Joan Didion: C/D?

dud? really? i'm reading my first collection of didion essays and her prose is blowing my mind. i haven't really come across too many negative reactions.

i've been meaning to start this thread for the past week, too!

I've never really heard many who would dare dudion. (Sorry.)

But, yeah, she's seriously one of my top five favorite writers.

Miami is so accurate that it makes me love the shit town in which I live all the more.

I expected to hate The Year of Magical Thinking because of the hype, but after I bought it a few months ago I was struck again by what a perfect marriage of subject and writer – she's the only one who could assess such a dreadful experience with the sort of dispassion that's possible only after thinking through an emotion with all your intelligence and imagination.

I finally got round picking up one of her novels, 'Play it as it lays'. Good stuff.

Her collection of recent politcrit Political Fiction is pretty great too, especially the one tracing the origin of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy's attempt to impeach Clinton.

I wanted to get myself this baby last time I was in NYC, but couldn't fit it in my suitcase. Next time.

http://ec1.images-amazon.com/images/I/51PRNY6V02L._SS500_.jpg

It's all good. I can't imagine too many other writers making me want to read an essay on, for instance, the inner workings of the Hoover Dam.

Just for balance, here's a dissent:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2005/06/joanie_loves_sc.html

Didion's been coasting on a pinched air of superiority for decades

I've never understood why anyone should be ashamed of being superior.

I read that Wolcott dissent at the time, and it made no sense. I mean:

Where I Was From, Political Fictions, Miami, Salvador...it's a long arid trek with no oasis in view, a joyless stretch (Didion has no humor whatsoever) of preciously guarded insights and uninflected prose amounting to a body of work with a barely detectable pulse.

Her ethos is to accumulate data – quotes, statistics – and let the humor arise from the situation. I've laughed aloud many times.

He (and Pauline Kael) are right about the "sanitarium chic" with which her novels are suffused, though.

didion's humour is very, very dry, but it's not joyless.

i love the 'personals' section of slouching towards bethlehem...

Yeah, Didion's work is very much about the humor of the mundane.

And I think Didion has demonstrated an awareness and self-critical (albeit self-interested) attitude towards her ... attitude.

What's "sanitarium chic"?

And I think Didion has demonstrated an awareness and self-critical (albeit self-interested) attitude towards her ... attitude.

didion's self-awareness really adds an extra dimension to her observations - her writing is as much about analysing herself and her reactions as the things she sees

*Year of Magical Thinking* was fascinating, but only as a sort of case study of a very idiosyncratic sensibility responding to death. Nothing that matched my own experiences.

terrible screenwriter.

baaderonixx: She fetishizes the fractured, lacuna-specked thinking of loonies, like BZ in Play It As It Lays.

haha i find her really obnoxious in this blinkered NYRB high-horse way, but she is a brilliant prose artist.

most things on ilx re: didion point to classic
i base most of my opinion on her older stuff, which seems to eclipse everything else, and b/c years ago slouching towards bethlehem changed my life, in a way

yeah her writing seems/seemed to affect as much in terms of prose artistry than content, pos more

affect me, i mean

So, of the old stuff, where's a newbie to start?

The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

I say plow through chronologically.

So, yeah, begin with those two and if you like what you read, continue.

I've only read the collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem and a handful of other pieces but it's all great.

I expected to hate The Year of Magical Thinking because of the hype, but after I bought it a few months ago I was struck again by what a perfect marriage of subject and writer – she's the only one who could assess such a dreadful experience with the sort of dispassion that's possible only after thinking through an emotion with all your intelligence and imagination.

She's a very good writer, but the dispassionate way she approached that subject in TYOMT made it hard for me to like the book.

i like her. i didn't used to so much. but then i moved to los angeles.

My favorite living writer and one of my four or five favorites of all time. Her sentences are like little diamonds. I never tire of rereading them. The place to start is Play It As It Lays, in my opinion, but I've spent a lot of time with that one, so much that it's like one of those things where I can't imagine being unfamiliar with it, you know? Democracy is also incredible, and The Last Thing He Wanted is something else, too. All the novels are good; for essays, I'd go with After Henry first - she's a better writer now than she was when she wrote The White Album, but then again, some of the stuff in TWA is so heavily anthologized that I may be a little immune to its first-reading charms.

Thanks all.

haha she is pretty much for new yorkers who don't "get" la, isn't she.

MEMO TO NY: CALIFORNIA IS WEIRD! LOOK HOW THE SUN REFLECTS OFF THAT BARN, THE 60S WENT SOUR, WE ARE ALL PARANOID.
-JD

I'd go with After Henry first - she's a better writer now than she was when she wrote The White Album,

OTM. The essay on Reagan and her coverage of the '88 Democratic convention are scary and hilarious.

sorry, i'm just trolling because i think andy dick is much funnier than joan didion

BAN GHOST RIDER

there are some great omnibus collections out there too - mine has Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album and After Henry in one volume

i get l.a.

i think part of my california obsession is b/c of didion

I've read most of her fiction and essays but tend to favour the latter. Still haven't got round to reading 'The year of magical thinking' i'm rather ashamed to say but have a pile of other books waiting to be read so it'll have to wait. I've read 'Playland' and 'Monster' by her late husband John Gregory Dunne, is any of his other stuff worth seeking out?

i just bought slouching towards bethlehem

also

i like her. i didn't used to so much. but then i moved to los angeles.

-- get bent, Thursday, 19 July 2007 14:55

is part of the reason why

i've only read STB (and that years ago) and it was good but i've never made a dent in any of the novels. i read some of play it as it lays and it just seemed like an unfunny less than zero told from the parents' POV.

yeah, she's from california, ghost rider, not some woody allen circa annie hall type doing "lol, uri geller and wheat germ"

Classic.

mega-classic. but i think the schiavo piece in NYRB that wolcott disses was one of her rare misfires. mixed on her fiction but slouching toward bethlehem and the white album really opened my eyes ca 1980. was her political reportage on latin america in the 80s was courageous.

for instance here she's typically incisive on VS Naipaul

i read some of play it as it lays and it just seemed like an unfunny less than zero told from the parents' POV.

Well-put.

really? i meant that is well-put but is it accurate? i dont think so. but then do you mean in the writing style or in the narrative? i guess i just hate bret easton-ellis so any comparison btwn him and joan didion makes me unhappy :(

Ellis borrowed lots from her.

really? i've got to read more ellis. i've realised now that my feelings re: ellis are prob based more on his audience than on his actual writing. which is embarassing.

i mean didion is obv a better stylist than bret but:

"some people ask: what makes iago evil? i never ask." <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< "people are afraid to merge on freeways in los angeles."

I admire Joan Didion's writing, but apart from J.D., no-one has given an example, or any evidence of whatever it is - her 'style'? - that they like. We're facing a consensus choice here -- we agree she's good -- but can we try and articulate why? Or who the other comparable figures against whom we judge her are? I mean, if I read nothing but the Guardian all week, I'd have a hard-on for Didion.

yeah the lady was raised in/knows california v. well, see 'where i was from'

SHE HAS A STEELY EYE.

i read play it as it lays in the suffocating august heat in las vegas last year (by poolside while fighting a head cold) and it was pretty much the most perfect thing i could've been doing at that point

the white album is terrific too, love the mall essay

i liked that deadpan cool disaffected spare/lean/sinewy/california desert vibe when i was younger. dry, but not a lot of heat. but i haven't read her in years. play it as it lays was up there with renata adler's speedboat in my 19 year old misanthrope pantheon. she kinda reminded me of many of the gay men i would fall for around the same time (or a little later). john rechy, edmund white, genet, dennis cooper. sometimes bitter. utterly dry-eyed. rarely sweet. clear and clean. impersonal. almost anonymous at times. like a fly on the wall. but a fly with great taste and a love for the french. all bone and marrow. little fat.

plus, those dustjacket photos(!). almost too cool for school.

http://www.nndb.com/people/823/000023754/didion.jpg

she kinda reminded me of many of the gay men i would fall for around the same time (or a little later). john rechy, edmund white, genet, dennis cooper. sometimes bitter. utterly dry-eyed. rarely sweet. clear and clean. impersonal. almost anonymous at times. like a fly on the wall. but a fly with great taste and a love for the french. all bone and marrow. little fat.

Good call on White! He's definitely gotten flabby in the last 10 years, though.

She's a stunning camera study, isn't she?

for those in the uk that are interested, she's the subject of the south bank show tonight.

really??? i thought it was on roald dahl last night - i would have watched otherwise, as am DEEP into didion again at the moment.

It was amazing Stevie (sorry to rub it in). Really simple, just readings and interviews (and Martin Amis being a twat, but that can be hard to escape) and she spoke about herself extremely well. I was surprised by that, she's always written about her shyness, but she was a good, thoughtful and measured speaker.

hmm. perhaps i can TORRENT this somehow...

as it was i think i watched that AMAZING moebius documentary on channel 4 instead, so no regrets. except, maybe, a couple.

it's on UKNova, if you have access to that. if not i think sign-up is open.

Fuck, and I watched Dalziel and Pascoe :(

thanks jed!

I only just started reading her -- I bought that omnibus and tackled Slouching Toward Bethlehem and after that read The Year of Magical Thinking -- and I admire her a whole hell of a lot. She's great at short, simple sentences that are nonetheless filled with immaculate detail.

I also love the back cover photo of TYOFMT, how she's coolly studying her own family:

http://img.citypages.com/imagebank/articles/26_1298/26_1298a13785_p.jpg

I have "taped" it, so I can fast forward through Amis being a twat. Result!

Amis was fine, he's always very good at talking about writers he admires. i don't know what was twattish about his appearance unless you just think he's a twat full stop and can't stomach him which i can understand but y'know....

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--kneFKH8E--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1402874290985513135.png

:/

feel a strong aversion to that macro

gtf outta here w that

been wondering abt the new biog

the writer also did the one of barthelme which was p good or at least well detailed/researched as i recall

xp it's from this, but it popped up in my fb feed with that image
http://review.gawker.com/the-long-con-of-joan-didion-1726474476

Megan Reynolds, the author of that gawker article, is obviously trying to shuck off her early admiration for Didion by isolating some of her more obvious traits and attributes as a writer and defining them into flaws, with the help of a generous amount of caricature and exaggeration.

Younger writers often select one or more idols who they use as templates when they're first learning the ropes, and almost as often they will later experience a measure of revulsion against these same authors when they tire of aping them. The authors in question are neither as miraculous as their early idolatry would have them be, nor as wretched as the later revulsion makes them out.

I'd say Didion's reputation is safe from Reynolds' disappointment in her. And I'm not even a very dedicated fan of Joan's work.

fragility and sensitivity are not really the first things I think of when I think of the Didion I like

yeah, it takes strength and courage to write honestly and reflectively about one's own emotional vulnerability. also, she never mines that for material just because -- always didion is looking to connect her experience to something more general or shared. she is a journalist through and through

Also she has a lot of great writing that is not about her own emotional vulnerability.

yeah, definitely true

I worked my way through that Everyman's Library compilation of her non-fiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live about a year or so ago, and her book about Miami was outstanding, even among that admirable group of works.

but even the year of magical thinking isn't "about" her vulnerability. she's not portraying herself as any more vulnerable than anyone else. the subject of the book is grief, not joan didion

aimless treeship & man alive otm
really dislike that article

My first exposure to her was also my first exposure to someone smart and witty and not overtly conservative expressing skepticism about a lot of sixties culture that I had previously only either seen revered or reviled.

i suspect joan didion's reputation will survive a withering takedown by someone who writes for gawker, buzzfeed, and the frisky

really loving the slow stream of yung contenders wildly flailing with misdirected blog shots @ jd, solid, rite-of-passage 21c clickbait

Her best work is Miami and those later political essays.

Just published, "California Notes" from 1976:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/california-notes/

wow ty

"the white album" feels very relevant this year. she nails the disconnect that comes from history seeming to happen so fast while one's own life seems to stand still.

She's classic, and everyone should read some of her essays.

I liked the bio on Netflix--brings out her deadpan cool disaffected spare/lean/sinewy/california desert vibe (h/t scott seward upthread.)

Also a kind of weird review here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n01/patricia-lockwood/it-was-gold

She rules

right-wing women intellectuals are the most terrifying thing ever, and among them didion might be the most terrifying of all, because so undeniable. not just the 'laser-like precision', even before she gets to the facts she convinces you she's right w/ her brilliance, tone, authority.

among her things <i>The Last Thing He Wanted</i> is kind of trashed and forgotten, but is pretty perfect, and has one of the best opening lines wih that breathless "Some real things have been happening"

*with that breathless..., I meant

she's right wing?

she didn't care for hippies

Well, she's skeptical of feminism and Black Power in The White Album, and fairly nostalgic about John Wayne's version of normative masculinity in the respective essay in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, but from the Reagan administration on, I don't think you could fairly call her political commentary conservative.

wouldn't it be more accurate to say she didn't care for some feminist activists and some black panthers?

Sure, but I would assume that the choices she made about which activists to discuss, and how she frames those discussions, implies something about her judgment of the broader movements in question.

interesting question there - to what extent does skepticism toward the people making up a movement translate to skepticism of the goals of the movement

imo she's characteristically ambiguously icey on that distinction

― Joan Digimon (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, December 25, 2017 6:32 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think her reaction to the hippies in slouching towards Bethlehem is more a reaction to the distressing nature of the reality on the street in SF, just the squalor and drugs and decay she was seeing, and very few of those people were political activists of any sort since their lives generally involved getting enough food and drugs

the Beatles famously had the same reaction when they visited SF for the first time, I think Haight mostly just a disgusting place then

Didion's 1982 reporting on US-supported terror in Salvador is probably a better indication of her politics than her lack of enthusiasm for hippies

I have a friend who grew up in Berkeley whose parents are both on the left and loathe hippies, because they were beatniks.

"I think Haight mostly just a disgusting place then"
it still is and AFAICT has always been

I don't think she's right wing at all, she's just very skeptical - which you can read as small c conservative, but even the myths she believes in (California frontier stuff) are pretty bleak.

I doubt anyone will finish Salvador or Miami and think she sympathizes with Reaganist conservatism. If she's critical of Bill Clinton's Democratic Party, it's because, like the Reaganites, they found, to use her term, a political fiction to disguise some kind of rot, often from themselves too.

I do remember her at one point suggesting that her (50's) generation got tarred with the "quiet generation" tag but that the reason they didn't advocate for any kind of radical change wasn't conformism but rather knowledge of what rocking the boat might lead to, which felt like a pretty weak line of argument (though in line with the skepticism I mentioned before).

I've personally never hung out with capital-H hippies and not had the overwhelming sense that they were full of shit I think that's probably what she's responding to

also she's fairly ruthless in pursuit of writing, at least it's my impression that ultimately her politics were secondary to creating her art

she is not a right-wing writer

she's also not as fucking tone deaf and horrible as joyce carol oates

why do we need to compare

good grief

I mean to be clear I don't think her writing is "anti-hippie" because she thought hippies were full of shit (though she very well may have); I think she saw what was happening around her as an extension of the biker movies she wrote about before, youth gone wild kind of thing rather than any ideological divide. Which sometimes reads a bit moral panic now but I don't doubt it was very true where she was.

one of the things that gets glossed over when ppl talk about Didion as chronicler of the dark end of the 60's is I don't think she thought they ever had much light in them in the first place

i don't know what the exact opposite of "tone deaf" would be but joan didion is definitely that

As hippie-ness spread out from Haight-Ashbury and parts of L.A. from whence it sprang, it very rapidly morphed into so many variations and local adaptations that the term lost all meaning, except for a general association with drug use, disdain for The Establishment, and long hair on men.

right-wing women intellectuals are the most terrifying thing ever

Why, exactly?

You can google her political affiliation. It's changed during her life.

Aimless OTM. So is Al.

I picked up Year of Magical Thinking again over the past week. It's so good.

one of the things that gets glossed over when ppl talk about Didion as chronicler of the dark end of the 60's is I don't think she thought they ever had much light in them in the first place

― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, December 28, 2017 12:49 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the haight stuff w/the little kid on acid etc is actually at the beginning of the "60s", like the grateful dead and big brother and stuff are just regulars hanging around they aren't even really famous yet etc i think it's in 66 mostly (or maybe 67)

https://popula.com/2018/10/15/the-center-held-just-fine/

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show. It is the calf-bound, gilt-edged bible of neoliberal meritocracy. The weirdest thing about it is that this dyed-in-the-wool conservative woman (she started her career at the National Review) somehow became the irreproachable darling of New York media and stayed that way for decades, all on the strength of a dry, self-regarding prose style and a “glamor shot” with a Corvette. The toast of Broadway and the face of Céline, decorated by Barack Obama himself, Didion is the mascot of the 20th century’s ruling class (both “liberal” and “conservative”)—that is, people who “went to a good school” and know how to ski and what kind of wine to order, and thus believe themselves entitled to be in charge of your life and mine, and just… planet Earth. Almost every college-educated person in the United States d’un certain âge (that’s the kind of phrase we liked to use) is to some degree responsible for this, insofar as we accepted it—or did, maybe, until 2016, when the failures of the “meritocracy” finally came home to roost. Or not roost, rather, so much as attack like we were Tippi Hedren.

The depressing truth is that Didion and co. strangled the potential movement toward egalitarianism of the Sixties in its cradle.

It's always satisfying when a cold case is solved, but I'm disappointed in Joan -- what was she thinking?

I don’t know it seems like the unchecked hedonism and disdain for institutions that she identified, in their nascent form, in the Sixties counterculture weren’t egalitarian in the first place and, in the end, had something to do with the Baby Boomers’ willingness to embrace the sociopathic individualism of neoliberalism in the following decades. If she is a conservative she is a very specific kind—a skeptic, as someone said above, who was more aware than other writers of her time how fragile the individual human being is, which is not at all hallmark of the conservativism of Reagan and Thatcher. Basically the opposite tendency. I certainly don’t agree with everything Didion argued through the decades but I’m creeped out by the eagernes I’m seeing here and there for people to admonish her as a class enemy.

That article was whack.

Almost every college-educated person in the United States d’un certain âge (that’s the kind of phrase we liked to use) is to some degree responsible for this, insofar as we accepted it—or did, maybe, until 2016, when the failures of the “meritocracy” finally came home to roost. Or not roost, rather, so much as attack like we were Tippi Hedren.

This isn't English -- these are Simon Le Bon lyrics.

Seriously, is that a sentence? An editor approved?

the homepage of that outlet is flogging some sort of cryptocurrency so I doubt it

Popula is a journalist-owned, journalist-run, ad-free publication on the Ethereum-based Civil publishing platform.

why

I think the writer is the editor in chief. I don't know, it looks like it's a newish site, so maybe they want some odd hot take to pull in the rageclicks.

days like today make a career change to baking feel like a good move

maria bustillos has been the worst writer on earth for like ten years now

even i tire of the cult of didion and didion could write fucking delirious circles around her ten times out of ten, what a ridiculous front

i think for me the last straw with her was that pro-pickup artist piece she wrote for the awl, speaking of cryptoconservatives (making that sweet sweet cryptocurrency)

It was sad to see normally sharp folks like Ryan Cooper and southpaw breathlessly retweeting this wank.

whatever, Play It As It Lays is great

I think a lot of the political criticisms of Didion are fair. Still a great fucking writer.

that didion takedown is such a piece of incomprehensible garbage

i mean:

Didion’s work is an unrelenting exercise in class superiority, and it will soon be as unendurable as a minstrel show.

what can you say to this except "uh, no, it won't be"?

Yeah, that line was really, really tone deaf.

this is just the normal egoism of "however I feel right now is how I imagine all people feel".

If Top Writers like Didion had written about the legitimate concerns of Mario Savio, the Free Speech Movement or SDS, the lastingly valuable and influential aspects of Sixties youth culture, rather than getting off on themselves by talking with an allegedly tripping toddler, who knows where we might have gone, instead of where we find ourselves now.

if only joan didion had written a different book than slouching towards bethlehem, maybe donald trump wouldn't be president. really makes you think!

bustillos has never read miami or any other didion book afaict

lastingly valuable

seems to have skimmed the title essay from bethlehem and drawn all the wrong conclusions from it though

Didion is a great writer who is also def an elitist w politics I often find grating

that piece is terribly written though.

I haven't noticed the elitism. Maybe it takes a 1 percenter to thrash the Beltway commentariat and presidential candidates of all sizes and kinds and of cant.

aw man, bustillos is the person that did the last Bourdain interview.

love how the argument that didion is really a "dyed-in-the-wool conservative" comes down to her once writing for national review (apparently she wrote book reviews). well, garry wills wrote for national review too, but nobody would call him a conservative. otoh nobody would bother writing a takedown like this of garry wills because the actual reason for this piece seems to be "we hate people who love joan didion."

nothing about that piece makes sense. Besides maybe pulling some well loved name out of a hat and then trying to write a contrarian article on it as a writing exercise.

I’ve heard this basic critique before, forget where. For a certain kind of person for whom politics is everything or everything is politics, a writer like Didion would always grate because she distrusted movements.

and those people don't read books

there are some grains of truth in that article, Slouching Towards Bethlehem really does drip with disdain for its subject, and its weird how much of it seems to focus on degraded drug-related shenanigans and def notable that people like the Diggers refused to talk to her.

as Brad points out, she shows no deeper acquaintance with her later books from Miami onward in which Didion became a different writer. She mitigates the disdain, I think, by using motifs; it's as if the use of them concentrates her mind (i.e. emphasizing Prio's daughter's French heels and smoking on a rainy summer afternoon in a Miami condo).

That’s why it’s interesting though. It’s neither a denunciation nor a romanticization of the counterculture — it’s a report.

Xp shakey

it's a very biased and sensationalistic report

the sixties counterculture had some sharp thinkers who had intellectual chops, but by the time it filtered out into the general population of young people, it was reduced to a garbled mess of poorly focused anti-authoritarian sentiments that vaguely aspired to anarchy but didn't have the integrity to achieve it.

the one movement that emerged from the sixties with integrity, focus and a driving will to succeed was the gay rights movement.

that appears to undersell the achievements of the civil rights and feminist movements imo (which obviously flamed out after certain goals were achieved - gay rights movement had farther to go and took way longer, also started last)

I think Aimless means in terms of social movements that saw their first (American) flourishing in that era

there are a lot of words i’d use to describe “slouching towards bethlehem” the essay, none of which would be “disdain”

alfred otm

i mean you’re not wrong exactly shakey so i’m not trying to start an argument

when I reread Didion, which is often, I don't go to her early non-fiction.

^^^^

i tends to return often to parts of book of common prayer and miami

the architecture of Miami is as satisfying as a George Eliot novel's.

When the book ends with the Reagan quote it's the shutting of a door.

feel like that piece is more of a passive aggressive swipe at people who instagram their manicures amidst table spreads with anthropologie china sets and replicas of didion first editions than anything else

i probably didn’t read it right though

Yeah, I know that photo of her with the cigarette was the desktop background or profile picture for a lot of my fellow english majors back in college. But that shouldn’t be a crime

i think i still like didion? (i was obsessed with the hoover dam essay when i was a teenager.) but year of magical thinking didn't really click for me, and i read play it as it lays a few years ago and hated it. obviously she's an amazing stylist but i'm not convinced she has much more going on than that.

i do agree that her writing isn't going to age well but what writing will in the coming apocalypse

that appears to undersell the achievements of the civil rights and feminist movements imo (which obviously flamed out after certain goals were achieved - gay rights movement had farther to go and took way longer, also started last)

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, October 16, 2018 2:06 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I mean c'mon the Civil Rights movement predated the Haight/Ashbury hippie millieu by years (and before the 60s!) and it's been my impression that the hippies didn't really do shit for heavy lifting as far as civil rights was concerned (and frankly had their own problematic racial stuff)

(if we're specifically talking about Slouching and the Haight Ashbury scene she's writing about)

I don't disagree w any of that.

Aimless said "emerged from the sixties", so yeah I took it to be a broader statement about what was accomplished by radical movements in the 60s in general, and what they morphed into afterwards.

i read play it as it lays a few years ago and hated it. obviously she's an amazing stylist but i'm not convinced she has much more going on than that.

Like Baldwin, her novels feel uninhabited, or are exhibitions of their worst tendencies as essayists.

I can take or leave Magical Thinking. To me, her achievement rests with Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions.

i'll keep miami in mind if and when i give her another try.

Rather different.

as Brad points out, she shows no deeper acquaintance with her later books from Miami onward in which Didion became a different writer. She mitigates the disdain, I think, by using motifs; it's as if the use of them concentrates her mind (i.e. emphasizing Prio's daughter's French heels and smoking on a rainy summer afternoon in a Miami condo).

― You like queer? I like queer. Still like queer. (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, October 16, 2018 2:48 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the didion revival of last 10 years is mostly about the earlier works though; no one reads or talks about Miami

maria bustillos has been the worst writer on earth for like ten years now

― princess of hell (BradNelson), Monday, October 15, 2018 5:29 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i thought she was p good?

also popula.com is kind of interesting to me, may be worth starting a thread for

the didion revival of last 10 years is mostly about the earlier works though; no one reads or talks about Miami

Which is a pity! And Political Fictions is its match: bone-dry essays about the Clinton impeachment hearings ("Vichy Washington") and Newt Gingrich that appeared in the NYROB and no doubt contributed to the cachet on which it's depended for the last twenty years.

Miami is fucking amazing & Democracy is her best.

I know this is a coterie I'm referring to but every person to whom I've recommended Miami has been amaze.

amazed too

Salvador is a good companion to Miami too

attempts to write takedowns of Didion on politics are nothing new and they always fall flat because rely heavily some pretty simple good-guys-bad-guys formulae. I don't think Joan Didion believes in good guys, generally, except with heavy qualifications

i thought she was p good?

you try sifting through the sentences in this particular piece

or reading any of my other posts about her

also idc if only her early essays have been prioritized, if you’re gonna write a takedown of something you should have a holistic view of your subject (imo) (many a takedown i should’ve enjoyed in the past is compromised by laziness and dishonesty), otherwise you should aim the takedown at her fans who have only read the cover image of the white album i guess

also i am long overdue to check out democracy, maybe now’s the time

I was wondering why Didion was trending today, thought she died for a sec

https://youtu.be/o2yCIunJQ14

ach no thank you

idgi

The last two paragraphs of Miami, which I've just reread, had me drawing breaths.

I’ll need to revisit. Just brought We Tell Ourselves ... out of storage and started re-reading Political Fictions.

I lifted a good print of Play It as It Lays off YouTube a couple of years ago (still there), a movie I'd been waiting forever to see. I started it, watched a few minutes, never went back. Capturing white whales is too easy now. A reminder to myself to try again.

I read We Tell Ourselves... a few years back as a library copy. I just broke down and bought one for my own library, after constantly looking for a cheap used copy and failing to find one.

I added the Library of America volumes and am hoping there's one that covers the '00s and '10s (and, God willing, the '20s) still to come.

oh no

God willing, the '20s

:(

The New York Review of Books has un-paywalled about 40 articles she wrote for them over the years.

Link

found “A Book Of Common Prayer” at the local library today, looking forward to reading for the first time

had planned to reread “Play As It Lays” this holidays already so that will still happen too

RIP <3

I've only ever read Play It as It Lays and a few assorted essays. What would y'all recommend by her for someone who doesn't want to read a whole bunch about American politics?

Reading Miami through the three NYRB installments and am completely enthralled. I love that's it's local and specific and anthropological, not a Didion memoir or focused on pop culture or national politics. Every paragraph is worth savoring.

Miami is truly outstanding. Alfred said it upthread, and as an ex-Floridian who has some familiarity with that culture, it rings true for me and I hope other people can appreciate it

Deleted my Joan Didion Tweet because I need to be less negative. Sad to see hippie-bashing on the timeline though. One of those far-right opinions that somehow became leftish common sense. Laughing at people who wanted peace and love. So hateful.

— Don Hughes (@getfiscal) December 23, 2021

What would y'all recommend by her for someone who doesn't want to read a whole bunch about American politics?

sorry, i'm just trolling because i think andy dick is much funnier than joan didion

― ghost rider, Thursday, July 19, 2007 7:58 AM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

you still feel that way?