Joan Didion

Estela, why can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous? Curious. Also are you referring to Didion when you say "she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway..." because Didion should be not only a woman at this point but a seasoned author.

she's otm about Manhattan.

I still prefer her political writing to anything else: her talent for skewering people for their language never found a better, to quote T.S. Eliot, objective correlative.

Most of us remember very well these secret signals and sighs of adolescence, remember the dramatic apprehension of our own mortality and other “more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe,” but eventually we realize that we are not the first to notice that people die. “Even with all the distractions of my work and my life,” Woody Allen was quoted as saying in a cover story (the cover line was “Woody Allen Comes of Age”) in Time, “I spend a lot of time face to face with my own mortality.” This is actually the first time I have ever heard anyone speak of his own life as a “distraction.

BOOM!

How exactly is that a criticism of Woody Allen?

oh, wow

How is it not?

Midnight in Paris is the latest example of an Allen film being so damn clumsy about its literary allusions; they're more like tags of erudition than references.

Woody Allen never tries to hide in his films how he believes much in life is a distraction from death, to make work, love etc a waiting/putting off of death. I don't see how his own honesty about this neuroses is a criticism.

I don't think he's hiding it in his films!

oh whoops sorry -- you said that. Anyway, why should give him credit for honesty?

she's also arguing that these attitudes -- and how he clothes them in undifferentiated psychoanalytic jargon -- are juvenile.

Then am I not getting something? Is she take Allen to task as a person or a film maker?

I'm not necessarily giving him credit for being honesty. I just don't think there has ever been undercover motives with Allen's films. Scenes From a Mall is not a literary references to Bergman, but a love of him films and knowing he could never recreate it. But he tried. Woody Allen has always been himself which is a failed person who can't sort life out. He admires other peoples work and borrows heavily from it. Sure America isn't attached to freudian babble, but Allen was, for better or worse. I think through his failures he manages to create a body of work that is distinctly his own. I think the failures Didion points out about Allen are included in his films, he displays it. I mean yeah that's him.

Geez I should sleep

So many good posts in this thread, esp from horseshoe and estela. I agree that Harrison comes off as a crank, especially in the beginning of the essay. There's too much envy blurring her better points. In the part where she lays out the "trick" to Didion's sentences, I found myself thinking "but...that's a great sentence" at almost every example she uses. Didion's style is unimpeachable. Which is a shame because I think Harrison's more political point about Didion seems like a fair criticism. There IS something very End-Of-History-conservative about Didion's almost knee-jerk skepticism of anyone who seems to hold a sincere belief in something.

assumed her work had no relevance for me and my concerns

this is odd to me!

Estela, why can be hard for girls to write about the world without feeling pompous? Curious. Also are you referring to Didion when you say "she suffers at times from a slight self-consciousness when making declarations but she still makes them anyway..." because Didion should be not only a woman at this point but a seasoned author.

― *tera, Wednesday, June 15, 2011 6:39 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i can't obviously speak for estela but when i read didion i very much get the sense that her fantastic ability to read situations, places and people means that shes also very aware (too aware, maybe) of her own place in those situations, and that awareness, combined with a ready insecurity and--this is maybe what estela alludes to?--an early life in which she was taught, implicitly and explicitly, as many women were and are, that she should be quiet and avoid pronouncement and confrontation, turns into a fear of pomposity.

i mean i wouldnt say didion has a 'slight' self-consciousness--i feel like (in what ive read which is not everything didion!) shes all self-consciousness. & i think that self-consciousness is (insofar as its what gives her that ability to read situations and relationships and so forth) what makes her so good, but (insofar as heightened self-awareness can, maybe even tends to, lead to crippling insecurity) it also makes her scared of how she must sound.

i just woke up so that probably doesnt make much sense. also i am over-thinking this. i will say that i think didion's "fear of pomposity"/"self-consciousness" is related less to her lived experience than it is to... "how her brain works" in some sense. so it doesnt matter that shes a seasoned writer now. its like saying "woody allen is successful and respected, why is he still so neurotic."

So many good posts in this thread, esp from horseshoe and estela.

otm. and everyone else! i love didion but its cool to hear ppl like lamp and pinefox getting to the heart of why they're not on board

There IS something very End-Of-History-conservative about Didion's almost knee-jerk skepticism of anyone who seems to hold a sincere belief in something.

Can you develop this? What I see isn't skepticism of sincerity so much as scorn for malnourished or incoherent thinking in support of a sincere position.

Martin Amis, in the rather good essay on Didion's style already referenced by Pinefox above, suspects her of being "defensive" in her attack on Manhattan. He accuses her of being scathing about other people's lack of cultural and literary sophistication while repeatedly betraying her own. The argument is subtle and doesn't lend itself to easy summary, but it's worth getting hold of the piece if you're interested in Didion and/or Amis.

Writers being writers shockah

It doesn't read like that, Alfred. There are enough similarities (and political differences) between the two writers to arouse suspicion of professional jealousy but in fact Amis, who's perfectly capable of being bitchy and partisan, seems to be doing his best to be scrupulously fair on this occasion. He's willing to praise Didion for what he finds good in her. It's an intelligent, perceptive and balanced piece of criticism.

I wasn't trying to be glib, mind: a writer always betrays his biases when criticizing fellow writers for their own.

He does in one way, in that essay: he says 'all of us are fascinated by what we most deplore' -- which sounds much more like a reference to MA than to JD.

Otherwise, Frankiemachine OTM and it's still the best thing I've read about Didion.

i'm not convinced martin amis is enough of a human being to deplore anything, to be honest

'we are all of us most fascinated by what we most feel mildly inconvenienced by and/or superior to'

estela and joan didion not entirely dissimilar in prose style imo

Thanks, Max.

In 50 years from now(or now for that matter), if a person were to read both Didion and Harrison, ignoring all of the hype and critical opinion surrounding Didion, and just read them both as objectively as possible, they would find Harrison a much better, more substancial writer, Imo... yes, her hatchet job is a little over the top, and jealousy may have been a factor, but there is also quite a lot of truth to her arguments, Imo... If one were to read her collection of essays "Off center", you would see that Harrison is a very brilliant writer, and that unlike Didiom, she is very 'common sense' oriented and down to earth... Didion give the impression, Imo, of being a lofty, out of touch, arrogant, snobbish, judgemental elitist, while Harrison gives the impression of being smart, witty, compassionate, articulate, reasonable and earthy... Harrison was a left wing feminist, but she was also very suspicious of dogma and ideology on either political extreme... she is certainly opinionated, but she tried to be as reasonable and fair as possible, at the same time... It's sad that she died in 2002...

what's ironic about Didion's article about Woody Allen, is that many of the same criticisms that she spouted about Woody Allen could be equally said to apply to her...

Maybe in the early days. She barely makes allusions to other writers and in the last ten years has stripped her prose of any bombast.

i dont hear much referentialism in her early days either?

Didion give the impression, Imo, of being a lofty, out of touch, arrogant, snobbish, judgemental elitist

This is about as wrong as wrong gets.

definitely didion's body of work should be dismissed because she's not "earthy" enough

i dont hear much referentialism in her early days either?

I mean, I complained upthread that she seems to have stopped reading novels in the late sixties.

earthy vs lofty is one of the lamest binaries ever.

I agree with you, jd.

I do not dislike Didion but found Harrison more impressive. But there aren't many Harrison readers here?

sounds like my politics are closer to harrison's than didion's (to the extent that i can make out didion's commitments) but i don't ever need to read anything else harrison wrote

pwn didion

for those not familiar with Harrison, here is a bit of info about her... I wish it was possible to post more of her essays, but they don't seem to be avaliable over the internet at this time, unfortunatly...

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-lierary-criticism/harrison-barbara-grizzuti

It is true that she does seem to have a propensity to sort of "attack" the rich and famous and powerful... She also wrote hatchet jobs on Jane Fonda, Billy Graham, Oprah Winfrey etc... yet, perhaps the rich and famous and powerful deserve to be critisized...

sorry, there was a misspelling in the last post:

http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/harrison-barbara-grizzuti

as literary hatchet jobs go, i don't think it's a patch on renata adler's 'the perils of pauline.'

hey hurting did you ever find that quote about the 50s generation? if it's the one i'm thinking of, it's actually from the white album:

"we were the generation called 'silent,' but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the era's official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. we were silent because the exhiliration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man's fate."

or perhaps that's not the quote you were thinking of at all. still a good one, though.

have been re-reading all the pre magical thinking non-fiction this week as collected in that big everyman's omnibus that came out a few years back and this thread has been very interesting to read through. while i am probably more a horseshoe/aero partisan than a pinfoxian skeptic, i wonder if pinefox ever did bother with the later nonfiction. she nevers loses her essential didion-ness, but the early essays (which i revere for reasons as much personal as literary) do seem (as others here have said) as much about working out her own shit (paralyzing fear leading to inaction) at a time when to-the-barricades action was the "proper" response, coupled with a natural skepticism. from salvador on, there's still that deep fatalism, but with a newer (and less solipsistic?) (not using solipsism as a neg here, btw) view that social justice might not totally be an incompatible mug's game for a life lived in a constant state of existential dread and the we're-all-gonna-die search for a point that might not (probably won't) be there.

I think that is the quote I was thinking of, unless she expressed the same idea elsewhere.

have been re-reading all the pre magical thinking non-fiction this week as collected in that big everyman's omnibus

same here, inspired by this thread

I found myself annoyed as I read Slouching Through Bethlehem by a few passages that use understatement to shore up savage judgments, but the overall impression is of a very young person who through scary intelligence and self-discipline learned to see and write like someone older and wiser. One of the cool things about that omnibus is watching her grow into that person. By Salvador, which I'm reading now, she seems fully in command of her powers and more aware and accepting of her weaknesses, and she makes a terrifying witness.

Am I an outlier for preferring the After Henry-Miami-Political Fictions phase of her career? I understand that stylistically she needed to sort herself out in STB and The White Album.

no, i dont think it makes you an outlier. she certainly got *better* as a writer, thinker, reporter. i think stb/wa, aside and/or plus their merits as writing, have also become her canonical books because they're "documents of the 60s/70s" or whatever, and i'm not sure the 80s/90s have the same hold (yet!) on the public imagination. plus for certain people (like me) who fancy themselves writers while also trying to mentally sort themselves out, then stb/wa have a certain special hold.

As a recorder of the moods, inchoate longings, and designs of a period, she sounded like no one else, but I flip through STB and TWHA when I want what I look for in the later volumes: affectless asides about the Doors, the Reagans, Hollywood, etc. At the beginning she chose, in my view, subjects as correlatives for her confusion.

haha yeah i cant imagine someone of didion's intelligence choosing to hang out at a doors session except to find the zero point of lassitude and futility of that era.

the first thing i ever read by didion was the 3-4 paragraphs about the doors session in 'the white album,' taken out of context and put in a cheap-o book of rock articles, where it read kind of funnily in between articles about sabbath's first tour and james brown's legal problems.

to the person who mentioned Ellen Willis in the above thread... thanks! I just finished reading her latest collection of essays and reviews about Rock music, and loved the book... I was vaguely aware of who Willis was, and had read some a little of her writing, but being reminded of her compelled me to buy the latest collection... so thanks again! Sadly, Willis died in 2006...