Joan Didion

silverblatttttttttttttttt

caitlin flanagan is one of the larger reasons i no longer subscribe to the atlantic (and she definitely shouldn't be accusing anyone of being a 'tired espouser of the most doctrinaire . . . political opinions'), but:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/the-autumn-of-joan-didion/8851/?single_page=true

To find the details that these women loved so well that they remembered them verbatim, he would have had to pass over most of Joan Didion’s extensive nonfiction body of work and go back to the beginning, to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968, and to The White Album, in 1979. If you love Joan Didion so much that she fundamentally changed the way you think—and there are many who feel this way—the books that did this to you are those two and no others.

one need not read past this nonsense claim, really

yeah. i read that, because the awl linked to it, taking up the criticism of didion and dunne as parents in particular. i admit it's less horrible than other things caitlin flanagan has written and yet.

maud newton's comments on the awl's link to it seem p much otm to me:

Maud Newton (#600)

Flanagan writes about Didion's parenting as though Didion herself doesn't see any problem with her parenting. In fact, her self-flagellation is the most intense and unsettling thing about Blue Nights, which for my money is a much more powerful piece of writing than The Year of Magical Thinking.

And the bit about the young Didion's anxious behavior at a dinner party and inappropriate wearing of a Chanel suit says far more about Flanagan and her own mother, it seems to me, than it does about Didion.

Maud Newton (#600)

@deepomega I'm not saying Didion is beyond reproach, nor do I think Didion herself would argue that she is. Nevertheless, Flanagan's tone and approach rankle me, as they almost always do.

re: flanagan's tone, that lady has never met an adverb modifying an adjective she didn't like. "viciously well-read" "hysterically sycophantic" she lays it on a little thick.

xp
lol <3 aero

horseshoe I tried to read emma by jane austen

oh no did you hate it?

I was talking about how much it sucked to a friend, I kept mentioning it, day after day, then she told me clueless was based off of it so I can't hate it that much

I was flying for about 40 hours total and I had ulysses, emma and a brautigan book I had read already, but then I lost ulysses on one leg so I was stuck w/ emma or real steel starring hugh jackman

also, that caitlin flanagan article. i mean, she's not wrong about the experience of reading didion as a woman, exactly, but i'm not comfortable with her take on what being a woman is. and this is a pretty fucking limited account of Didion's genius imo: "Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has." that article feels like it's participating in the same essentialist romanticization of womanhood that flanagan's father was when he said, "there's something weird going on with joan didion and women," except i guess maybe flanagan takes women more seriously than her father did. maybe.

clueless is the most austenian austen adaptation also i hate u >:[

no no I like clueless

also i resent the parallelism between didion and thompson even though, yes, again, she's not wrong, because didion is a much greater writer. i think that's why she meant so much to me when i first read her, yes she's a woman, but she's also a woman who wrote circles around her male cohort, which felt like a vindication to me. this is very petty, obviously, and i wouldn't presume to generalize it to other female Didion fans.

xp oh i understood you perfectly

I can't make it thru emma either, I want to time travel back to the land of emma and make everybody do bong hits until they loosen up a little

I find didion inoffensive and her popularity is quite puzzling, to me, in one respect I guess because I really don't see what's so special about her, but this takedown is pretty tacky

i don't really think it was intended as a takedown! also everyone itt shut up about emma shut up shut up shut up!

not long after the discussion upthread (6 months ago) i found an old hardcover copy of slouching towards bethelehem in a charity shop for $3 and bought it, hoping to like it, but i still havent read it

nb I didn't end up reading most of the article (like emma), only made it thru to the chanel suit part and assumed it was a takedown

i mean caitlin flanagan is kind of mean-spirited so i guess even her tributes come out barbed (and over-adverbed!) but i believe didion means something to her

Lamp I don't think that's the Didion book for you but you might like Democracy

do you not like slouching, aero?

There can’t be a novelist who writes with more authority about clothes. If you are going to pay serious attention to women—to their sense of themselves, their position (social, political, economic), their assumptions about the face they are presenting to their world, it helps a good deal if you know exactly what they are wearing.

i think this sorta sums up my misgiving with the way flanagan is misreading both didion and women in this article: i think this is very true in a small way but absurdly wrong in a large one, i suppose its partly mistaking oneself and ones prejudices for the world idk

also everyone itt shut up about emma shut up shut up shut up!

<3 <3 <3

"Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has."

ohh lord

this is a sentence someone was paid money for

I read this Tuesday and shook my head after every sentence.

Also: Emma is marvelous because the heroine is as cerebral and penetrating as the writer herself, which is why you should try Mansfield Park first

didion rules Flanagan drools

Was looking at the Amazon page for the Blue Nights "enhanced" Kindle edition:

This enhanced eBook edition of Blue Nights includes three short films directed by Griffin Dunne and starring Joan Didion. Each film blends Didion's incisive prose with images and mementos from her daughter's life.

also i resent the parallelism between didion and thompson even though, yes, again, she's not wrong, because didion is a much greater writer. i think that's why she meant so much to me when i first read her, yes she's a woman, but she's also a woman who wrote circles around her male cohort, which felt like a vindication to me. this is very petty, obviously, and i wouldn't presume to generalize it to other female Didion fans.

I don't disagree, but the parallel is one of popularity, and power over the imagination of readers, and invention of an image of the writer. They're comparable on those terms. Didion wrote circles around Thompson, but Didion created "Didion" in the same way Thompson created "Thompson" (and Hemingway created "Hemingway"), and those creations have a life independent of the books. I read the article as an attempt to explain the phenomenon of "Didion".

If you restrict your attention to the writing alone -- which is the right thing to do I suppose -- then all that remains a complete mystery. And then you have to explain why Didion caught the public imagination more than Janet Frame, for example, who was a better writer still.

i mean caitlin flanagan is kind of mean-spirited

Well, maybe she is. I don't know, I've read only a few things by her. I can tell you this, though: if you grew up at that time, place and milieu, then the world will forever be letting you down.

that all seems otm (i've never read janet frame!) i meant to indicate my own investments in didion which i think reveal that it's kind of silly to talk about her appeal to women as uniform.

the only part that doesn't seem otm is this: if you grew up at that time, place and milieu, then the world will forever be letting you down. but maybe i just don't know what you mean.

It's not important, but CF's early biography and mine are identical (except for gender). It's a leap from there to understanding her presuppositions, but I imagine that I can.

has her newt gingrich piece been linked here lately

max linked it in i think the primary thread

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/aug/10/the-teachings-of-speaker-gingrich/

finished blue nights after taking it out from my library

they put an insert slip in the front of the book that sez "Help other readers! Evaluate this book" & has rows headed by: age/gender - comment - rating (out of ten)

i wrote - 32 M - made me terrified of ageing - 7/10

this is sad but i lol'd at this

I've been trying to fight my way through this because of the book tour. I don't actually want to do the book tour, because it's tiring and ... it's a book tour. Then I keep thinking: If you didn't go on the book tour, you would have failed, and so this question of doing the thing -- going to the airport, getting on the airplane, going to Toronto, where you don't want to go ever in your whole life -- is on some level necessary. Otherwise you have failed yourself.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/03/joan-didion-cancels-la-appearance.html

just picked up blue nights from the lib. i accidentally requested the large print edition, and it's all a bit distracting to have the book in such huge font, and with boldface in lieu of italics.

no she insisted it be published like that, it's to make its insights into ageing more tangible

the audiobook is narrated in the tone of voice you would use to speak to an elderly, hard-of-hearing father-in-law

I wasn't crazy about BN :(

how so, alfred? not that you can't differ, only a friend read it & seemed to not like it for the exact reasons i thought it was really successful

She's often at her most powerful inserting those perfectly timed caesurae. A few motifs here are sensual (e.g. the fried chicken). But she didn't transform the material like its predecessor did.

i'm liking it so far. had to stop reading on the train because i was getting too emotional. same thing happened to me when i tried to read magical thinking on a plane. should just read it at home with my cat.

mmm. sensual is a good way to put it. the friend who wasn't so into it talked about being bemused by things like seeing her red shoes at the altar, why that was relevant, radiant. i think it really neatly succeeded at two things; first, though it wasn't intending to, painting a kind of elliptical portrait of quintana through those fragments, fleshing out these parameters that she existed in between, unavoidably conjuring someone, half-sullen and always young. and secondly phrasing all of those recollections, sensuous or stray, as what they were to didion, now; incomplete, snatched memories, every part of the thing itself gone, each remembrance the only clay she had left to play with*. & i felt it was more about those than the first thing, that inasmuch as we were meant to be responding to what she remembered it was just as a solipsistic thing, displaying what that debris was to JD.

xp, i can see how reading it in public might be kinda trying, rayuela

*i just read this daniel clowes thing, where he talked about his mother dying, how it'd be like if someone told you you could never see the ocean again - could have fun, but just would never see the ocean. i've never read proust or anything but i like those things that are trying to process what memory feels like, where it fits.

finished reading 'the year of magical thinking' just now and i liked it quite a bit, much more than i have anything else of hers. there are places where i think its sort of clunky or flaccid but the spell she casts over her life was so immersive and resonant to me the the dinners at candide with wasp dougherty the faded spode china the rewrites at the wilshire and the flights to cartagena and they way it flowed around her mourning, her daughters illness... she herself hints that shes romanticizing things but it reads like an elegy for a disappearing american leisure class. im not sure its supposed to, and the parts directly dealing death are good but seemed less vital than the other stuff, this idea of a life of grace and good linen

i found the 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live' collection and 'blue nights' in a thrift store (the same one where i got 'the year of magical thinking' so i guess someone was cleaning house) and im fairly impressed so far. i went to the park after work and sat in the grass and read the first three essays in 'slouching', it sortof kills me that she opens with that yeats poem. i think i can see some of what max and horseshoe are talking about upthread like there are some lines like the one about 'going back to hairdressing college' or the way she repeats and dissects the stories of the cast and crew on the john wayne western that would seem condescending bordering on cruel out of context but become almost admiring in the flow of the essay.

like shes so clear-eyed and cool and ambivalent as a way of managing this deeper despair. her description of the california mindset and california lives you can just ~~feel~~ her paying the wages of national headache and notional dread, its so brittle but precise.

Wait till you get to the political content in Miami and After Henry -- her peak.

things have been in and out lately and i got sort of tired of her reactionary bad temper and cold, nervous fingers picking at the embroidery of other peoples lives but man 'goodbye to all that' is just so fantastic i read it and gave up. i had already read about the 50 yards of theatrical silk somewhere else, probably here itt but who knows, but the essay accumulates so many similar details that match exactly my own experiences and feelings and articulates these all so clearly and rightly that i felt displaced, unmoored. so ive just sorta put her aside and gone back to struggling through the second half of 'underworld', so it goes.

I can't believe I was so hard on poor old Joan.

haha oh man

'the white album' for all its flaws detachment isnt really one. its voyeuristic w/out being insightful, theres a sense of her saving all her compassion for herself, of a despair bordering on the theatrical, the self-regarding. but its also incredibly compelling as a way of documenting the depressive state. or something.

i finally finished 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live', i liked the political stuff w/o thinking much about it i could sort of wave it away and see it outside myself, like as 'stuff' i guess. there are a lot of good posts early in this thread i feel late the party or like im wearing last years clothes now but im glad i finally read her and made my testament

i really enjoyed yr posts lamp, thought i couldn't quite figure out what was motivating you to continue so thoroughly while ambivalent about her. particularly enjoyed this as it has the kind of drunken gallop of a david lehman poem:

finished reading 'the year of magical thinking' just now and i liked it quite a bit, much more than i have anything else of hers. there are places where i think its sort of clunky or flaccid but the spell she casts over her life was so immersive and resonant to me the the dinners at candide with wasp dougherty the faded spode china the rewrites at the wilshire and the flights to cartagena and they way it flowed around her mourning, her daughters illness... she herself hints that shes romanticizing things but it reads like an elegy for a disappearing american leisure class. im not sure its supposed to, and the parts directly dealing death are good but seemed less vital than the other stuff, this idea of a life of grace and good linen

― Lamp, Tuesday, 24 April 2012 06:33 (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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amirite?