Old review, with which I disagree.

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I find very attractive the skeptical, reflexively ironic persona that comes through in these essays, as well as the unshockable sang-froid of her prose rhythm--but to call the book a classic, or a "stylistic masterpiece" as the back cover does, seems a bit much. None of these essays, singly, is anything I could cherish. If I encountered any of them in a magazine I would think "she's a good writer" and move on. There's nothing--at least for intellectual pith--that compares with Richard Rodriguez's "Late Victorians," if I may indulge a childish taste for antithesis by invoking another superb stylist known for searching essays on The Meaning of California.

The real review to read is Vivian's, https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
What she said.
Bonus: https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories...
"From Hollywood to Malibu: Mapping Joan Didion’s Los Angeles," a 6 3/4 min [sic] read.
More links and photos in the notes, below.

She made a big impression (not always positive, mind) on everyone she met. A remarkable writer, woman, mother, human being.
Partial reread notes, 2020.
The shorter essays were the ones that really rang my chimes this time. Some of the longer ones, well, kind of dragged. The most striking ones for me, this time:
• John Wayne at Churubusco Studio outside Mexico City, in 1965, making his 165th movie.
• Joan Baez at the Monterey County Board of Supervisors in 1966, where a neighbor objected to her Institute for the Study of of Nonviolence in Carmel Valley.
• Talking with Michael Laski, General Secretary of the Communist Party USA (Marxist-Leninist), a splinter group, at their West Coast HQ in Watts, 1967. Comrade Simmons is reporting the income from sales of the Party newspaper: $9.99 from the sale of 75 newspapers, for contributions ranging from 4 cents up to 60c. Not a good day, Laski remarks.

Perfect little time capsules from the 1960s: all 3 5-star! Once again, for more details, see Vivian's. Lots more worthwhile stuff in the Didion, well worth your time. Recommended.

Joan Didion is technically an excellent writer. Her essays are admirably precise and considered. Observant, insightful even. But so dispassionate. Occasionally, I'd get slightly pulled into one... which mostly meant I didn't have to reread each paragraph several times because I'd forgotten to pay attention. I realize this is blasphemy, and saying this probably means I'm just somehow uninitiated or anti-intellctual, but I WAS SO BORED. I had to force myself to finish it so I'd feel less like a plebe.

Hey, yeah. The 1960s? Happy times, heavy times. These are the opening lines to the 1972 cartoon movie Fritz the Cat - a movie I was drawn to decades later when I discovered it in my late teens. For me it was a window to a more exciting time, an era narrowly missed, a world that was only just waking up, when to be young meant to live freely and love easily, and to seize the day and change the world required no more than to step outside one's own front door.

Well, that's how I saw it at the time, but of course things weren't really like that. The fires of change were fueled by deep turmoil and conflict. The cultural, sexual and racial oppression was heavy, and the wild desire for freedom was in many ways the direct response. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the mood of the times is captured beautifully in Didion's soaring and perceptive prose. It's there in the bitter, spiteful conservatism of the woman she meets in the store, who simply cannot come to terms with the audacity of a woman who would wear a bikini. You can sense it in the gloomy countenance of the teens, burned out on psychedelics, for whom any notion of a future has been so annihilated that the mere concept of a thirty year old is barely comprehensible. There is a palpable anxiety, a desperation that permeates the landscape of California - that California of the 1960s: a shimmering moment in time, mystical and otherworldly, and yet even so, all too real. Heavy times indeed.

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

I realize what is disturbing about these essays and what leaves the acrid aftertaste on the leftist tongue about Didion. And I don't think it has much to do with her relatively measured take on the drug-addled Haight-Ashbury scene. For better, but admittedly and sadly often for worse, the radical leftist imagination has been characterized by a willingness and a desire to leap out of our skin into the skin of others, to experience a jump of radical empathy in which the concerns of "they" become the concerns of "we," to see through many eyes the way Virginia Woolf allows us to do. Which is why, especially if we are white, we vilify our roots because we often see in our own family histories, a palimpsest of larger histories of injustice and oppression. We have a melancholic view of history, in which moments of utopian potential are consistently being snuffed out in the name of "order" and "tradition," the very values, in other words, which Didion spent much of her time in the 1960s eulogizing. She is writing funeral speeches for the passing of milieus whose only apparent meaningfulness is that they are connected to her own biography. Why we should lament the disappearance of the pathetic stagings and affectations of a dusty fake aristocracy is not clear to me, why we should take the survivalist grit of the pioneer generation as ethical models for the present even less so. The Indians are amongst us, protect your own, defend your lifestyle against all costs. These are the imperatives of the Right, old and new, Goldwater and Bush. Circle the wagons against the strange and the new. I admire Didion for the razorblade incisiveness of her critique but her unwillingness to open her subjectivity up to the world makes it difficult to think of her as an ally.

perhaps my favorite Didion, very cherished

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.

n  

“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.”

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Joan Didion was always on my vague to be read list, but after her passing I bumped her to my must read immediately. I'm so glad I finally picked up this collection - as I was very impressed by it.

Didion's writing is distinct, charming and engaging. Her use of language and the flow of the essays through her style really kept me engaged. I LOVE essays about place, so the ones about California really stood out to me. I think my favourite essay was "Goodbye to All That", which closes the collection. It's a beautiful piece about growing up and connecting to a place at different times in your life.

Definitely picking up her other works

I read this in college and I was ambivalent. I was young and naive and ignorant and undecided about many things (this is still true - how the horizons of ignorance expand as we learn!), and Didion didn't help me because I couldn't decide whether to agree with her, and I couldn't feel what she felt or think what she thought. I couldn't make much of the picture she painted of the world.

Having recently read a few other bits and pieces of Didion's and reviews of her work, I've decided I don't want to come back to this collection. There's too much bell hooks & Audre Lorde to get through.

I was so close to dnfing this book. Allow me to summarize the book and save everyone else the pain from reading it:
"I'm Joan Didion and I hate everyone and everything on this plant. I'm only happy when I'm by myself with no other humans around me. I wish we could go back to the good old days when Hollywood wasn't a thing. The Golden Dream isn't real and everything is bad."

This is the book that made me fall in love with Joan Didion. Her prose is like a razor. What style she has. Her essays in this collection prove that it's not what you write but how you write it. Of course, I appreciated her subject matter too and her eye for a good story, and the way she cut through social issues, as she did the hippie myths of Haight-Ashbury during the 1960s in San Francisco.

One of my favorites is one called, "On Keeping a Notebook," where the great Didion talks about writing (and notebooks):

"How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook...See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write— on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there..."