A passage from a book I'm reading that came back to me as we were talking about the South in the middle of the night. The book is "South and West: From a Notebook" by Joan Didion. A new reprint came out last month, but it tells the story of a road trip through the Gulf South that she made in 1970 (and a second trip in the west in 1976).
Here's another passage:
In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death, not violent death but death by decay, overripeness, rotting, death by drowning, suffocation, fever of unknown etiology. The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray: the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence. The crypts above ground dominate certain vistas. In the hypnotic liquidity of the atmosphere all motion slows into choreography, all people on the street move as if suspended in a precarious emulsion, and there seems only a technical distinction between the quick and the dead.
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Sounds like Hemingway meets Faulkner. Boring.
She's a typical South-hating northerner. Enjoy your snow. (Written from my chair as I look out at Bon Secour/Mobile Bay.)
She could have just said Shithole and left it at that. Or maybe she's paid by the word.
What overwrought writing. Didion's all technique and no insight. She's all frosting and no cup cake, and as with eating straight frosting, the effects are not good for you.
“The moral worthless of these human forms without human feeling, these demi-persons, roiling, heaving, spilling onto your shoes like the splatter of offal from a slaughterhouse, scents the air like rotted magnolias and the sour, hopeless sweat of chain gangs.”
What a great passage describing New Orleans. I imagine that circa 1970 it was even more pronouncedly dark than it would be today, but it still strikes me that way when I am there. The South, however, is vastly different today than the South of the early 70's. Inflows of thousands of people over the last 20 or so years has changed the landscape. A native of Michigan, I've lived around the South for 25 or so years now. I love the Southeast, the people, the land.
When I travel the rest of the country for business or pleasure, I'm always glad to come back here.
“The moral worthless of these human forms without human feeling, these demi-persons, roiling, heaving, spilling onto your shoes like the splatter of offal from a slaughterhouse, scents the air like rotted magnolias and the sour, hopeless sweat of chain gangs.”
Didion married well, was educated at Berkeley, live in Brentwood among the rich and famous, of course she hated the South.
Loved South amd West; I lap up every word Didion writes. But it’s not a new reprint, I think, it’s the first time these 1970 noebooks have been published in any form.
Given her turgid prose, Didion should have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express instead.
Not a bad take on tropical anywhere.
1970: Our Tricentennial
I object to the use of the colon in the last section. Pointless.
In 1972 I was thinking of going Florida to practice once I finished my training.
The air conditioner in the motel room froze every day.
That was not a good time to be thinking about going south.
However, the town I was looking at, Fort Myers, has grown enormously.
We had a discussion at Chicagoboyz about the South before the Civil War last week.
Why they did not develop industry. Some of it may have been climate.
The darkness of the perpetual overcast of extreme humidity is also spot on.
It certainly changes the light.
Not that you cant work with that, but it certainly isnt California of the golden light.
In the cultured liberal mind, it is always 1964 in the South.
This reminds me of a conversation on NPR's "Uncommon Knowledge recently with George Guilder" which says this it what it was, what it is,and what will be. Aka as "sticks and stones can break my bones. But words will never hurt me". Save as perceived by the listener, where they can and do motivate action. In maybe 100 year cycles, like the revolutions 100 years ago were motivated by those who thought their words were essential truths, which they were in their minds. Fake news isn't fake, its just propaganda per its eternal definition as all speech is.The censor's power lies in their ability to redefine the the same words describing Civil society, which in today's world that we live in is called representative democracy, where the system of checks and balances are failing to sustain our old definition of same, so it fails the anti-fragile test, which is just part of the natural cycle of life "from dust to dust", which is what we are seeing not only in the South but everywhere. Sometimes called infrastructure, but it is actually the framework for civil society. So yes, there was a time we did not need nuclear families to achieve the same end. Where Ms C's MAGA equivalent was "It takes a village" Which at that time was growing increasingly obsolete as humankind recycled itself.A tough time to live through until the next generation completes its job remaking our world.Which by definition won't be completed until the word millennial fades from the scene in that new world.
The place is physically dark, dark like the negative of a photograph, dark like an X-ray: the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence.
That doesn't even make any sense. I rather dislike writing that doesn't make any sense.
Deep State Reformer opines: What overwrought writing.
'Overwrought' was exactly the word I was going to use. Thanks for beating me to it.
In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death
The start was OK. She should have stopped there.
"In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death".
Oh wow Joan, what a perceptive remark...not. What does it even mean? Nothing. Writers are too much in love with their own words. What it means, and whether it's true, is secondary to how it sounds.
I love the south, Louisiana more than Florida, but pretty much all of it and I appreciate Didion’s take on it from the 70’s. It’s not turgid but immersive.
Temujin
The South really didn't develop a thriving middle and upper middle class till the 1960s. Then the exodus of northern transplants developed.
Joan Didion could have taken a few tips from Elmore Leonard:
Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle
"midstream America" reads like a typo
"Loved South amd West; I lap up every word Didion writes. But it’s not a new reprint, I think, it’s the first time these 1970 noebooks have been published in any form."
I'm still confused about that but used the word "reprint" because at the Amazon link it says "Vintage; Reprint edition (January 2, 2018)."
But the word "reprint" appears nowhere in the ebook, and the copyright page says copyright 2017 with no earlier editions listed.
""midstream America" reads like a typo"
Sounds urine-sample-y.
As to her writing here being overwrought, Didion may have thought the same as she didn’t publish the notebooks until now when she is no longer active as a writer. The publisher needs some material as she sells well.
"That doesn't even make any sense. I rather dislike writing that doesn't make any sense."
It's subjective. It's supposed draw you into wanting to think in terms of why she feels that way. It's not really The South but how the south made Joan Didion feel and you have the special privilege of experiencing it through her. She had to travel through the landscape of The South and you, you lucky dog, get to travel through the landscape of her brain.
Sounds urine-sample-y.
;-D Exactly. The 'clean catch' procedure.
@ tcrosse
I've been meaning to tell you I appreciate your adopting the image of Victor Mature!
"Not a bad take on tropical anywhere." Except that, applied to another tropical anywhere, it would have been racist, orientalist, you-name-it-ist. The South was fair game in 1970, still is.
Air heavy with death is especially odd: down South, stuff grows. No deserts, no barren mountains, no months of ice and snow: just life and more life.
The passage by Didion is awful. The writing is awful. And cliched. Not one of her observations is in any way original. It's as if she boned up on Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner, Robert Penn, James Dickey et al., and set out to imitate them. Anne Rice does a better job expressing that sensibility and she's a hack.
Victor Mature a handsome cool (er than) Sylvester Stallone and he could act well too.
Misery loves misery and will find it everywhere.
@Althouse
Praise from Caesar.
@AA/
As Louisville commenter here "dreams" will appreciate, Mature is/was a native Louisvillian..
(signed--a former denizen of "Lou-a-vul" myself for 20 yrs)
I wonder if anything along the Gulf Coast has changed in the nearly 50 years since she wrote that account. Naw,I'm sure it's exactly the same. I know I'm exactly the same as I was 50 years ago, and she probably is too.
Blogger buwaya said...”Not a bad take on tropical anywhere.”
My view too. I understand some people like it and more power to them, but I dislike hot and I especially dislike humid. Even Wisconsin summers can get oppressive for me.
The Edgewater Gulf Hotel was demolished in 1971 for a Sears that was demolished in 2018.
Heat and humidity may make one horny but it's too hot and humid to do anything about it.
It evokes another New Orleans song:
Crickets are chirpin' the water is high
There's a soft cotton dress on the line hangin' dry
Window wide open African trees
Bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze
There's smoke on the water it's been there since June
Tree trunks uprooted beneath the high crescent moon
Feel the pulse and vibration and the rumbling force
Someone is out there beating on a dead horse
I lap up every word Didion writes
Run, don't walk, to see the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, trailer here.
@Ann Althouse
The hardcover and Kindle editions were published March 7, 2017; the Vintage paperback (Reprint edition) was published January 2, 2018. It appears it's a reprint only in the sense that Vintage got the right to publish the paperback.
She's a typical South-hating northerner. Enjoy your snow.
Yeah, no. She was born and raised in Sacramento, in California's delta country, which (before the federal water projects were completed in the 1970s) was the only Southern tidewater city in America outside the South.
I read a lot of Didion's pre-1980 stuff and I never heard of this one. And
I grew up on the gulf so I'd have noticed. But the ac's didn't exactly go violent, more like
hesitantly forthright? I do remember the various ac's and the sounds they made. My
parents had an ac in their room. Cranky thing. I'd go jump into bed with them and they'd think it was for love.
Raised in Sacramento? Wikipedia has her moving around a lot as a child. Her first novels,
first I read had the old settlers in the new land sense? I thought back then you could have
done the same for old Florida. So I thought for a long time she was old California. But not.
I was born and raised in the South and those are accurate observations. New Orleans -away from the French Quarter & Garden District- is a 3rd world city. And the climate is unbearable in the summer.
However, fall weather is splendid, and, I do love the people of the South. If you had a relative pass away, half the town would show up at your house to pay respects and your dining room table would be replete with covered dishes (it is true that most folks were a bit too gossipy). Of course, both jazz and blues music originated there. Blues music, and its variants, is enjoyed by both black and white alike. Excellent literature has been written by native southerners, including William Faulkner and Walker Percy. I moved out west 10 years ago and I can tell you that there is nothing out here like the vibrant, unique culture I experienced in the deep South. There seem to a lot of California ex-patriots who are blase' about everything, including NCAA football!
Truman Capote is also from New Orleans. Most of our best writers--and our best playwrights--came from the South.
That should have read 'playwright', singular.
Sebastian: Air heavy with death is especially odd: down South, stuff grows. No deserts, no barren mountains, no months of ice and snow: just life and more life.
More life, more death. There is no death in lifeless places.
There is an ineluctable sense of death and decay in the tropics and subtropics that is not felt in more temperate or frigid climates, precisely because of the the lush superabundance of life. Turn your back on nature for one minute in the tropics, and it devours all the works of man.
Life is easier for humans in some ways - abundant food vegetation, no effort needed to survive winter. But the climate is also energy sapping and all that lush life includes the lush abundance of parasites and pathogens of all kinds.
My hat is off to humans who built and maintained, for any appreciable length of time, civilizations in hot and humid climes. I loathe the tropics.
"it devours all the works of man" I get that. But the "superabundance of life" and "abundant food vegetation," nature so alive that "devours" the works of man, would seem to counteract the "death in the air." Anyway, when I am in the South I sense the superabundance more than the death.
Superabundance of life means superabundance of rot.
We perceive death not as death, but as the side effects of natures recycling of the dead.
In the tropics there is more life, more death, and the recycling is much more obvious.
And more than death, the waste products of life.
I lived a year in Sacramento.
It gets hot, but its a very dry heat by tropical standards.
Maybe not quite as dry as Arizona, but certainly not humid.
When it rains in Sac its in the winter and quite cold.
When its sunny and hot its dry.
Raised in Sacramento? Wikipedia has her moving around a lot as a child.
She graduated from California Junior High School and McClatchy Senior High School in Sacramento, so her formative years were spent there. Berkeley, where she attended college, was a conservative, Republican town in 1952. The Sacramento Valley was the setting of her first novel, Run River (1963). In the seventies she could still be described as an apolitical western Goldwater libertarian (a description that still resonates in the West), and this was the period of her groundbreaking work. After that she moved to New York and the predictable decline and corruption set in.
I have a photographer friend who loves loves taking pictures of very early morning New Orleans because of the light and how it interplays with the color and texture of its buildings.
I was raised in NOLA and we had annual family vacations at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel. In those days it was like the big hotels often seen near railroad stations. Yes, the air was humid and the oak trees heavy with Spanish moss. Left in 1967 never to live there again.
How could a girl who grew up in Sacramento, in the CA central valley, not properly use the expression "go to seed"? Right there in the first half of the first sentence, I start to lose interest.
Also, the South is hardly the toughest place for the material and cultural works of humans. Ever see what ice does to structures? Blowing sand? Fast-moving water flooding? Urban squatters?
We used to have a boat moored in salt water near Seattle. Just about everything needed replacing on a regular basis and fighting mildew was a way of life. How I love being here in the desert! :-)
In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and death
Let me fix that--In New Orleans in June the air is heavy with sex and Democratic Party corruption, incompetence, and failure. In the other 11 months, it's more of the same.
Most of our best writers--and our best playwrights--came from the South.
I'll see your South and raise you the Midwest, particularly Chicago, as the home ground for the best American writers ... and now playwrights, with Chicago having long since overtaken and surpassed NYC as a center for quality original theater.
I find too many Southern writers to be too verbose, prolix, windy -- in love with their own voices, rapturously so. Dear me, how they do go on. How they blab.
By contrast, I give you ... Hemingway. Among many others.
You forgot Chicago's own David Mamet.
Also, the South is hardly the toughest place for the material and cultural works of humans.
I don't think Didion intended for it to be a dick-measuring contest.
Well, Hemingway needed to live in the Keys before he got really pretty.
"the atmosphere absorbs its own light, never reflects light but sucks it in until random objects glow with a morbid luminescence." Didion discovered CO2 based global warming! Take that Mann!
Best 'modern' writing I've ever read was Beryl Markham's West with the Night.
The Gulf Coast is indeed disgusting, and New Orleans is a spooky-ass place. There is weird shit going on on some mysterious metaphysical level there.
Just my opinion.
Superabundance of life means superabundance of rot.
We perceive death not as death, but as the side effects of natures recycling of the dead.
In the tropics there is more life, more death, and the recycling is much more obvious.
And more than death, the waste products of life.
Used to live on Guam which I assume has basically the same climate as your Philippines. The smell of the woods was super rich; very alive. Everything was either growing or rotting and rotting simply led to more growth.
In defense of the Gulf Coast, Hurricane Camille (cat 5) hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast in August of 1969, so cleanup would have still been occurring when Didion visited. My own family had to travel through Biloxi during that period on a way to a funeral in upstate Mississippi, and I still recall that bottle-nosed dolphins were being refuged in the swimming pool at the Admiral Benbow Inn where we stayed, because the aquarium they were normally housed at was damaged (Katrina caused a repeat of this: dolphins and other marine mammals being housed in hotel swimming pools).
I Have Misplaced My Pants: absolutely agree about the ‘mysterious metaphysical level’ of NO. It’s a very strange place and tends to produce overwrough reactions.
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