From "Joan Didion Revisits the Past Once More" by Durga Chew-Bose (NYT)(reviewing Joan Didion's new collection of essays, "Let Me Tell You What I Mean").
January 27, 2021
"Telling Didion that 'having a pretty place to work is important to a man,' Nancy Reagan fills an apothecary jar with hard candies for his desk..."
"... carpets the floors of the State Capitol 'in a pleasing shade of green,' Didion writes. (What green carpet, Didion’s deadpan delivery invites us to ask, has ever been 'pleasing'?) Didion’s understated tone registers the nuances obscured by the quotidian: the stiff neutrality between mother and son ('The Skipper’s arrival is, I have been told, the pivotal point of Nancy Reagan’s day'), Nancy’s preference for little choreographies... As [Didion] puts it in her 1976 essay 'Why I Write': 'I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. … What is going on in these pictures in my mind?'"
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38 comments:
Didion writes elegantly. But she doesn’t sing to me.
Her essay/article on John Wayne holds up pretty well.
Run, don’t walk, to watch Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix.
Titlers have strip-mined The Second Coming for a century.
Yeah, the bitchy bitchness of today is nothing new.
The usual sneering, snarky horseschiff about the Reagans.
I always get these elderly white female politico-fiction writers confused. is this different from the eternal sighing of peggy noonan? Should I care?
White women are the worst.
Yeah I get her mixed up with Susan Sontag and Joyce Carol Oates.
But Didion is good.
Didn't know she was a novelist. Thought she was an essayist.
I found that Joan Didion wrote unreadable claptrap.
It was a long time ago.
(What green carpet, Didion’s deadpan delivery invites us to ask, has ever been 'pleasing'?)
Well, if she's ever over at my house for dinner she can eat in the kitchen while the rest of us eat in the green-carpeted dining room.
I've read over 1,000 pages of Didion since my Covid confinement (never had read her before, but knew of her). I liked reading her stuff from the 70's to 90's, revisiting events I lived through. Even when history has shown that her take was wrong, it's still was interesting because she writes well.
Her book, the Year of Magical Thinking, about grief, was a worthwhile read.
Durga Chew-Bose sound like the name of a Star Wars character.
Well I don't know. There aren't many pretty places for a man to work on a factory floor, or in a machine shop, or out on an oil rig. So there is that. But if Nancy Reagan wanted to think that a pretty place to work was important for a man, who am I to "just say no"?
As for Didion she's worth an occasional read. I do recall reading something she wrote where she was as excited about a seamless, effortless merge of the car streams from the Hollywood Freeway on to the Pasadena-Harbor Freeway south. Almost as orgasmic as Erica Jong's (name?) "zipless f#$k" I don't know, you take your writerly thrills where you find them. I don't get overly excited about that particular freeway merge, but it can be tough when traffic is heavy.
Aesthetics do matter. Good for Nancy for knowing that. The odd thing is that everyone knows this, except the highly educated.
Many moons ago, while working on my graduate degree in economics, I was the first (but not last) UW-Madison student to be invited to intern at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. The inner sanctum had a carpet the exact shades of green on the dollar bill. Most pleasing shades of green to be seen. Ms. Didion didn’t get around to the right places.
Carpet is color, shade and texture, many greens are in favor currently. It changes.
I liked Didion for a long time and then I didn't anymore.
As I remember, her essays were readable and interesting, but she was no Orwell. An elegant literary style can cover multiple lapses of judgment. Pauline Kael wrote well about the movies, but her recommendation was no guarantee you were going to enjoy the movie. I believe the judgment of history is that Last Tango in Paris is not the best foreign movie ever made. I think the movie might even be on the cancel list. It features an authentic looking rape because Marlon and the director took the trouble to sort of rape the leading lady... I have a collection of Murray Kempton essays. He thought that the tragedy of America was that FDR chose Harry Truman and not Henry Wallace for his running mate for his last term. Well, Murray wrote well. Lots of cantilevered prose with multiple subordinate clauses, but the meaning of the sentence remained clear. Neat trick......I'm not sure, but I believe that political acumen is inversely proportional to literary talent. It's a sure bet that no young person ever put pen to paper in order to tell the world how nice their parents were or what a swell society they were living in.
Forest green now, Forest Green forever...
Another writer, like Herb Caen of the SF Chronically, who made I then dissed Sacramento, the town she came from. Then there are others like Greta Gerwig that write beautiful tributes to our humble farm town.
Geez I hate autocorrect. SF Chronicle should not be chronically though it wrong about most things in that manner.
And certain Sacramentans made it big but they didn’t made I.
I used to read Didion very respectfully and carefully trying to see what she meant. But she's not my kind of writer. You get adamant about that kind of thing when you get older.
Walking around in real life as if you were a set designer - oh, a very talented one - a Hollywood set designer taking a last walk through before the filming begins for episode 7 of some banal, popular sitcom. Are all the details right? each one saying just so much, just exactly this, not that? The show implied in the details. Walk on to your next set. Behind you life begins. Did life match the set? We never go back to see.
Her take on miami was terrible her fictional take was even worse.
"Ronald Reagan’s tenure as the governor of California. Telling Didion that “having a pretty place to work is important to a man,” Nancy Reagan fills an apothecary jar with hard candies for his desk, carpets the floors of the State Capitol “in a pleasing shade of green,” Didion writes. (What green carpet, Didion’s deadpan delivery invites us to ask, has ever been “pleasing”?) Didion’s understated tone registers the nuances obscured by the quotidian: the stiff neutrality between mother and son (“The Skipper’s arrival is, I have been told, the pivotal point of Nancy Reagan’s day”), Nancy’s preference for little choreographies."
Joan Didion saw the Sacramento Capitol with green carpeting but perhaps she has grown old and forgetful. The muted green carpet really was indeed quite pleasing.
The last thing they carried, of course netflix made into a film.
When I worked, arriving home from work was certainly the pivotal moment of my day. My husband works from home, but if he didn't, his arrival home would be a pivotal moment. If a family member's arrival isn't a (or the) pivotal moment of the day, that's just sad. It is a turning, a switch, a change in way of living, and it should be!
How shocking could it he to learn that Nancy Reagan was an actress who cared about superficial things? Or, that grief leaves you feeling spent and empty (Year of Magical Thinking). I always respected Didion's eye for details, and the way she put words together; however, her observations were hardly original or revealing.
What green carpet, Didion’s deadpan delivery invites us to ask, has ever been 'pleasing'?
Before additional commenters get huffy about whether green carpet is indeed pleasing, please note it's the NYT reviewer, not Didion, who thinks it's not.
She's a good writer. The White Album is great, one of the best things about the Sixties I have read. I just read Where I Was From, which was very good, better than I expected. Slouching Toward Bethlehem is good, but despite its reputation, not as good as The White Album. Joan Didion seems to get a level of adoration beyond what she deserves. Great prose style, yes, certainly, and that counts for a lot. There is an essay by Caitlin Flanagan about Didion that is entertaining, if only to see the cult-like idolatry of her, which seems inexplicable, but it is apparently a girl thing.
Not to take away anything from her talent (I haven't read anything by her so I really can't judge); but Didion was, I understand, an early beneficiary of The Garry Wills Effect: a writer laboring in obscurity in the National Review vineyards, who then switches ideological teams and suddenly gets noticed, praised, etc.
'I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. … What is going on in these pictures in my mind?'"
She means feeling.
Per Antonio Damaso
I'm still made I leant that book of hers to a friend because I'm trying not to buy books since I read kindles, but want it on my shelf so maybe my kids will see it when they're a little older. I remember my parents' bookshelves and not just because I stole most of them.
Maybe the last time I flew I watched "The Center Will Not Hold," a move about Joan Didion. What a strange person. But I do recommend.
About the daughter who was so sick at the time when Joan's husband died, apparently she was a major boozehound and Joan always wanted not to discuss that.
---There is an essay by Caitlin Flanagan about Didion that is entertaining. [Lexington Green]
Very! Also illuminating.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/the-autumn-of-joan-didion/308851/
Markoni,
Forest green now, Forest Green forever...
Agreed. The very dark green one associates with Christmas trees. However, needs to be vacuumed constantly, and requires good lighting. Probably impractical here, b/c cats, who do shed all over the freakin' place. Though there is a large wool rug, very dark green and medium tan pattern, which is now in my husband's studio.
(The actual carpet here is that sort of nondescript beige that used to be everywhere, and probably was in here when the house was built -- 1975 or so. I hate it, and it's not in the least resistant to cat barf, but ripping it all out and replacing it would be an awful lot of work.)
Gah, I can't believe I forgot to mention this. The first house my parents ever bought, after moving out of UW/Madison grad student housing, was a place in Leawood, KS, so that they could gou to their respective Univ. of Kansas post-docs. That house was green. All green, inside and out. Green exterior, green carpets, green tiles, green walls, green trim. Different shades, but only one color.
We were only there two years, so my parents didn't get all of the interior changed, but much of it was redone. Still, the initial sight of the place was a shock to four-or-five-year-old me.
Didion's husband's family, the Dunnes, thought of themselves as the Kennedys of Connecticut: stylish, well-off, well-connected (and now with all the tragedies). Didion herself saw the Reagans as a cheap knock-off of her own Sacramento family. The Didions were real old money Californians who came with the Gold Rush and the Reagans were Hollywood arrivistes. After she moved left Didion changed her mind about Old California and her own family, but not about the Reagans.
How did Didion go from being a Goldwater supporter to despising the Reagans? I think it had to do with being a young Westerner in New York City and embracing Goldwater as a fellow Westerner. She was an outsider and Goldwater was an edgy emblem or totem of outsider status for her. When the Didion-Dunnes moved to LA, Joan's position changed. She was a sophisticate from the East (and from Northern California) who could look down on Southern California, and on the Reagans. Or maybe it was just that everyone around her was Democrat and progressive. In any case, her disgust with the Reagans was strong and visceral, perhaps to make up for her Goldwater girl past.
Joan and John maybe the closest thing we've had to Scott and Zelda since the 20s. We know an awful lot about their private lives (or what Joan has seen fit to reveal), even down to their moves from NYC to LA and back to NYC. Joan is the Scott and John the Zelda, though, which he may not have liked.
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