Fascinating time capsule of the 60s. I enjoyed the lens on Sacramento.

Summary

 Some Dreamers of the olden Dream - interesting start. Housewife post murder of her husband. Didion ponders the nature of the role of women at that time. The essay never established innocence or guilt, it pondered what must of have gone on in her head, while examining the predetermined role of a wealthy wife/socialite in the 60s.

 John Wayne: A Love Song - Didion laments the manliness and masculinity of John Wayne as he struggles w/ a cancer diagnosis. It's almost as if she expected he would be passing away soon...he lived for another decade after this essay was written. Knowing what I know about John Wayne, this one had me wondering about Didion. Really fawning essay. The times I guess.

 Where the Kissing Never Stops - This was an essay about Joan Baez. It's kind of my favorite so far because it indirectly points out the pretentiousness of Baez as she endeavors to give back the people via a school that has no curriculum or charter. There is an obviousness to the pretense. Acts like she's just like everybody else, ignoring the numerous resources, wealth and power that she has. Great to put your energy into a school, however what is taught in order to receive praise. Curious how Didion fawns all over Wayne for literal doing nothing but acting, but undermines Baez in her own way (no matter how self serving) who seems to be trying to contribute to society.

  Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) - a brief exploration of the communist party via a young man that appears to suffer from depression (and paranoid delusions). Another time capsule where Didion finds a person whose dedication to his idea of communisms bears little resemblance to textbook definitions of communism. Another case of trying to undermine an idea by taking an extreme example and applying the quirks of the individual across the board. Lopsided. Corporate masters dictated the contents of this I suspect.

 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38 - A short article about name dropping in a lower middle class address that is peripheral to the film industry. Lots of people try to wear the prestige of the film industry while living in substandard accommodations surrounding the film studios.

 California Dreaming - Didion explores a political organization that caters to famous people. It's a setup that allows celebrities to buy access to politicians. The trade off is that the political organization gets to publicly associate w/ the celebs (who apparently have the intellectual heft towards governance /sarcasm). Hmm so strange. That could never happen now...

"Marrying Absurd - Didion looks at the marketing of marriage in Vegas. Fascinating because these essays were written in the 60s. A time capsule. BTW, it hasn't changed.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem - A realisic look at the drug culture in San Francisco masquerading as hippy counter culture. A bunch of drugged kids. Pretty depressing.

On Keeping A Notebook - short essay about how Didion has always kept a notebook and how that allows her to stay in touch with the person she used to be. Self reflective.

  On Self Respect - "Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs."

 I Can't Get that Monster Out of My Mind - Didion ponders Hollywood after the loss of the studio system. Meh.

On Morality - Didion ponders morality. A very short, surface level essay. Not especially memorable."

 On Going Home - Didion as an adult w/ a daughter goes home for a visit without her immediate family. Familiar.

 Notes from a Native Daughter - Love letter to the City of Sacramento in the 60s. As someone who lives in the area now, I recognize much of what she is talking about and also recognize how much has changed. For me this one is a standout...for obvious reasons (I live here). Loved it!!

Letter from Paradise 21 degree by 19'N. 157 degrees by 52' W - Didion looks at Hawaii w/ the same eye she looks at Sacramento. Very interesting essay that showcased the "paradise" vs reality of military and oligarchical capitalist competence. Another good one. Timeless.

 Rock of Ages - a look at Alcatraz after it was closed as a prison but before it was a State park. Interesting.

 The Seacoast of Despair - tribute to the vaccuousness of the vanity of vast wealth. Didion muses on the very ugly houses on ridiculously expensive real estate that populate Newport Beach over the breakers. The breakers where many poor people have lost children to the sea. But mostly it's about the tackiness associated with such vast wealth not just in architecture but also in deeds.

 Guaymus, Sonora - Bored and tired Didion and her husband take a short jaunt to a sleepy town in Mexico where after a week long stay they decided to do something, they found there wasn't much to do so they went home.

 Los Angeles Notebook - a look at the pretensious atmosphere of LA. Putrescence is the word of the essay...

Goodbye to All That - Didion looks back nostalgically about NYC. How she fell in love with it and how it's gotten tiresome after 8 year. Keep in mind that this is nostalgia from a 30ish yr old woman. I think she returned to NYC later in her life.

While I can appreciate the excellent and interesting writing of Didion, perhaps this is one to read in small doses instead of straight through. Some of the rhythms and pacing of the essays began to feel similar even when the subjects were not. In the end, this was good but not as good as I had anticipated. I still recommend it, just read a few essays at a time.

3.5 Stars rounded up

Read on kindle

Days after Manson died, I kept thinking about him, how he and his Family had summoned the darkness at the heart of the Summer of Love. I remembered how surprised we all were, that the drugs and the smiles and the flowers had come to this, but then I thought, no, not all of us. Joan Didion would have understood; Joan Didion would not have been surprised.

Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays and Didion’s second book, is about many things, but mostly it is about ‘60’s California. In its first section “Life Styles in the Golden Land”—slightly longer than half the book--every piece but one is set in California: a San Bernadino Valley murder, profiles of California icons (John Wayne, Joan Baez, Howard Hughes), characteristic California political institutions (the Communist splinter group the CPUSA, the now defunct liberal think tank the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), and the California nexus of the Hippie Explosion, San Franciso’s Haight-Ashbury district during the Summer of Love. (Even the short piece not set in California, “Marrying Absurd,” about the Las Vegas wedding industry, is about California and its culture too.)

But the California connection does not stop there. Didion was a product of the Sacramento Valley, the descendant of settlers who—before the Gold Rush—crossed the plains in a covered wagon (Joan’s great-great-great grandmother travelled with the Donner party, but, unlike the Donners, her family avoided the fatal short cut and instead followed the old Oregon Trail.) Thirty additional pages of Bethlehem, some of the most personal of the book, describe her California and how it has shaped her character and her perspective.. She recognizes that, even for a Native Daughter like herself, the oldest of California traditions are too recent to constitute roots, that the culture of the ‘60’s Golden Land is always changing: from orange groves to real estate to aerospace (and, later, to high tech and beyond). In her title essay, Didion lays bare the predispositions of the lost freeway children who inhabit the Haight in the late '60's: aimless, disconnected from culture, lacking the principles that might help them fashion a viable alternative, they are people for whom any hypnogogic amusement, any superficial enlightment, even a dark savior, will do.

You can learn much about the ‘60’s from this book, but its real pleasure lies in its elegant, sinewy prose. If there is a single clumsy sentence in this book, I failed to find it (and I am one of those irritating fellows who looks). Here is just a taste, from “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a description of the San Bernardino Valley:

n  This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.  This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school.  “We were just crazy kids” they say without regret, and look to the future.  The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.  Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer.   

Here is the last stop for all those who  come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.  Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look:  the movies and the newspapers. n

“We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

Wow, this was so good! What a smart and thoughtful essay collection, consisting mostly of journalism pieces and personal experiences in 1960s California. Can’t wait to read more Didion! This was my first.

PS. Keaton’s narration was pretty meh. I got tired of it quickly.

Hard to believe but this is the first Joan Didion book I have ever read. In this book, a series of essays, Didion takes on the sixties and the many different components that makes this time period so memorable. Her wide range of subject matter is amazing, from a courtroom and a trial. to Las Vegas weddings, from Haight-Ashbury to John Wayne and much more. Her writing is so clear and concise, basically I loved it. This is my first, but not my last Didion.

some pieces were amazing but in the whole i found this quite underwhelming

It should come as no surprise that this collection of Joan Didion's essays and journalism from the the mid sixties leading up to her publication of Play It As It Lays is thoroughly good, cynical, and perceptive. She writes about societal malaise and the ominous leisure landscapes of California all quite wonderfully, in particular. Though it does leave me wanting to grab more of her fiction soon, as well.

The wry and casual elegance of Didion's prose style remains quite special despite the endless attempts at imitation in the decades that have followed; she also has that rare talent of being able to make you think you're reading something lightweight, even disposable and then at the last minute flooring you by unleashing an unexpected torrent of significance and resonance.

But as lovely and thoroughly enjoyable as these essays were, I will always be grateful for a disclosure Didion makes in the collection's short preface:

n  "I am not sure what more I could tell you about these pieces. I could tell you that I liked doing some of them more than others, but that all of them were hard for me to do, and took more time than perhaps they were worth; that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic."n

I read these several sentences at a particularly dark moment early on in my thesis writing process where I also found myself suddenly unable to string together a simple sentence, despite the fact I was writing on topic I have been thinking about for years and years and am ready to share my thoughts on. I was ready to write: and suddenly couldn't.

Needless to say I wrote this out on a index card and stuck it above the wall on my desk, and now it serves as kind of a talisman, the reminder I often need of the sheer hard work of writing and that even the very best--even those who give the impression of such effortlessness and ease of articulation--must valiantly struggle sometimes too.

The next day I started writing again. And while there is much to appreciate about this book, I will always treasure it for that.

I learned about Joan Didion from a fellow Goodreads member several years ago and have been planning to read her ever since. Her death in December of 2021, motivated me to finally do so.

So, where to start? Well, why not her first work. Since I had been slouching to read her, Slouching Towards Bethlehem made sense. I wonder if she ever made it to Malakoff Diggings.

I have to admit, it took me a few chapters / essays to really begin to appreciate the scope and beauty of her writing. And once I took my time to really absorb her prose, it clicked and I got it. What vivid descriptions and emotions across a number of interesting people and places. Some famous and others, like Malakoff Diggings, less known or unknown.

One thing that struck me about many of these essays is that a lot things, places and the way people act and behave from her stories haven’t really changed all that much since the 1960’s when she wrote them. While some of the drugs of choice may have changed (but not all) and certainly the technology has, much remains the same.

This book is such an interesting glimpse into the past, especially California. From LA to San Francisco and Sacramento too, plus many additional places throughout the State, including, of course, Malakoff Diggings.

But her stories are not just limited to California. She writes such a vivid description of New York City, accurate in many ways to how I have experienced it myself like this:

“ It pleased me obscurely walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in fifty-seventh windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer.”

Now if you are curious as to why I wonder if she ever made it to Malakoff diggings, it’s because I live in the Sierra Foothills just about 20 miles or so from this long closed mining operation, which is one of the least visited and most obscure state parks in California. Today It’s a stunning landscape. Healed literally from massive scars of terrible offenses to the environment from hydraulic mining during the Gold Rush. I was so intrigued that she mentioned it as a planned destination while she wrote from Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love.

However, from the story it seems the drugs and the time slipped away and I don’t know if she ever made the trip. But I appreciate the trip she took me on with these stories.

Η Joan Didion με δεινή πένα και υπηρετώντας το ιδανικό του "See enough and write it down" καταγράφει το σημείο που τέμνεται ο περιβάλλων χώρος και το ανθρώπινο μυαλό και περιγράφει με ζωντάνια και με σαφή αντίληψη της βαρύτητας της περιρρέουσας ατμόσφαιρας την Καλιφόρνια και τη Νέα Υόρκη, μεταξύ άλλων, της δεκαετίας του 1960, την ιδιομορφία των κοινωνικών καταστάσεων, τη προσωρινότητα και την αγάπη για μια πόλη, την πολωτική οικονομική πραγματ��κότητα, με την καταθλιπτική κι αδιέξοδη ατμόσφαιρα να διαπερνά τα κείμενά της.

Το ομότιτλο δοκίμιο έχει κατά τη γνώμη μου τη δύναμη του Howl του Ginsberg· πρόκειται για μια σκληρή εξέταση της κουλτούρας των χίπις της γειτονιάς του Σαν Φρανσίσκο που ξεκινάει με μια προμετωπίδα παρμένη από το The Second Coming του Yeats, ποίημα που ενέπνευσε άλλωστε και τον τίτλο του βιβλίου (And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?), και προσφέρει την πιο άμεση και μεστή αποτύπωση της οπτικής της Didion για τα θέματα που αναλύει στο εν λόγω βιβλίο:

n  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 misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves. It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. 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. n

I loved this collection of essays and Didion’s concise and stylish writing. This is a snapshot of a specific time in American history and culture that both seem so vivid that you can easily visualize it and undeniably lost to time.

A collection of essays mostly originally published in the 1960s. Some of these I had read before, perhaps in anthologies.

Joan Didion has a clear voice, and I especially liked the last piece, "Goodbye to All That."

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays was a searing collection of essays by Joan Didion, most previously published in various magazines in 1965, 1966, and 1967, and taking place in California. In the Preface Ms. Didion shares how hard it is for her to interview people and to meet her deadlines. She describes her success as a reporter thus:

n  

"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

Slouching Towards Bethlehem is divided into three sections, the first being Lifestyles in the Golden Land. One of my favorite essays was the one entitled, John Wayne: A Love Song where Joan Didion related how she fell in love with John Wayne movies at the age of eight when she and her brother watched his films three times a week. Didion was able to interview John Wayne while in Mexico City filming The Sons of Katie Elder, his 165th movie. Another favorite was Where the Kissing Never Stops, an essay about Joan Baez and her school, The Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, in Carmel Valley in 1965. The final essay in this section was Slouching Towards Bethlehem, an essay covering the time she was reporting about the time she spent in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in 1965. Joan Didion shares that while she felt that this was the most imperative piece she was writing, it also left her despondent after it was printed. As a reader, it left me despondent as well.

The second section of the book entitled Personals is about keeping a notebook writing one's thoughts and dreams. A very interesting essay was on self-respect, who has it and who does not, it being the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life, not only in her experience but in many characters in literature. There was another essay on morality and another on going home again.

The third section being Seven Places of the Mind opening with her feelings and observations and the history of her native Sacramento, a favorite of mine as I lived there only a year but fell in love with the Sacramento valley. One of Didion's quotes:

n  

"In fact that is what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

n

In the Preface Joan Didion shares how she named this book of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years certain lines from the poem by W.B. Yeats were coming to mind:

n  

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

n
W.B. YEATS