bernardino to Salinas, from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara to San Francisco and Alcatraz, from Hollywood to Watts, from Death Valley to the Central Valley, most of the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem focus in a similar way on California as landscape of alienation, where the bright sun shines down on desperate people. It is not a happy message, but Didion communicates it exceedingly well, and captures poignantly the tense and fearful mood of late-1960’s America.

45th book for 2018.

I really liked both the writing and insights in "South and West".

I lived in Los Angeles for a few years, and traveled a fair bit around the state, and fascinated by the late 1960s, so this book should have been an immediate hit for me, but the essays rarely seemed to go anywhere. I would say they were mostly style over substance, but even the style wasn't that good much of the time. She doesn't engage in the subject matter sufficiently; and comes across as condescending and aloof. I am not sure there was one person in the book she wrote about that she actually liked (other than her baby and perhaps her father).

She framed some interesting aspects of California for me, but only two-stars because she never gets beyond her self-absorbed surface reflection.

2-stars.

Not entirely sure what to say about this one, other than I enjoyed it immensely. Didion's prose is about as good as any other contemporary author I've read, and she's got a knack for powerful imagery and seems to know how to drive a point home with real force and emphasis. As someone who was born a stone's throw away from Manhattan, the last essay in this collection, "Goodbye to All That," was among the most powerful for me. There's something hyperreal about New York, and there's certainly something hyperreal about youth, and the combination of the two can be at times explosive, in really disastrous ways.

Not to mention, Didion seems to set both the standard and the methodology for a great many literary essayists to come. After reading this book, I can hear much of Didion in the best contemporary essayists--David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and Hilton Als come to mind. Her influence alone should make this worth reading, but never mind that--if nothing else, it stands on its own.