Joan Didion
This Blog spot could run on for days. Didion is one of the best essay writers around. I happen to be revisiting Slouching Towards Bethlehem (N.Y.: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968, 2nd print), and I am zipping through this collection with rapture. I usually do not read quickly unless I love the prose. If I don't love a book, it will just sit around and I'll leaf through it now and then, or it will continue to be ignored until I finally just shelve it somewhere with the thought that maybe in the future I will be interested. My reading is very much based on mood and level of tolerance. (An ex: I tried to read Secret Life of Bees, and I could not finish it. The symbols kept jumping off the page and beating me with a stick. Symbols shouldn't do that. They should arise from the prose without the author shouting to the reader, "Here's a symbol!" Alas, I have shelved it for now, and will try again another time.) Granted, I am talking about fiction now, and I started out with nonfiction.
Start over.
I love Didion's philosophical comments and her intelligence that even is present when she's writing about L.A.; in particular, Hollywood. Somehow she infuses intelligence and insight into the most shallow topics. Even when writing about John Wayne, she rises above the movie star magazine language. She talks about a picture where Wayne says to the girl he would build her a house at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. She writes, "As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear" (30).
Start over.
I love Didion's philosophical comments and her intelligence that even is present when she's writing about L.A.; in particular, Hollywood. Somehow she infuses intelligence and insight into the most shallow topics. Even when writing about John Wayne, she rises above the movie star magazine language. She talks about a picture where Wayne says to the girl he would build her a house at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. She writes, "As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear" (30).
posted by Dr. C at
1:16 PM
2 Comments:
Another Didion line that I love: "...I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History."
From "Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.)," p63.
By
Dr. C, at September 26, 2006 1:46 PM
I read "Slouching..." so long ago that I can't remember any details. I did pull down another slim volume of her work, "Salvador". Though the problems of that sad country and all our dirty dealings there are now long gone form the public's conscience I could not help but be reminded of all the stupidity going on in Iraq and elsewhere. Our war on commies and other leftist movements and governemnts has now been subsumed by the need to hunt radical Islamists? Who will be the new boogey man in twenty more years? No matter who it is, all is a sad waste.
By
Onca, at September 30, 2006 8:46 PM
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