"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
- The Second Coming, Yeats



“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I'm sure at some point Joan Didion will disappoint. I'm positive the honeymoon period will run out. I'll discover a fatal flaw, a series of articles, or a minor novel that she just 'phoned in', but not yet bitches.

Seriously, if prose could make me pregnant, I would now be Nadya Suleman.

I know this is just the normal hormonal response I get whenever I really seem to mesh or synch with an author or artist. I felt this way when I first read DFW's and McPhee's nonfiction. This is the same brain-storm that happened when I first read Delillo & Bellow's fiction; the same awe I felt when I walked into the Paris Opera and saw that giant Chagall ceiling hanging beyond that infamous, 7-ton bronze and crystal chandelier. Those same chills ran down my spine and flushed my face the first time I swallowed a Vicodin. I felt just as complete the first time I watched a Coen brothers movie. I also felt this the first time I discovered my arm naturally guided my hand to my lap. No, this isn't a revolution. It isn't even revolutionary. It a euphoria and I know it. I get it. I'm already cooling down. But I'm just going to leave the book here on my chest for awhile until my heart slows down a bit.

4,5
Eseje Didion są doskonałe - nieprzewidywalne, uwierające, brutalnie szczere. Obierana przez autorkę perspektywa nigdy nie jest szablonowa, każda jej puenta to niewymuszona maestria.
Nie daję 5 wyłącznie dlatego, że Didion zazwyczaj opisuje świat, który jest mi bardzo daleki i na którym zależy mi w niewielkim stopniu. To świat, którego już nie ma, ale którego nie żałuję. Może to też ciekawy efekt.
Urzekł mnie szczególnie tekst "O szacunku dla siebie samej"
Tłumaczenie i przypisy 10/10, wydanie bardzo zgrabne.
Na pewno nie zapomnę o Joan Didion i będę szukać dalej.

Life is competition, or so I keep hearing- from a mysterious Greek in the Watergate Hotel bar on New Year's Eve, from my friend's father, who told him years ago, "by the time you're 35, you know whether you're a winner or a loser", from my own internal monologue. And yeah, the impulse is to dismiss it, but how do you know that you're not just trying to console yourself (that friend of mine, incidentally, is scheduled to get married this year at the approximate age of 34 years, 10.5 months)? It's easy enough to find examples of meaningless existence and pointless ambition- just log onto Facebook and look at photos of your high school classmates smiling with their young children in football jerseys- but harder to come to the conclusion that every victory is pyrrhic; or rather, that there's something not quite right about all this talk of victory and defeat, winning and losing. But let's say you do. The problem with opting out was neatly summed up for me about six years ago by a Ukrainian friend a decade older than me. "People spend zeir lives looking for ze vay, ze meaning", he told me. He smiled. "And, as a rule, is all in vain."

"Naturally", I agreed.

"But ze irony is zat if you do not make your decision, you end up working for someone else's vision, someone else's dream."

I didn't understand him then, but I think I get it now. Earlier on New Year's Eve, I went to the DC Holocaust Museum. It seemed to me suggestive of the problem with ceding power; you never know what that other dream is going to be.

Then again, there's this Didion passage about Howard Hughes:

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. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century...Howard Hughes is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.

Maybe that's it, then. Victory is to protect yourself- through distance, wealth, or guile- from the dreams of others, simultaneously relieving you of the necessity of imposing yours on them. But in some way you still have, haven't you? Isn't it true that there is no true escape from the arena? And don't you have some responsibility to try to shape the world for the better, in whatever minor way you can? Well, Didion has an answer for that, too:

Of course we would all like to "believe" in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, and of course it is all right to do that...But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing and why...only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with "morality." Because when we start to deceive 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...

Didion's worth reading. You may not always agree with her- I'm not sure I do- but she gets you thinking.

BEI TEMPI ADDIO


La ex casa dei Grateful Dead a 710 Ashbury Street.

Nonostante in un capitolo (questo libro raccoglie articoli usciti su riviste) dal titolo Non riesco a togliermi quel mostro dalla testa, la signora Didion esprima opinioni tranchant su Kubrick, Antonioni, Visconti, Bergman, dimostrando per la prima e unica volta che perfino lei può sbagliare, prendere cantonate e dire bestialità, ho amato questo libro e amo profondamente questa meravigliosa scrittrice, sentimento costruito su una breve intensa conoscenza (incontrata per la prima volta neppure cinque mesi fa, è la sua quarta opera che leggo e apprezzo a fondo).


Joan Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, nell’aprile del 1967.

Viene definita la migliore scrittrice vivente in lingua inglese (e io le auguro mille anni oltre gli 80 che compirà il 5 dicembre prossimo) e si dice che proprio nel giornalismo proponga il meglio di sé.
Il New Journalism, il giornalismo che è Letteratura, il giornalismo che è Arte: quello consacrato con la pubblicazione di “In Cold Blood”.

Io non saprei: la amo molto sia come romanziere che come scrittrice di memoir che giornalista.


Le cinque vittime del 9 agosto 1969 nella villa di Polanski al Benedict Canyon: da sinistra, Voityck Frykowski, Sharon Tate, Stephen Parent, Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger.

Cos’è che colpisce in questa raccolta?
Il fatto che Joan Didion sia sempre dentro la narrazione, che il suo io sia in prossimità dell’oggetto del racconto.
Non nel modo fastidioso che spinge a riportare tutto l’universo a se stessi, a misurare abissi e cieli sul metro del proprio vissuto: ma con quella sua capacità di trasformare le proprie difficoltà e debolezze in leve di forza, informando e illuminando senza intromettersi nel racconto.


Ruth Ann Moorehouse e altre due ragazze di Charles Manson.

Didion non scrive per svelare, ma per capire, non scrive per stupire, ma per ‘leggere’ il suo tempo, riesce ad andare oltre il qui e l’ora con parole che rimarranno per sempre vere.

Poche volte si incontra una scrittura che dice così tanto di chi scrive. E ogni parola della Didion ci racconta di una donna fragile, ma dalle mente affilata, una donna problematica, ma forte e intensa… una narratrice in grado di toccare l’anima delle cose, e farla sembrare la cosa più facile del mondo.

Per quanto coinvolta, partecipe, vicina e attenta, Joan Didion è un’osservatrice molto acuta, che riesce a mantenere un distacco spontaneo per riuscire a cogliere una prospettiva singolare e precisa.

Joan Baez canta durante una manifestazione di protesta.

Didion descrive e racconta, senza commentare, un’America in trasformazione, molto diversa da quella in cui è nata e da quella emersa nel secondo dopoguerra – un paese in movimento verso un futuro che non sembra radioso, mentre il presente lo è: all’inizio degli anni Sessanta, gli US sono prosperi ed effervescenti – ma sono già un popolo e una terra che hanno perso l’innocenza, dove anche le voci alternative mostrano limiti e cadute, una terra dorata sostanzialmente allo sbando.
Didion è per certi versi un’anticipatrice, sicuramente uno sguardo senza schemi né veli.



Racconta un fatto di cronaca nera e la suspense divora il lettore.
Racconta di Joan Baez e in una frase riesce a racchiuderla tutta.
Racconta di San Francisco e la sua scrittura si fa jam come quelle dei Dead nel Golden Gate Park.
Racconta di sé, “sul tenere un taccuino”, e mi fa venire la pelle d’oca.

it is perhaps a comforting thought that joan didion was at her most boring—her most unimaginative, her most insular, her most spoiled—in her thirties. barely a 2.5/5.

I'm not sure how I managed to NOT read this over the last few decades, but I recently read an article listing the top best 15 audiobooks to listen to, and Slouching Toward Bethlehem was on the list. Diane Keaton does indeed do a wondrous job with the narration, though personally this would not be on my "top 15" list of audiobooks. (One of them, for sure, would be Michelle Obama's "Becoming.")

Despite being written 50 years ago, the essays are amazingly timeless, and hold up well today. My favorite was the title essay, about life in Haight-Ashbury in 1967, followed by the one on Howard Hughes, a man about whom I've long had a small obsession with learning about his weirdness and phobias. Had I been older than 12 in 1967, I'm sure I would have felt the call to head to San Francisco, and that would NOT have been a good place for me - nor was it for any young girls at that time - as Didion describes in rich detail.

This was a solid 3.5 stars for me - half the essays were 3 stars and the other half 4. I'm rounding down to 3 because - well, I'm not really sure. I guess because I LIKED all of the essays, per 3 stars, and REALLY LIKED, per 4 stars, a handful. It's definitely worth listening to, both for a trip back in time to 1960's America (mostly California), but also because they are so interesting and, of course, well-written.

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.

I continue to return to this book time and again because of the portraits of people that Joan Didion gives us. Even though this was written before I was born, I am able to picture each essay with clarity thanks to her amazing prose and ability to capture folks from every walk of life.

The best way to enjoy Joan Didion's work is desultorily. Don't be in a hurry, and don't be bothered by expectations.

My favorite piece was the final one, called Goodbye to All That. It's about her experience of falling out of love with New York City. I have never been to NYC, nor do I have any desire to go there, but I am old enough to look back on my youth and understand exactly what she was getting at when she wrote the piece.

"One of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before...
Was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was...
Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about...
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."

I could make mistakes and none of it would count. Oh, how I remember that feeling.

I rated each of the twenty essays individually and came up with an average of 3.75 stars.

At thirty three or four, Didion of Slouching Towards Bethlehem is still a girl. I recognize the signs. (Some people capable of voicing their thoughts on subjects such as "Self-Respect" and "Morality" are born middle-aged; others, possibly due to their specific upbringing, remain questioning, uncertain, young.)

Her parents relocated multiple times during her childhood (her father was in the military), which left her feeling a perpetual outsider.

Her voice is that of a well-mannered young woman, quiet and perceptive, living next to other people, but never being of them. Even when - I guess - she might be feeling some distaste - be it for the murderers, child abusers, or the very rich and divorced from 'real life', it is subdued, neutral, to be inferred, shown-not-told:

one of [Greek shipping heiresses] taught me a significant lesson (a lesson I could have learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves) by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchid-filled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside. (On Keeping a Notebook)

She is sensitive and perceptive in a way which makes me want to buy her a drink:

Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara. (Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

She is a neurotic; she weeps in Chinese laundries and wakes at night; she escapes to Hawaii; she is Elizabeth Wurtzel's patron saint and older sister - but she is old enough to be self-aware:

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in "Wuthering Heights" with one's head in a Food Fair bag.

Didion's understanding of situations and people is an instrument of unusually wide range; she understands the big picture (I read her description of post-war Hawaii - "Letter from Paradise" - with bated breath), but she can also convey her perceptions of individuals in amusing, nearly picture-book-like neat phrases, which one may confuse for innocence:

Mr. Scott says that he will be glad to get Alcatraz off his hands, but the charge of a fortress island could not be something a man gives up without ambivalent thoughts. (Rock of Ages)

On the whole, I wanted to give the book four stars, but then it ended with a sublime (and girly, and whiney) "Goodbye to All That" - so underhanded! So manipulative! Such writing! - and decided to give it 4.5.

I don't mean to be super fangirl about this collection, because a lot of the essays were fine but didn't blow my socks off. However, the ones that I really liked? I really fucking liked. And I know that a couple of months from now, probably even a few years from now, even with my shitty-shit memory, I will look back at this collection and think happy thoughts because of the essays that made my little Grinch heart explode into brightly flavored fireworks of flowers and sunshine and unicorns.

I don't mean to be dismissive about the essays that I thought were merely fine, but that's probably how it will come across. Let's just lay out here: I don't care that much about California. I know people who live there, one of my brothers used to live there, that's all great, they're good people. But when I think about places I have an active interest in visiting, California isn't high on that list. Even when a lovely person like Joan Didion writes about California, it doesn't make me want to hop on a plane and head there. So those essays didn't do so much for me, much like her other collection, Where I Was From, didn't do so much for me. I blame all of this not on Didion or her writing, but the entire state of California. Because, duh.

That's right, California, I'm throwing shade your way.

There's that one, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, for which this collection is named, that was really powerful. Didion spent time with the hippies of the original Sixties in Haight-Ashbury, and okay. That was a really decent essay. But that was more about Haight-Ashbury and counter-culture than it was about California.

But the other ones that were amazing and did funny things to my heart were the ones that were even more personal, personal to Didion and to who Didion is as a person. Most of the entire second section, Personals, made me nod out of familiarity. I knew exactly what she was talking about. On Keeping a Notebook, an essay every notebook-keeper should read; On Self-Respect; On Morality; On Going Home. And in the final section, Seven Places of the Mind (such a great section title), the final essay, Goodbye to All That hit me in all the feels. ALL THE FEELS, guys.

I want to curl up with this book and re-read all my favorites over and over again. But right now I can't even.

So five glowing stars for the ones I liked the most and I'll just pretend the other ones that felt lackluster in comparison were from that other essay collection of hers that I gave two stars.

3.5 stars.
The writing exemplifies the sentiments and mood of the counter culture of the 60's, Didion does indeed capture it exceptionally well. Dry and sharply delivered and filled with references and dissections of social issues she is definitely the voice of a generation albeit it comes across a little dated now. I wish I could say I liked this collection as a whole, not all essays resonated with me and left me underwhelmed more often than not, I had high hopes for this so maybe my expectations were set too high. Her more personal accounts left me wanting more so for this reason I will explore more of her work as she clearly has something to say and delivers it extremely well.