even though the description of LA sounds like gibberish to me, who has never stepped a foot in the US, this collection of essays still managed to be quite interesting !

From the book....

“I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.”

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Didion's greatest two-word sentence.....

https://www.thecut.com/2021/12/joan-d...

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My family moved from a small town in New Hampshire to the SF Bay Area when I was age 7. There was no “Silicon Valley” then. If Didion were writing about California today, I am sure a new volume would include her unique take on the land of tech. Since my childhood, I have traveled all over California. In addition to those travels, I spent my first two years going to college in Orange County before transferring to Berkeley. And five years after college living in LA County before returning to the Bay Area. During that time in LA, my wife and I made the drive to San Bernardino to look after my aunt.

The first essay is about San Berdoo and her prose is Chandleresque, as in this opening paragraph……

“This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.”


I am not surprised Didion considers her cover essay on the Haight in the 60’s to be her best. I finally read it a year ago online. The dark underbelly didn’t surprise me. I was in middle school at the time and found the behavior of older Boomers somewhat dismaying. Charles Manson knew where to look for confused runaways to build his cult.

What I didn’t realize was that almost no one understood her Haight piece after it came out. She was really bothered by this……

“The [Bethlehem] piece was important to me. And after it was printed I saw that, however directly and flatly I thought I had said it, I had failed to get through to many of the people who read and even liked the piece, failed to suggest that I was talking about something more general than a handful of children wearing mandalas on their foreheads. Disc jockeys telephoned my house and wanted to discuss (on the air) the incidence of “filth” in the Haight-Ashbury, and acquaintances congratulated me on having finished the piece “just in time,” because “the whole fad’s dead now, fini, kaput.” I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.”

When a more recent Didion book came out, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” I saw an interview with her in which she surprised the questioner by saying she regretted becoming a writer. “I should have become a physicist instead,” Didion declared.

That’s hindsight, of course.

A matching event to the Summer of Love was Woodstock, two years later. Today there’s Burning Man, which has something called the Playa Restoration Team to clean up and restore the desert in a month-long effort. This was not the case with Woodstock, where the flower children left behind a garbage dump.

https://www.google.com/search?q=woods...

The excellent Slouching Towards Bethlehem essay.....

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2...

”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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3.5 stars. as usual i loved didion's writing but not all essays resonated with me (which i'm sure i would have liked more if i had known what she was talking about haha) regardless, i'm still excited to read more of her works.

my favorite essays:
some dreamers of the golden dream
on keeping a notebook
on self-respect
goodbye to all that

While I personally prefer the magazine reporting mode of Didion over the more personal essay type mode, it is very easy to see how her distinctive voice carved out her place as a definitive non-fiction author of the 20th century. I particularly enjoyed her stuff on Hollywood in the 1960s in this collection, and I look forward to more from her in the future

Just unbelievably good. I'm not the right person to write about Joan Didion, but my God, she is real and she can write.

my friend gave me this essay collection for my 22nd birthday with the inscription that ‚not a single word in this was unnecessary‘. I kinda disagree, but nonetheless loved it.
joan didion in the late 60‘s was a journalist working for publications like the new york times magazine, vogue and the saturday evening post. slouching towards bethlehem was her 1968 debut where she collected previously published essays that she wrote in the last two years.
essentially this book is a polaroid snapshot into the west coast of the sixties, the guardian says that our perception of 1960‘s california exists largely because of didion. she pioneered what was later called ‚new journalism‘, a kind of reporting where the writer immerses themselves into the community that they‘re portraying and essentially becomes a part of it. this is taken to a beautifully prosaic and melancholic, philosophical extent in the title giving essay ‚slouching towards bethlehem‘ about haight street and the san fransisco based countercultural movement we have come to associate with woodstock and hippie culture. essays like this or the ones about marriage in las vegas or leaving new york felt personal and fast paced. but especially through the last half of the book I felt a certain slump, many people who were prominent figures at the time are unknown to me, the references can be hard to understand, not because they are difficult but because this book is essentially a contemporary piece of journalism that referenced popular culture of exactly that time.

"I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder."



Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion's seminal essay collection detailing life in Northern California, most notably the 1960s counter culture. The title essay contrasts Didion's impressions of San Francisco hippie culture with its most idealized utopian representations. The "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" title comes from W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming." Yeat's famous line from that poem, "The center cannot hold" works brilliantly in this essay and (in my mind at least) echoes through the rest of the collection. Through Didion's words, we feel transported to this time and place, but it was already a transitory place when Didion was writing about it, and you feel that it is already fading into story: “The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.”

Attending UC Berkeley and living in a student co-op (Barrington Hall) that was called "the last bastion of 60s counter culture," I felt something like nostalgia at the feel and the texture of these stories, and the sometimes idealized but deeply imperfect past Didion describes. “Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of it would count.” 4.5 stars

Everyone I know who reads a lot or considers themselves writers has told me to read Joan Didion. I always cringe and go the other way when too many people tell me to do the same thing. I’m not sure where, or when, this resistance to Didion started. But it has somehow manifested itself in my psyche.

During my first semester at Antioch University, Rob Roberge, in one of his brilliant seminars, made a few comical references to her. Not her writing, but of Didion, or more precisely the cult of Didion – much to the disapproval of my fellow students – so furthering the hype that I figured I had to finally discover just what all the brouhaha was about.

Didion can write. Her descriptive narratives that make up the chapters in Slouching Towards Bethlehem prove that she can. Yet it is the “her” in her descriptive narratives that I tend to not want to experience. Maybe I’m just too jaded with preconceived ideas, or I’ve set my expectations too high. Whatever the case, I can appreciate the craft – yet find her attitude/ego too much to wade through.

Funny, but this is probably what people say about my writing. Hmmmmmmm.......

n  

"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."

n
Somehow, I usually read Didion on a blue night, when it's so bright outside that I open my curtains to search for the moon; instead, what greets me is a pale hue of blue sky. When I read Blue Nights, I had a similar experience. These are the kind of nights that reminds a reader of what she is, of what she is not: "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give." Oh how I would love to teach Didion's "On Self-Respect," if only to garner the provocative perspective of a generation not yet born when she experienced and wrote this collection.

People debate the essay form often; some think it is simply nonfiction, some are not even sure about the distinction between nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir, and the personal essay. The art of nonfiction is intrinsically disconcerting and perhaps intentional in its derived eclecticism. Still, it is beautiful. Thank goodness we have modern essayists like Leslie Jamison to remind us of the form, an essayist who in my opinion, resembles Didion in style and concept. Any debate of the essay as an art form, should be silenced by Didion's slouching. Why did I take so long to read this, I asked myself as I palmed my forehead, for I drooled through each page, not even noticing when it was time to clear my desk for office hours with students.

These essays illuminate the America of the 1960s that will never exist again, and yet it is the America of today - the odd juxtaposition confuses, I know. Didion has managed to illustrate a landscape of hurt and pain, of music and money, of politics, drugs, rehabilitation, and gain. This is New York, this is California, this is a slouch towards Bethlehem. I was moved by her memoirs Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking; however, with this book, I was inspired by not only the stories and the essay form, but also by the art of the craft of narrative nonfiction in some of her pieces, this art that places a writer within the center of observation, and yet silences her persona.
n  

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

n
Didion was a compulsive notetaker and eavesdropper. Because of this, we get stories about: the Los Angeles Santa Ana, a party in Beverly Hills, a story of Sacramento, a "hallucinatory" view of New York, a riff "on morality," a behind-the-scenes look at a Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, an intense look at acid, alcohol, promiscuity, and all of the hurt that evolves with flashing. Some things we see, we know we'll never see again.

I loved reading "Goodbye to All That," Didion's meditation on New York City, a place she loved and loathed, the city wherein she lost herself. Yet my favorite essay was "Where the Kissing Never Stops," an essay which allowed me to view myself, to think about those intrinsic values placed aside for work; after all, isn't this the beauty of the personal essay, that it teaches us something about ourselves? I found oneness with Joan Beaz, the artist, humanitarian, renegade, and recluse; the woman whose life Didion explores in this piece. Perhaps this is one of those essay collections that leaves each of us with something of ourselves:
n  

The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.

n

It's a pleasure to discover a great writer somewhat later in life, one whom you had never personally engaged with despite hearing their name mentioned here and there for years. This book of classic essays by Joan Didion was my first encounter with her writing, and I was not disappointed. Her essays on morality and self-respect, as well as her vignettes from the reporting of a murder trial, 60s-era counterculture in California, and her own life as a young woman in New York City, evinced a level of elegance and quiet wisdom that was humbling. Some writers force you to pause, read, and reread to fully absorb a piece of knowledge which they're trying to impart to you. They don't just hand you their message on a plate, even if the plate is made of beautifully ornamented prose, but make you work a bit to absorb it. Didion's writing is like that. She displays a level of grace that is hard to find in writers today: a mixture of being at once self-possessed, reserved, skeptical, and honest about things. She sheds some light on her philosophy about how to carry oneself in her self-respect essay, first published in Vogue Magazine decades ago. Among other things, it's a byproduct of learning how to take accountability for ones own life and actions. That may sound simple, but in reality it is something that one has to consciously choose.

The essays in this collection were uneven, but the strongest ones were truly unforgettable. The backdrop to most of it is a harsh California landscape with which I'm as yet unfamiliar in my own life, but her New York essay was so visceral, across a span of decades and even cultural barriers, that I felt I could immediately imagine what her life must've been like there. It is a gift to be able to collect the wisdom that a brilliant person left behind in their writings, and I plan to collect more from her in future.

like with any didion work, she always approaches her subjects with such precision and purpose. every language choice is intentional, every sentence is so eloquent, every detail is meticulously written. she perfectly captures the essence of 1960s california and its cultural politics, somehow making me nostalgic for a place and time i never even experienced. i haven’t read much else on the subject, but i can’t imagine anyone writing about california as well as joan didion.

my fave essays were: ‘some dreamers of the golden dream’, ‘slouching towards bethlehem’, ‘on keeping a notebook’, ‘goodbye to all that’.