How can one possibly not love Joan Didion be it for her fiction or non-fiction. These twenty essays demonstrate her skills not only as a journalist but also as an incredible author. I must confess the essay on Howard Hughes scintillated me.

As for the title which I found very unusual. I was intrigued to see that W.B. Yeats was Didion's inspiration, as shown in the last two sentences of his poem:

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Why did she choose this poem? I kept on thinking about this and so I was intrigued to read that "This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there".

How wonderful to read that.

The rainbow does indeed shine on her!

I applaud her!

i bought myself some joan didion books for christmas and they were sitting under the tree when i heard of her passing. i’m disappointed i didn’t get to read some of her work while she was still here but joan’s legacy will live forever.

after finishing this book i find myself wondering how i can feel so close to a person i’ve never met?

rest in peace to a brilliant, inspiring woman.

“…my mind veers inflexibly toward the particular.”

A marvelous collection of diverse essays written in the 1960s. I thought these would speak to the California girl in me, but when her essay about of being young in New York--a place I’ve never been--came alive in my mind, I realized that what captured my interest wasn’t the subject. It was the writer.

Didion starts with a true crime story, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” and not because of shock or exploitation but because of the way she developed the piece, I couldn’t take my eyes off the prose.
“It was in the breakup that the affair ceased to be in the conventional mode and began to resemble instead the novels of James M. Cain, the movies of the late 1930’s, all the dreams in which violence and threats and blackmail are made to seem commonplaces of middle-class life.”

She continues with more profiles of Californians, including the title piece about time spent in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1967. This was my least favorite, perhaps because I already knew so much about the place. She uncovers a very pathetic view, matching the Yeats poem about World War I that serves as epigraph to the collection.

Next she gives us a section of personal essays, which all felt honest, unusual, and so relatable to me. From “On Keeping a Notebook”: “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

She heads the last group of essays perfectly: “Seven Places of the Mind.” These demonstrated my favorite kind of travel writing--specifically describing the melding of a place, time and experience. She takes you to a specific spot where her mind took an interesting turn, and whether it was New York or Mexico of her own California, I felt like I was along for the ride.

A brilliant collection; both of a time and timeless.

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 loved the sheer beauty and rigor and power of the sentences. I'd never read anything by her before but I'd heard great things. I picked this up for 50 cents on a lark and found it to be ideal subway reading.

I don't say this lightly, mind- I spend a lot of time reading on subway ( ars is pretty longa and vita is DEFINITELY brevis ) and having a book that meshes well with the overal mise en scene is key. It might be that Didion seems to be uniquely fascinated with urban landscapes and the ephemera of modern people, or that she wrote many of these pieces for magazines and thus erred always on the side of accessibility and flow, or just that she's a damn fine writer. Does it matter?

"Goodbye To All That" was as luminous and poetic and tough-minded and vivid as its reputation insisted. I haven't had the depth of experience with NYC that she obviously does but I flatter myself to think that I could really relate to what she was writing. I could see myself in the prose as in a particularly well done movie; the silent second lead, as it were. Pretty much every time she was either reminiscing or leaving some place or reminiscing about leaving some place her prose really started to hit these amazing, subtle, breathy and breathtaking cadences.

The in-person profile of John Wayne was also interesting and somehow economically true-to-life. She writes that when she was young she saw a movie where Wayne states that he'll take the girl he fancies to the place where the water-lilies grow- she has always dreamed, albeit ruefully, that someone would take her there someday. It's a sweet, subtle, sneakily personal moment which caught my breath when I read it.

There's something to the way she can quietly inject herself into the tone and flow of what she's writing about so that the seam between herself and the world, objective/subjective voice becomes miniscule, not to say meaningless. I love this kind of writing- magazine profiles are always a special treat- and I guess Didion deserves much of the credit for pioneering it alongside the more borborygmous practitioners of the New Journalism, your Mailers, Thompsons and so on. She makes it severe, language-wise, rationing out her lyricism to distill it for maximum impact. The reader learns pretty quickly not to mess with their author's judgments.

And this is my gripe, with this book at least (the only non-fiction of hers I've read): she seems to only pick up the pieces of the most annoyingly shoddy, vapid and delusional characters. Californians of all stripes come out for the freak show on Didion's home turf: be they drippy hippies, Joan Baez's radical chic socialist summer camp, dogmatic and humorless commies selling nickel newspapers by the beach, or murderous adulterous couples who make big, ill-alibi'd splashes in their adenoidal misadventures- possibly the only great moments in their whole boring lives.

Everybody here seems a caricature. It might be true to life- I wouldn't and couldn't know, having never set foot in Cali- but it seems to be very much a shit on a shoe situation, w/r/t Didion's brilliantly lucid all-seeing-eye. It might be me, but I couldn't shake the feeling that these characters and scenarios are interesting to her because they are so fucked-up, drained, and wasted. The cumulative effect is one of aggregated enervation leading to slight but distinct exasperation.

I mean, pointing out the hollowness of the 60's counterculture is all well and good, but what with the portentious, doomy title and the near-callous, scornfully raised eyebrow of disapproval I start to take Didion's judgments with ever-increasing grains of salt. You can either shake your fist in the street or you can get some kicks out of laughing your ass off, and wouldn't it be more interesting, all Modern Urban Malaise considered, to crack a joke once in a while?

Plenty of artists and writers satirized the same social and moral landscape with seemingly similar values in mind (one might think of West, Wilder, Pynchon and Zappa, just to name a few, not to mention HST, a near-peer whose zest for the absurd only partially redeems the fact that he can't write a paragraph, or even a sentence, on Didion's level) but they did in their own ways with a bit more bravura, wit, and sympathetic understanding.

Didion doesn't need to like these people- I mean, really, who could?- but she could easily have disliked the people she writes about with less of a scowl and overblown intimations of apocalypse. Didion can write masterfully- I wonder if she can laugh half so well.

There's an interesting article I read awhile back in The Atlantic magazine that delves into Didion's role as a literary and cultural presence from a totally different and interesting perspective which might be worth reading, if you're reading this:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

For the record, I don't think Didion is being narcissitic or maudlin, I really got the sense that her social anxieties were real (rather than the hipster confections we see every friggin day on the tv or eavesdropping confabs over vegan coffee beans under paintings of sad koalas) and that most importantly they made her a better writer. Mirror to nature, fly on the wall.

Man, do I ever feel that, btw. Reading her took me back to undergrad (or last week) when I spent many interminable evenings sociologically trying to interest myself in the company I kept, bored out of my sockets, silently sitting cross-legged and watching everything everybody did, ostensibly storing it up for future reference but coming away feeling bored, despondent, and a little lost. Where have all the good times gone? As she herself remarks, in one of her many brilliantly wise, mordant aphorisms, "writers are always selling somebody out."

It's not a gender thing, either. I could give a hoot in hell for the overblown HST theatrics and the exaggerated clowning for addled insights which were never truly there where it counts, where it has always counted, IN THE PROSE. I had more friends than I cared to who thought he was the second coming of Christ and that his books qualified as real bona-fide literature. Some do, surely, but the reach exceeds the grasp for decades at a time. HST yearned with all his little heart to write like Fitzgerald and suffered the unlucky fate of being more or less the kind of writer who people who don't really cherish literature for its own sake assume to be great writing.

Didion seems the stronger writer by far in terms of (and precisely because of) her openly acknowledged subversive, steel-spined modesty. Her shit detector seems solid, shock-proof and substantial, as grizzled papa's was so rarely. My (major) beef is that, in STB at least, it's constantly blinking red.

me: if this book was at the boston tea party it’d be on the ocean floor
joan didion: what
me: i’m saying you served

Love her prose style, but felt the collection was interesting without being outstanding. Many of the shorter pieces seemed to need to have been developed further, and others, like the true crime ones, were forgettable. There were moments like the title essay and “Goodbye to all that”, and a couple of others that struck home, but most fell short. ‘Slouching towards Bethlehem’ was certainly not an earth-shattering read, but It was OK.

Ale to się świetnie czytało - ten obraz USA późnych lat 60., który podaje nam Didion przefiltrowany przez jej dystans, spokój, wyważoną obserwację, której nie brak jednak zrozumienia i czułości, to było coś wspaniałego. W tych tekstach jest coś ostatecznego - dla mnie one wszystkie traktowały o jakimś końcu, o jakimś przemijaniu, o sprawach, które odchodzą w zapomnienie. Didion pisząc te teksty, była bardzo młoda, a jednak już wtedy moim zdaniem niesamowicie rozumiała, na czym polega odchodzenie i wiedziała, jak patrzeć, by dostrzec coś, co zniknie bezpowrotnie.

Girando e girando nella spirale che si allarga il falco non può udire il falconiere

Venti articoli usciti su varie riviste negli anni ‘60. Raccolti assieme, formano un racconto lungo che ci parla degli USA anni ‘60 e della giovane donna che li attraversa, ne coglie i mutamenti profondi, e muta lei stessa. Ed è questo mix tra cronaca giornalistica e vicende personali, luoghi reali e luoghi della mente, che rende il libro un’ottima lettura.

Non a caso Didion mutua il titolo della raccolta da Il secondo avvento (integrale in esergo) potentissima poesia di Yeats sul cambiamento dei tempi e il conseguente spaesamento e terrore che questo genera (il falco gira in aria senza più la guida del falconiere, le cose crollano, il centro non tiene più, la bestia rinasce a Betlemme).

Tre sono le parti in cui sono suddivisi gli articoli.

La prima, “Sulla vita nella terra dorata”, include frammenti di California e dintorni. Difficoltà familiari con (forse) omicidio (Sognatori del sogno dorato). John Wayne, malato e a fine carriera (John Wayne: una canzone d’amore). Il sogno pacifista di Joan Baez (Dove non smettono mai di baciarsi). Gli assurdi matrimoni di Las Vegas (Sposalizi assurdi). Una generazione di giovani in acido (Verso Betlemme).

Lo sentii dire alla ragazza in un film intitolato Terra nera* che le avrebbe costruito una casa «sull’ansa del fiume dove crescono i pioppi». Si dà il caso che io non sia diventata il tipo di donna che può essere l’eroina di un film western, e sebbene gli uomini che ho conosciuto avessero molte virtù e mi abbiano portato a vivere in molti posti che ho imparato ad amare, non sono mai stati John Wayne e non mi hanno mai portato su quell’ansa del fiume dove crescono i pioppi. In fondo al cuore, nella parte in cui cade per sempre la pioggia artificiale, quella è ancora la battuta che aspetto di sentire.

In “Personali” troviamo riflessioni sul tenere a mente da dove veniamo e chi siamo stati (Sul tenere un taccuino), sui primi fallimenti personali e la consapevolezza di non essere all’altezza delle proprie aspettative (Sul rispetto di sé), su una possibile definizione di moralità (Sulla moralità).

“Penso che sia saggio mantenersi in buoni rapporti con le persone che eravamo un tempo, che le troviamo o meno una gradevole compagnia. Altrimenti si presentano senza preavviso e ci sorprendono, martellando la porta della mente alle quattro del mattino di una brutta nottata con la pretesa di sapere chi li ha abbandonati, chi li ha traditi, chi farà ammenda.”

Tra i “Sette luoghi della mente”, terza e ultima parte, troviamo una più vera California, quella della Sacramento Valley, il luogo d’infanzia dell’autrice (Osservazioni di una figlia nativa), le Hawaii, tra tradizioni, sviluppo turistico ed i memoriali di Pearl Harbour e quell’incredibile cimitero militare nel cratere di un vulcano (Lettera dal Paradiso, 21°19’N., 157°52’O). Alcatraz ed i suoi 4 abitanti dopo l’abbandono (Scoglio secolare). Newport e le sue assurde ville, simbolo distorto del capitalismo o del capitalismo distorto (La costa della disperazione). Una New York che seduce con le sue infinite possibilità ma che non regge al richiamo del Pacifico (Bei tempi addio).

È molto facile sedere al bar di, diciamo, La Scala a Beverly Hills, o da Ernie’s a San Francisco, e condividere la diffusa illusione che la California sia solo a cinque ore d’aereo da New York. La verità è che La Scala ed Ernie’s sono solo a cinque ore d’aereo da New York. La California è da un’altra parte. Molta gente dell’East Coast (o «back East» come dicono in California, anche se non a La Scala o da Ernie’s) non ci crede. Sono stati a Los Angeles o a San Francisco, hanno guidato attraverso un gigantesco bosco di sequoie, e hanno visto il Pacifico glassato dal sole pomeridiano al largo di Big Sur, e naturalmente tendono a credere di essere davvero stati in California. Non ci sono stati, e probabilmente non ci andranno mai, perché è un viaggio più lungo e per molti versi molto più difficile di quanto siano disposti a intraprendere, uno di quei viaggi in cui la destinazione balugina come una chimera all’orizzonte, sempre più lontana, sempre più piccola. Si dà il caso che io sappia di questo viaggio perché io vengo dalla California, vengo da una famiglia, o una congrega di famiglie, che ha sempre abitato nella Sacramento Valley.

n  

... and I did not tell him what I want to tell you, about a place in Honolulu that is quieter still than the 'Arizona': the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. They all seem to be twenty years old, the boys buried up there in the crater of an extinct volcano named Punchbowl, twenty and nineteen and eighteen and sometimes not that old... Samuel Foster Harmon died, at Iwo Jima, fifteen days short of his seventeenth birthday... There are 19,000 graves in the vast sunken crater above Honolulu... I saw no-one else there but the men who cut the grass and the men who dig new graves, for they are bringing in bodies now from Vietnam.

n
Didion's first collection of prose pieces from the 1960s and a bit of a mixed response from me - but what is undoubted is the power and sheer style of her writing.

I was a little wary knowing that Didion has a reputation, at least at this stage of her career (1960s), of being essentially conservative but these are not party-political pieces. Yes, there's an underlying attitude of the world coming apart (note the title as a quotation from WB Yeats' 'The Second Coming') with moral foundations shattered - but in the wake of WW2 and the camps, that's hardly an unusual attitude and not one confined to the right.

The collection is essentially split into three and it's the first, on California during the hippy/Flower Power era, which is the strongest for me: here Didion skewers people, movements and social attitudes with acuity and lethal elegance exposing the dark underbelly of the supposed Summer of Love with irresponsibility, drugs (even being fed to children) and a generalised effete disengagement countering my romantic vision of activism, feminism, Civil Rights, anti-war dynamism. To be fair, she focuses her eye where she chooses so there's a sort of inbuilt bias, inevitably - but there's analysis like this, too:

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

or,

They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicised self doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

The second section on 'personal' pieces was my least favourite; the third a mixed bag of travel-related pieces one of which is the outstanding article on a visit to Hawaii where the memories of Pearl Harbour coalesce with the repatriation of bodies from Vietnam.

This is, of course, a very American collection and there were places where I simply didn't understand the references. But the star of the show for me is Didion's glorious writing: stylish, hard-hitting and perceptive with a creative panache that is rare in journalistic articles.

I cannot understand who would not love reading Joan Didion. To my mind, there is not another writer who is her equal in evoking a sense of place, an evocation that calls on all of one's senses. To set such a gifted observer and writer loose in the wilds of late 20th century America was a stroke of genius and a gift to all of us. I love how she has this veneer of urban elegance that covers a rather parochial Sacramento girl. She is like a jordan almond, but less sweet. Didion would not argue that point, I don't think. She says, "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends."

I liked these essays best when they focused on a moment in a specific place. She captures Southern California like no one else, but she also gives us personal, immersive moments in other places, including Sacramento, San Francisco, and New York.

Didion's lens on her hometown of Sacramento was delightful. To illustrate this point, I will just pick my favorite passage on the topic and let it speak for itself:

“What happened in New York and Washington and abroad seemed to impinge not at all upon the Sacramento min. I remember being taken to call upon a very old woman, a rancher's widow, who was reminiscing (the favored conversational mode in Sacramento) about the son of some contemporaries of hers. 'That Johnston boy never did amount to much,' she said. Desultorily, my mother protested: Alva Johnston, she said, had won the Pulitzer Prize when he was working for The New York Times. Our hostess looked at us impassively. 'He never amounted to anything in Sacramento,' she said.”

I appreciated the title essay drawn from Joan's experience of the Haight in the summer of love. The hippies were ridiculous, sure, but Joan also brings us examples of the malevolence and cruelty that abounded in that scene, and the spectacular selfishness that was at the very heart of all of it. (Those are the people who brought us the country we have, the now 80 year olds who started there justifying endless self-indulgence and rejecting any responsibility to community or country.) And Joan takes down those people in their own language which is exponentially more effective than screeching at them with a critic's voice. Genius.

I was an even bigger fan of Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, a true crime story that is really a portrait of a moment where California was the heart of all that was golden for many Americans. Didion shows how false and rotten that vision turned out to be. When a man dies and the police believe his wife has killed him, the trial becomes a press frenzy. Didion focuses less on the events of the husband's death and more on what came before: "It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes."

The final essay on her New York years and how they ended with her submersion into depression was not my favorite, but there were some passages within that piece that are beyond perfect -- if I could write but one of those sentences, I would consider my life one well lived. Just after she lands at Idlewild (now Kennedy Airport) and makes her way to a cheap East Side hotel, she calls her boyfriend in California: "I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough and I stayed for eight years." And though we ended up feeling differently about living in New York in the end, she captured the way I never stopped feeling about the city:

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.”

My favorite essay, ostensibly about Howard Hughes but really about the decline of character, included the line:

"That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, 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 (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy."

That thought is as relevant now as it was then. We just have an avatar other than Howard Hughes to illustrate the point.

This is filled with moments of pure unquestioned genius interlaced with some very good but less impactful pieces (the Joan Baez piece is one I would name as not as compelling as the most perfect moments in the collection, and also the one about notebooks, and maybe the John Wayne piece). All in all, a very worthwhile read. Didion is a legend for a reason.

These essays- written in the 1960s for slick magazines -are in turns part memoir, part journalism, part social philosophy. Her essays on California are legendary-travel writing that doesn't just show you the geography, it tells you how California feels.I don't think I will forget the Santa Ana wind or the chill I felt when she visited Alcatraz. Within many of these in-depth pieces are glimpses of her life-but in a glimpse, so much is revealed. I don't need her to have said anything more. She gives the right amount of herself - and then moves on. This understatement has much more of an impact for me.

The essay on Joan Baez is simple-yet ambivalent. She allows you to ponder while she is simply giving you the facts,the bare reportage. But is this so simple? No matter what she writes about it is always so fluid. I feel engaged, swept away. The title piece "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is such a fine piece of reporting. She is there on the streets of Haight-Ashbury, interviewing so-called hippies. By merely reporting, it is a devastating piece. "On Respect" (my favorite) is an essay that she was seemingly randomly assigned to do-and she pulls it from thin air. It's brilliant. I was floored.