I'm reading that this morning after seeing "Linda Kasabian, Who Testified Against Charles Manson, Dies at 73/She had been a Manson family member and was along on the nights of the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, but she later became the prosecution’s lead witness" (NYT).
[Linda Kasabian] needed a dress that morning because the district attorney, Vincent Bugliosi, had expressed doubts about the dress she had planned to wear, a long white homespun shift. "Long is for evening," he had advised Linda. Long was for evening and white was for brides. At her own wedding in 1965 Linda Kasabian had worn a white brocade suit. Time passed, times changed. Everything was to teach us something. At 11:20 on that July morning in 1970 I delivered the dress in which she would testify to Gary Fleischman, who was waiting in front of his office on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. He was wearing his porkpie hat and he was standing with Linda’s second husband, Bob Kasabian, and their friend Charlie Melton, both of whom were wearing long white robes. Long was for Bob and Charlie, the dress in the I. Magnin box was for Linda. The three of them took the I. Magnin box and got into Gary Fleischman’s Cadillac convertible with the top down and drove off in the sunlight toward the freeway downtown, waving back at me. I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did....
Let me skip ahead to the last page of the book:
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled. In another sense the Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971, when I left the house on Franklin Avenue and moved to a house on the sea....
I have known, since then, very little about the movements of the people who seemed to me emblematic of those years. I know of course that Eldridge Cleaver went to Algeria and came home an entrepreneur. I know that Jim Morrison died in Paris. I know that Linda Kasabian fled in search of the pastoral to New Hampshire, where I once visited her; she also visited me in New York, and we took our children on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty....
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Waitress to another waitress who was marrying again: "You're not going to wear white, are you?"
Those events of the Manson rampage feel far away to me now. The real events, that is. The Didion excerpt only reminds me of her knack for manufacturing meaning where there wasn't any. With her overwritten tone of ominous significance. It got tiresome, to this reader. Along with her inveterate name-dropping -- even though here, the names are mostly worthwhile specifics to anchor and even accentuate the trivia of the events. But that tendency of hers wears you out.
Gary Fleischman, wearing his porkpie hat.
Didion is considered a brilliant prose stylist, but she still makes mistakes like "the dress in which she would testify to Gary Fleischman."
Nah it's still the sixties out here in flyover.
"The Didion excerpt only reminds me of her knack for manufacturing meaning where there wasn't any."
She is directly acknowledging this tendency of hers and critiquing it.
Kai Akker @ 8:53: Very helpful comment. I was wondering why reading her felt like a duty.
When DID the '60's die?
July 20th, 1969? (man walks on moon)
July 24th, 1969? (Apollo 11 splashdown)
Aug 15th, 1969? (Woodstock starts)
Aug 18th, 1969? (Woodstock end)
Dec 6th, 1969? (Altamont killing)
Dec 18th, 1972? (the start of The 11 Days that Ended 11 Years of War
i'm too young to know.. y'all fill me in.
On the Other hand.. I can tell you EXACTLY when the '70's ended: January 20, 1981
"her overwritten tone of ominous significance"
Excellent. A "brilliant prose stylist" who always gave off that look-at-me-writing vibe. Which she did brilliantly.
She is directly acknowledging this tendency of ours and critiquing it.
Show me where she is critiquing it, please, Ann. Even though it reads almost like parody, I think you are being too generous to her.
Portentousness was her most common mode. When events coincided with that tendency, such as with the Manson killings and various other events of the explosive '60s, Didion sounded wise and meaningful. But, to this reader, she was something of a broken record.
And the glitterati assholes are probably more upset at Polanski for staining the dress than for ass raping a 13 year old girl.
If there was justice in this world Polanski would have been locked away and we would never have to hear of him.
John Henry
I can tell you EXACTLY when the '70's ended: January 20, 1981
It was a month earlier, December 8, 1980.
I was 18 in December 1969. Most of us thought the sixties were opening a time of infinite possibilities, an Age of Aquarius. I had been at Woodstock and the Democratic Convention the previous year and I was 18. I loved the sixties.
There were others who foresaw trouble.
From Joan Didion:
"On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanksi’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and I wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised."
I agree that an entire book of that prose would be a slog -- but that excerpt really tells a good story well.
Writers: Less is More!
The Didion excerpt only reminds me of her knack for manufacturing meaning where there wasn't any. With her overwritten tone of ominous significance.
I'm so glad to hear that I'm not just a bourgeois suburbanite. She's always irritated me and this statement captures my feeling very well.
She may be self-critical of this tendency, but it doesn't stop her from doing it, does it? Which, I suppose, says something about her audience and their own (maybe?) desire to find meaning in the meaningless and unconnected events of all of our lives.
Everyone does it. Pattern recognition is what we do, to allow us to live in a complicated world without going crazy trying to notice, with consciousness, every little thing. So I guess I should appreciate the fact that Didion has found a way to monetize it for herself. Way to go, Joan!
I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences, but in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer it made as much sense as anything else did...
She is directly acknowledging this tendency of hers and critiquing it.
I haven't read the book, and can only comment on the snippets here. But one sentence of acknowledgement and critique hardly seems sufficient. This is like the dinner guest who acknowledges they've been monopolizing the conversation, and then proceeds to continue monopolizing the conversation.
"Oh, hi sweetie. What?" Pause. "Oh so, you went along on a murder party and you've turned state's evidence on the others and you bought the wrong dress to wear to testify and you want me to pick out at I. Magnin the right dress to wear in those circumstances. OK. Done. Oh I do agree, white isn't the look - Mexican peasant or 19C curtains is so much better. A girl wants to look her best when explaining about going along with a group to to kill someone and not intervening." And (implied) I'm not going to criticize your actions even years later. At least, you weren't a Republican.
I always liked Joan Didion but I doubt if I'll even try to read her ever again. This is carrying observation over action too far. (The story is behind a paywall so perhaps I missed some redeeming action. Hard to believe. I Magnin! Mexican peasant!)
I’ll never forget that August ‘69 weekend… with my family, returning to SoCal from June Lake in the Sierras and listening to that sad and horrible news on the radio.
Her collection of nonfiction "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live" sits on my shelf and occasionally gets taken down for a read. I love her writing. She could write about anything and I would enjoy reading it.
Good reminder of how wonderful Didion was (and I've reread those first two collections, Slouching and White, dozens of times) before she turned to international reporting. She was such an astute observer of America, offering details like that which had emotional resonance for Americans, the stuff from Latin America seemed, to me, as cool and detached as her writing cited here, for example, but without anything to strike home.
I felt the same in the book about Dunne, wondering where her pain was for her dying daughter, then skipped the book about her daughter. By then I'd been Didioned out, though I still bring Slouching or White to doctor's appointments and turn to any page while waiting.
I don't think I've ever read Didion. I understand what she's going for with the juxtaposition, but what she's written is boring, like a stenographer's report. The contrast of banal clothing details with the horror of the Manson murders doesn't work for me.
Back around that time in Wisconsin we were more concerned with Vince leaving (and soon after dying) and the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
She does drop names, doesn’t she. Cool how she even worked in JFK.
I always thought Didion was overrated as a writer. Looks as though I was ahead of the curve.
I suppose raping babies is a bit below murdering a woman 8 1/2 months pregnant, but not by much. The downside of being an atheist is that I cannot comfort myself that Charles Manson, Sue Atkins, and now Linda Kasabian are not burning in some pit deep in Hell.
"When did the '60s die?"
The '40s died 1/20/53
The '50s ended 11/22/63.
The '60s went into a coma 1/27/73 and were pronounced dead 8/9/74.
The '70s ended with a whimper in 1983, when Lowenbrau produced the first commercial (starring Joe Mantegna) aimed at the new demo group dubbed Yuppies. "Here's to good friends, tonight is kind of special, the beer you pour must say something more, so tonight, tonight, let it be Lowenbrau." Something more would become the ethos.
@gilbar, January 1969, Big Mike steps forward and is inducted into the US Army as an enlisted man.
You have to have lived in California to fully appreciate Didion. She understands the dread in the sunshine. Eve Babitz gets it too.
“jingle-jangle morning”. Where have I heard that before? Made the whole excerpt work for me. Brilliant Ms Didion. Thank you, Professor
The 60s ended in 1973, when the military ended the draft and the Vietnam War effectively ended.
Coincidentally just watched 'True Confessions' last night, written by her and her husband John Dunne.
The type used on the cover of the book at the link is classic.
Cielo Drive is very, very pricey real estate these days; probably then as well...
'Didion is considered a brilliant prose stylist, but she still makes mistakes like "the dress in which she would testify to Gary Fleischman."'
Isn't that the editor's fault?
Those had to be some amazing times in the Hollywood Hills area. (and Laurel Canyon). I'd say the party was over when Manson's team did what they were born to do.
That period- the 60s seemed surreal all throughout. Like the country had come unmoored and no one was really sure what direction it was headed. Kinda like today. Maybe we've been drifting since the 60s. I'd have to think about that for a bit.
As for Didion, I've not read enough of her to make a claim to loving or disliking her style, but there's this comment by Kai Akker, "The Didion excerpt only reminds me of her knack for manufacturing meaning where there wasn't any." That's probably what I liked most about what I read there. I like writers who can take the ordinary and give it life. Or even giving life to the ordinary bits surrounding extraordinary people or events. Anyone can write large about large things. Giving the ordinary life is writing....to me.
1. The Sixties didn't end the day after the killings. Nobody knew it was the 'hippie' Manson cult until a couple of months later. And anyway...
2. I agree with Mr Cook's timeline.
jingle-jangle… yep… Charles Manson was a real Mr. Tambourine Man…
sheesh
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.“ Hunter S. Thomson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971.
The sixties never ended.
Not even the illusions. "... that there was once a fleeting wisp of glory ... "
The world changed forever in 4 days of early August, 1945. The two million male American soldiers that voided death because of that week came back and impregnated the American girls that conceived the Baby Boom. As for the 1960s that was a Madison Avenue induced cluster fuck of drugs and sorcery with great background music. It finally ended in the early 1970s in a wide Revival of Christianity, much to the consternation of the old Christian Denominations.
The real theme was, “Those were the days my friend. We thought they’d never end. We’d live the life we choose. We’d fight and never lose.”
It sounds like the Manson trial was for Joan Didion what the OJ trial was for her brother-in-law Dominick Dunne. We can see the two cases as bookends: the beginning of the end for LA and the end of the beginning of the end for LA. At one point, Didion didn't live that far away from OJ's Rockingham house in Brentwood, but she was living in New York when the murders and trial happened. She might have appreciated all the talk about Bruno Magli shoes and the gloves from Bloomingdales.
Didion also reminds me a little of Scott Fitzgerald. The first two name-dropping passages recall the list of guests at Gatsby's parties, with the difference that these are real people caught up in something serious (Didion also luxuriates in high fashion labels and details the way that Gatsby and Daisy do in all his tailored shirts).
The end of the book reminds me of Fitzgerald's essay "My Lost City." Fitzgerald, or at least his generation (Malcolm Cowley, among others), may have started the habit of thinking of decades as signifying something more consequential than the passage of ten years. The script requires a hollow, empty feeling at the end of ten years crowded with events: the Twenties, the Sixties, the Eighties. Maybe it was a similar feeling to that felt at the end of the Great War a decade before: that's all over, what next?
In a way, the 60s ended the day we sold it. Dec 31st, 1969.
Even in season 10 the Simpsons could still land a few.
I know nothing of the world of American Girl Dolls and have no reason to believe that I will be in any way a more complete person if I were better informed about that world. That world does not impinge on my world and it is not a threat to American democracy.... Ditto with Charles Manson. His cult performed the most shocking murder spree of my lifetime. I was repulsed and a little frightened by him, but, as it turns out, he wasn't much. Charlie Manson and his followers were not messengers from the future. Their problems were not those of the larger society. The problems of Charlie Manson and his followers were rooted in the problems of Charlie Manson and his followers. Compare Charlie Manson and his followers with the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. His murder spree was a strictly boutique, retail operation. It never got franchised.......You can safely ignore Charlie Manson and probably Joan Didion too. I guess though that to the extent that she is remembered she will be remembered for her loose connections with him....Charlie Manson probably generated a lot of undeserved sympathy for Roman Polanski. Did Didion ever write about Polanski's trial or follow the girl who testified against him? That was part of the California zeitgeist too.
I recall a dispute years ago over whether The Godfather (Parts 1 and 2) is amoral (encouraging empathy for sociopathic killers) or profoundly moral (the story of a man losing his soul). The answer, of course, is both/and, not either/or. Joan Didion's reporting throws down a similar challenge, which makes some people nervous.
Growing up in UK, the sixties ended with Bloody Sunday 1/30/72 followed the next month with miners' strike and the first of several years of on and off blackouts from coal shortages.
Polanski of not rape-rape h/t Whoopi infamy.
Googling Ransohoff San Francisco pulls up not only the former department store but also a psychologist by that name. I guess the family is still around.
"Show me where she is critiquing it, please, Ann."
She says "Everything was to teach us something," lists a bunch of things, then says "I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences" — *senseless* — but at the time — "in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer" (the crazy summer of '69) — "it made as much sense as anything else did." That is, nothing made much sense, but I saw these things as fitting together but only in a meaningless — "senseless" — way.
At the end of the book, she does another list of things from that time and says that she stopped putting together the chain of senseless correspondence: "since then" she's learned "very little about the movements of the people who seemed to me emblematic of those years." Later, she, along with Linda Kasabian, was out of LA and all those weird situations and just doing New York by taking the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty.
She quoted Bob Dylan — "in the jingle-jangle morning" — so I'll quote Bob Dylan: "All these people that you mention/Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame/I had to rearrange their faces/And give them all another name..."
It all seemed so important at the time, she's saying, all connected, or so it seemed, but it really never made sense, though there was at least the notion that something could be "authentically senseless."
I spent most of the 60s in medical school, internship and residency.
I was more concerned about the La Bianca murders as close friends lived next door to them and between them and Harold True, the original target of the killers. There was a sense of fear in LA after until the crime was solved. One of the Manson girls had an appendectomy at County Hospital which, thankfully, did not involve me.
I'll bring up the list of books Ann linked to a week or two back. I got a couple of them from the library, but have only read the first book in Rachel Cusk's "Outline," after finishing Murakami's "After Dark."
Murakami (I learned from his writer's memoir) goes his own way. He writes what to him seems worth writing. Cusk (I guess) writes along the lines of what the literary establishment likes.
The difference is that Murakami writes about people caught in the midnight world, who meet, part, do things, meet again -- and also tell the story of a woman who decided to go to bed and rarely wakes up, who is transported to a different room (think a little David Lynchian), and tries to find her way back.
Cusk's book is about a literary writer who goes to Athens for a week to teach a writing class. She meets people and each encounter is given its own chapter. There's the thrice-married tycoon, now much poorer, who befriends her. A writing teacher who shows up on her last day to take her place. A woman in her writing class who is disappointed in her assignment the first day and calls the writer out.
Everything, however, comes back to the unnamed writer. It's all about her and something in her past involving her family and what scars (it's implied) is left on her.
It's a sensation I didn't get with Murakami. He's writing about other people, not himself. I was immersed in nighttime Tokyo, with it's Denny's, a love motel, a band's rehearsal space, and an empty playground. I was there, while in Cusk's book I was looking over her shoulder into a mirror.
It's a long way around to thinking, after reading this excerpt, that I might see Didion is a different way, like I do Murakami. I wasn't thinking while reading him, "Is it good?" I was grooving on the voice and the world, and maybe I'll do the same for Joan. I'll pull off the shelf the Everyman's Library edition of "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live" and try it out.
Didion readers should keep in mind that she was writing her essays for an audience -- an audience of the publishers and the audience of the publication. Consequently, she took various shortcuts that made sense at the time, but appear to be distortions today.
Also (forgive me), a reader should consider the times Didion was living in. I was there then (SoCal in the 60s and 70s), and I remember it being very focused on the moment in time that I'll call The Now. That's the fulcrum meaning of Timothy Leary's "Tune In" statement.
Tune it to what? KPFK 90.7 FM Pacifica Radio for Los Angeles, Southern California and the World. And, KPRI Radio 102.1 FM for San Diego which was a cassical music and commentary station. And, KFI AM 640 "More Stimulating Talk" for Los Angeles and the western US in range of it's powerful transmitter. And, KTLA TV Channel 5, Southern California's source for Los Angeles breaking news, weather, traffic and live streaming video for L.A., Orange County, Ventura County, ... [indeed...]. All very focused on the temporal moment.
So, my point is that Didion often wrote like a breathless reporter calling in a story before the last evening edition was released to the presses. I rather like reading her essays.
--- "Everything was to teach us something," lists a bunch of things, then says "I believe this to be an authentically senseless chain of correspondences" — *senseless* — but at the time — "in the jingle-jangle morning of that summer" (the crazy summer of '69) — "it made as much sense as anything else did." That is, nothing made much sense, but I saw these things as fitting together but only in a meaningless — "senseless" — way. [AA]
Thanks, Ann, I appreciate this opportunity to hear your thought process.
Would not the above amount to the imitative fallacy? Most typically invoked as, "the writer was boring us because life is boring at times."
If these things were "senseless," then they didn't fit together. Her fitting them together was.... senseless.
But I don't think that's why she wrote it that way anyway. The entire batch of material you are referring to was one authorial gambit on Didion's part. Why she indulged it, we can only speculate. She had no better ending? She had no deeper thoughts? She was writing on deadline and this was the best she could deliver? (Often the case!)
I think she liked linking herself to so many of the players and showing her involvement. It goes with all the name-dropping, something she never stopped doing in her entire career. For evidence of same, see "The Year of Magical Thinking."
That portentous tone was a tic. The name-dropping, another tic. My rebuttal to your viewpoint is that both those tics continued throughout her writing career. They were part of the package with her. They were not unique to that piece. She's definitely a love-or-hate writer with the readers.
Caitlin Flanagan caught her best in that 2012 Atlantic article, believe it's "The Autumn of Joan Didion," but it is behind the magazine paywall now. Terrific piece by someone who loved Joan's writing. But also saw some of the other aspects. I see Caitlin wrote a new one last year, but I have not read that. If it's accessible, it's probably well worth the reading.
Women seem to like Joan Didion's writing better than men. So was it her extreme femininity?
Gilbar said, When did the sixties end?
The sixties ended on May 4, 1970, with the Kent State shootings.
Gilbar said, When did the sixties end?
They ended for me when a friend, who dropped by for a toke in 1968, asked rhetorically, "What will be the next big thing?" I think he was trying to hitch a ride before his next ride appeared over the horizon.
And the finishing stroke for me was going on a government bus to LA for my pre-induction draft physical in 1969. I was deferred after an overnight stay in a roach infested downtown hotel because an Army doctor told me with a rich southern drawl, "Well son, you can't hear the Vietnameses in the bushes. So, you're 1Y now and can go home." I had already unrolled from college and went home to find line of work and a new place to live.
That was life in those tumultuous times and I think Didion captured much of it in her essays.
I was 7 in 1969. I was already afraid of hippies. The Manson murders made that fear worse. I would hid on the back floor of our car if we drove past someone on the sidewalk who looked like a hippie. Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” was cathartic for me. The only Tarantino movie I like. Because the bad hippies get their just desserts.
For better or worse, here's how I remember the lyrics:
Those were the days my friend.
We thought they’d never end.
*We'd sing and dance forever and a day.*
We’d live the life we choose.
We’d fight and never lose.
*For we were young, and sure to have our way.*
--gpm
Note that that Didion excerpt has another subtle quality to it. It removes a great deal of the agency from Joan Didion, reporter. She is, seemingly, just another element in the flow of events. Just a passing piece of the senseless jingle-jangle.
But the reader knows that Joan Didion, reporter, had plenty of agency and exercised it. So there is something false about the construct Didion presents for us.
Was this a characteristic of all her writing? Don't know, have never studied her to that extent. Maybe an unusual degree of passivity was an intrinsic part of her personality and some subset of readers just doesn't care for that characteristic.
It does seem to partake of the Chekhov observation, it is the writer's privilege to acquit himself. And it would not surprise me if the answer to my question above is Yes. For all
Didion's considerable gifts as reporter and writer, such apparently false notes would certainly explain why some find her work unsatisfying and, at times, irritating.
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