"It makes a weird kind of sense that 'The Apprentice' is arriving in theaters Friday, a week after 'Joker: Folie à Deux.'"

"Both movies are set in New York in the 1970s and/or ’80s. Both are about larger-than-life antiheroes perceived as monsters by many and lionized by others. And both seem perversely designed to disappoint audiences on either side of the aisle...."

Wrote Ty Burr, in "Trump biopic ‘The Apprentice’ avoids taking sides. Good luck with that. Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong star as the young Don and his soulless mentor, Roy Cohn" (WaPo)(published last Tuesday).

Why I read something this blurry.

I'd just watched "What a Way to Go" — the Criterion Channel is featuring Shirley MacLaine movies — and checking Rotten Tomatoes, I saw that Joan Didion wrote a review in the May 1964 issue of Vogue. I could subscribe to Vogue just to read that paragraph, but I found that by calming down and believing in myself, I could read it. It's not much different from reading without one's reading glasses. It's an apt and pithy review. "What a Way to Go" was a big movie in its day, so it deserves the bad reviews it got, but 60 years later, it's fun to look at the stars and the costumes and the sets. The Hollywood that produced it no longer exists. Nothing to get mad at now. Here's a sentence from the contemporaneous NYT review by Bosley Crowther:

Inspired by a Gwen Davis story, which has not swum into my ken, so I cannot tell you how fairly or fouly it has been used, the team of musical-comedy writers is making kookie jokes about a girl whose sad fate it is to marry a succession of burgeoning millionaires.

The "girl" hates money, loves Henry David Thoreau, and only wants to live the simple life, but the movie seems to have been made on the theory that the way to make good art is by spending as much money as possible.

"[O]n the morning of John Kennedy’s death in 1963 I was buying, at Ransohoff’s in San Francisco, a short silk dress in which to be married."

"A few years later this dress of mine was ruined when, at a dinner party in Bel-Air, Roman Polanski accidentally spilled a glass of red wine on it. Sharon Tate was also a guest at this party, although she and Roman Polanski were not yet married. On July 27, 1970, I went to the Magnin-Hi Shop on the third floor of I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and picked out, at Linda Kasabian’s request, the dress in which she began her testimony about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. 'Size 9 Petite,' her instructions read. 'Mini but not extremely mini. In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold. Or: A Mexican peasant-style dress, smocked or embroidered.'"

Wrote Joan Didion, in "The White Album" (1979).

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).

Didion continues:

"(The mother of Marina Warner, the beautiful and brilliant English cultural historian, used to ask her, 'Why do you keep disagreeing with men? They don’t like it, you know.')"

"Women who are admired as beauties risk dismissal as brains. But Didion was both. It was non-negotiable: it was impossible to dismiss her words, and it was impossible to ignore her looks. Like her words, they were spare, elegant, and arresting...."

From "Joan Didion’s Priceless Sunglasses/An auction of the writer’s possessions is further confirmation of how, for Didion, style was not surface but essence" by Roxana Robinson (The New Yorker).

"I wish she were still alive to write a mordant and illuminating essay on the auction of her personal belongings."

The top-rated comment on "Joan Didion’s Life in Objects/Hundreds of the writer’s furnishings and personal items will be sold at auction next month, offering fans the opportunity to acquire a piece of her legacy" (NYT).

"[Jia] Tolentino, a millennial essayist and New Yorker staff writer, said that she had not read Ms. Didion until her 20s, but immediately realized..."

"... that 'through the words of others, I had been reading her my entire life.' At a memorial where so many of the eulogies came from writers who have been paid a lot to complete sentences, it came as little surprise that the guests spent much time debating about who’d given the best one. But the funniest, many people said, belonged to [Susannah] Moore, who vividly recalled some of Ms. Didion’s one-liners, among them, 'Whatever you do, you’ll regret both,' and 'evil is the absence of seriousness.' That one arrived following a dinner Ms. Didion hosted. Among the guests, Ms. Moore said, was Bianca Jagger, who ignited scorn from Ms. Didion by proceeding to pick the magazines up off the coffee table and read them one after the other. The editor Joan Juliet Buck described a conversation she had with Ms. Didion, who had told her how to deal with a stalker: 'Move into the Carlyle.' Annabelle Dunne, Ms. Didion’s niece, reported that her aunt had advised: 'Don’t forget to have a baby. It’s easy to forget.' [David] Remnick started his speech with his misgivings about giving it: 'How do you speak about someone who was in her time the foremost enemy of canned cliché and falsehood?' he asked, before going on to praise her 'authority of tone' and the way she led by example."

From "A Star-Studded Goodbye to All That/Among the well-wishers at Joan Didion’s memorial service in New York" (NYT).

"'Hardness' has not been in our century a quality much admired in women, nor in the past twenty years has it even been in official favor for men."

"When hardness surfaces in the very old we tend to transform it into 'crustiness”' or eccentricity, some tonic pepperiness to be indulged at a distance. On the evidence of her work and what she has said about it, Georgia O’Keeffe is neither 'crusty' nor eccentric. She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees. This is a woman who could early on dismiss most of her contemporaries as 'dreamy,' and would later single out one she liked as 'a very poor painter.' (And then add, apparently by way of softening the judgment: 'I guess he wasn’t a painter at all. He had no courage and I believe that to create one’s own world in any of the arts takes courage.')... The men talked about Cezanne, 'long involved remarks about the "plastic quality" of his form and color,' and took one another’s long involved remarks, in the view of this angelic rattlesnake in their midst, altogether too seriously. 'I can paint—one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men,' the woman who regarded herself always as an outsider remembers thinking one day in 1922, and she did: a painting of a shed 'all low-toned and dreary with the tree beside the door.' She called this act of rancor 'The Shanty' and hung it in her next show. 'The men seemed to approve of it,' she reported fifty-four years later, her contempt undimmed. 'They seemed to think that maybe I was beginning to paint. That was my only low-toned dismal-colored painting.'"

From the essay "Georgia O'Keeffe" in Joan Didion's "White Album" (1979).

"To take aim at J.K. Rowling, Dave Chappelle or even Dr. Seuss shows real censorious ambition. But to cancel [Norman] Mailer at this moment would be an act of superfluity..."

"... like canceling Booth Tarkington or James Whitcomb Riley — a pointless kick to a fundamentally anachronistic character.... [Mailer's] reputational decline is so overdetermined, his persona so intensely out of step with our own era — the brawling macho solipsist who stabbed his own wife with a penknife — as to make him a comically easy and therefore pointless target for cancellation.... You want to impress me? You want to flex some cultural muscle? Let’s see you cancel Joan Didion.... In the recent obituaries you could see it enfolded into a larger narrative of her career, in which the conservative aspect of her writing... was something she gradually questioned and then transcended.... This narrative, in which Didion (to quote Hilton Als of The New Yorker) inherited a mythology and then 'began to see the cracks, and to wonder what those cracks meant,' is part of her protection against contemporary cancellation...."

From "Joan Didion, Conservative" by Ross Douthat (NYT).

For background on the current talk of cancelling Norman Mailer, see "Michael Wolff on Random House's Cancellation of Norman Mailer/Exclusive: The author's 'White Negro' essay helps sink a book set for 2023."

I remember when Norman Mailer was cancelled in 1971. Cancellation — and feminism — was so much more exciting and alive back then (not this dreary business we've got going today):

These days, Germaine Greer is cancelled.

"A few months after Didion’s review [of Woody Allen's 'Manhattan'] appeared, the NYRB published a selection of responses from readers. These readers were not pleased."

"Randolph D. Pope of Dartmouth College, no stranger to sarcasm, congratulated Didion on providing 'a perfect example of how a mind too full with culture is unable to understand humor.' Roger Hurwitz (MIT) advised that she would 'do better to be alarmed by than morally superior to the attitudes, concerns and mores Mr. Allen’s characters reflect.' John Romano (Columbia) spent 647 words chastising her for — among other offenses — treating Allen’s characters’ brand of self-absorption as tiresome and distinctly contemporary, rather than placing them in an intellectual lineage that stretched back centuries. The NYRB also published Didion’s response to these letters. It reads, in its entirety, 'Oh, wow.'"

From "Joan Didion’s Greatest Two-Word Sentence/The power of an ice-cold, unflinching gaze" by Molly Fischer (The Cut).

Goodbye to Joan Didion.

This was a writer I truly admired, so I will give you my “Joan Didion” tag and go back and read what I’ve said about her over the years.

"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?'"

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").

"The fact Bob Woodward has written another book about the current occupant of the White House should be greeted with roughly the level of enthusiasm reserved for..."

"... such annual or semi-annual non-events as the Biennial Conference of the American Hippotherapy Association or the Pro Bowl. I would be tempted to suggest that the latest affectless, indifferently written Woodward volume is a matter of at most seasonal interest, like the early September appearance of Halloween candy in supermarkets, except that unlike the former, Rage is unlikely to bring pleasure to any living American.... Why do presidents talk to Woodward? Is it some kind of tradition, cloying but innocuous like the White House Turkey Pardon? His modus operandi is by now fairly well established: Speak to him because if you do not he will publish hundreds of pages of decontextualized gossip from disgruntled agenda-driven current or ex-employees. He will in fact probably do so regardless of what you say to him and when, but why spoil the fun? What Woodward does is not journalism. It is, as Joan Didion memorably put it, 'political pornography.'"

From "There's nothing shocking about Bob Woodward's new book" by Matthew Walther (The Week).

ADDED: On that question "Why do presidents talk to Woodward?," here's Politico, "Behind Woodward’s September surprise: White House aides saw a train wreck coming, then jumped aboard":

"AGE 24/'Atlas Shrugged'/BY AYN RAND/'Marvel at the profundity of its objectivist themes — then, in a few years, marvel at your naivete."

From "Books for the ages/The best books to read at every age, from 1 to 100" (WaPo).

The book that caught my eye and that I downloaded from Kindle is the one chosen for age 92:

“Nothing to be Frightened Of”
BY JULIAN BARNES

Don’t avoid the big questions of life and death and faith: Tackle them straight on with help from some of the greatest thinkers.

The one chosen for my age, 68, is something I've already read, “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion ("Grief can make you feel like you’re losing your mind. That’s normal").

And, no, I've never read "Atlas Shrugged." I tried a little, but I have to like the sentences. I'm a sentences reader.

That reminds me, I wanted to recommend this Malcolm Gladwell podcast that has a lot to say about the kind of people who are slow readers:

The Tortoise and the Hare

A weird speech by Antonin Scalia, a visit with the some serious legal tortoises, and a testy exchange with the experts at the Law School Admissions Council prompts Malcolm to formulate his Grand Unified Theory for fixing higher education.

Gladwell is himself a "tortoise" — a slow reader — and he doesn't like the way his kind are disadvantaged on the LSAT.

A "tortoise"-type reader is not going to do well with "Atlas Shrugged"!

By the way, Gladwell talks about the condition of being a slow reader and a fast writer. I have that too. It's why blogging works well for me. I can find and isolate the sentences I find rich and readable — slowly readable — and I can flow very quickly writing about them. In this light, you can see that this tortoise/hare thing is not binary. There may be tortoises and hares, but there are also "hortoises" and "tares." If it's just tortoises and hares, it might be easy to say, yeah, it's just that some people are smarter than others. But if you see reading and writing (or reading and analyzing) as separate axes, with fast to slow on both, people are more complexly differently abled. Diagram to come....

ADDED: Oh, no, no, no... my idea of a diagram with axes and quadrants is defective. I had to try to draw it to see the problem!



Reading does not progress to writing the way slow progresses to fast. Please suggest a way I can draw this idea!

AND: Allison explained the solution and, with her help, I easily got it right:

"The collective outrage over 'American Psycho' provides a context for the essays in 'White,' whose topics range from [Bret Easton] Ellis’s unsupervised 1970s childhood..."

"... in upper-middle-class Sherman Oaks, Calif., to his critiques of movies and movie stars, to President Trump and the digital echo chamber. His points are not always agreeable, but that’s never stopped him. In one essay, 'Liking,' Ellis indicts the 'horrible blooming of "relatability" — the inclusion of everybody into the same mind-set … the ideology that proposes everybody should be on the same page, the better page.'... He’s complained about liberals who think he’s a Trump apologist.... 'Lately what’s bothered me is the tweeting world, and how, since there’s no context, no nuance, and since everyone’s so hysterical, you are tagged things that you are not,' Ellis said. 'The language police is a hard thing to deal with if you are creative.' He really wishes everyone would just calm down...
[He prefers] to treat the news cycle as fleeting entertainment rather than the end of the world ('Really, Jared Kushner looks great in a bathing suit')... Ellis finds himself now in his longest relationship to date, with a 32-year-old musician named Todd Schultz.... He described their post-2016 household as 'a bad sitcom of a crusty old Gen X-er, who’s kind of a lapsed liberal centrist, and my communist gay boyfriend.'... Todd’s a 'political monster' who 'sits in front of MSNBC having meltdown after meltdown … yet his bounce-back time is pretty good.' If Schultz stands for the melodramatic, media-obsessed millennial, then Ellis identifies as 'the old man on the porch,' whining over the cultural profundity of decades past."

From "Bret Easton Ellis Has Calmed Down. He Thinks You Should, Too. In the 1980s and ’90s, the novelist was seen as a literary bad boy and the voice of his generation. Now 55, he’s about to publish his first book in nine years" (NYT).

Here's that book of essays: "White."

Why's it called "White"? Is it racial? The article says that the original title was "White Privileged Male" and that it means to acknowledge the great old book of essays by Joan Didion, "The White Album."

ADDED: The opposition to the idea that "everybody should be on the same page" caught my eye because, just recently, somebody took me to task simply for using the phrase "on the same page" — "We need to be on the same page." He hated that, I was told.

"A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon/A panel of critics tells us what belongs on a list of the 100 most important books of the 2000s … so far."

At Vulture (NY Magazine). Worth a click just for the illustration (by Tim McDonagh). I love the drawing of Joan Didion (whose "Year of Magical Thinking" is in the canon), one of many drawings of writers, all colorfully jumbled together.

Any project like this is arbitrary, and ours is no exception. But the time frame is not quite as random as it may seem. The aughts and teens represent a fairly coherent cultural period, stretching from the eerie decadence of pre-9/11 America to the presidency of Donald Trump. This mini-era packed in the political, social, and cultural shifts of the average century, while following the arc of an epic narrative (perhaps a tragedy, though we pray for a happier sequel). Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, one of our panel’s favorite books, came out ten days before the World Trade Center fell; subsequent novels reflected that cataclysm’s destabilizing effects, the waves of hope and despair that accompanied wars, economic collapse, permanent-seeming victories for the once excluded, and the vicious backlash under which we currently shudder. They also reflected the fragmentation of culture brought about by social media. The novels of the Trump era await their shot at the canon of the future; because of the time it takes to write a book, we haven’t really seen them yet....

The Trump era books haven't come out yet, but one of the books in the canon is "The Plot Against America," by Philip Roth (September 30, 2004), and...

It can be easy to forget that The Plot Against America, which today reads as a parable for Trump’s America, was widely received as an allegory for W.’s — an interpretation that Roth encouraged by insisting the opposite. The novel begins in a buzz of fear and the pitch increases steadily, unbearably. But it’s Roth’s doomed hero, Walter Winchell, whose speeches have the uncanny urgency of prophecy: “How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?”

An interpretation that Roth encouraged by insisting the opposite... ha ha. Years ago, that used to be called "reverse psychology." It used to come up in sitcoms. We'll use reverse psychology. That is, when we want to get somebody to do something, we'll act like we want the opposite. It's like playing hard to get. When you suspect someone's trying to do that to you, you say they "protest too much."

Maybe I'll read "The Plot Against America." And by read, I mean let it read itself to me as I take my walks about Madison. I've read very few of the books in The Vulture's canon. Only "The Year of Magical Thinking" — maybe the only nonfiction book on the list — and some of the stories in "Oblivion." I've read part of "The Sellout." I haven't even read the Haruki Murakami book on the list —  "1Q84" — and I've read 5 Murakami books in the last year. So maybe the "dozens of authors and critics" on their panel are not very much like me.

Vulture also has "The Best Audiobooks of 2018 (So Far)," which influenced me to buy 2 things: "Convenience Store Woman" and "Educated: A Memoir."

Remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon if you want to buy any of these things (including the audiobooks). I like to buy the Kindle version of the book on Amazon and check the box or hit the button to add on the audiobook. You get both for a lower price than you'd pay for just the audiobook, and it's great to be able to find things in the text after you've heard them in the audiobook, especially for me, blogging and wanting to cut and paste.

"Everything seems to go to seed along the Gulf: walls stain, windows rust. Curtains mildew. Wood warps. Air conditioners cease to function."

"In our room at the Edgewater Gulf Hotel, where the Mississippi Broadcasters’ Convention was taking place, the air conditioner in the window violently shook and rattled every time it was turned on. The Edgewater Gulf is an enormous white hotel which looks like a giant laundry, and has the appearance of being on the verge of condemnation. The swimming pool is large and unkempt, and the water smells of fish. Behind the hotel is a new shopping center built around an air-conditioned mall, and I kept escaping there, back into midstream America."

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. 

"I had told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone that I would cover the Patty Hearst trial..."

"... and this pushed me into examining my thoughts about California. Some of my notes from the time follow here. I never wrote the piece about the Hearst trial, but I went to San Francisco in 1976 while it was going on and tried to report it. And I got quite involved in uncovering my own mixed emotions. This didn’t lead to my writing the piece, but eventually it led to—years later—Where I Was From (2003). When I was there for the trial, I stayed at the Mark. And from the Mark, you could look into the Hearst apartment. So I would sit in my room and imagine Patty Hearst listening to Carousel. I had read that she would sit in her room and listen to it. I thought the trial had some meaning for me—because I was from California. This didn’t turn out to be true...."

Writes Joan Didion in the new issue of The New York Review of Books.

"I know a married man and father of two who bought a twenty-one-room motel near Denver many years ago in order to become its resident voyeur."

"With the assistance of his wife, he cut rectangular holes measuring six by fourteen inches in the ceilings of more than a dozen rooms. Then he covered the openings with louvred aluminum screens that looked like ventilation grilles but were actually observation vents that allowed him, while he knelt in the attic, to see his guests in the rooms below. He watched them for decades, while keeping an exhaustive written record of what he saw and heard. Never once, during all those years, was he caught."

So begins "The Voyeur's Motel," by Gay Talese. At one point:

I saw what Foos was doing, and I did the same: I got down on my knees and crawled toward the lighted louvres. Then I stretched my neck in order to see as much as I could through the vent, nearly butting heads with Foos as I did so. Finally, I saw a naked couple spread out on the bed below, engaged in oral sex. Foos and I watched for several moments, and then Foos lifted his head and gave me a thumbs-up sign. He whispered that it was the skiing couple from Chicago.

Despite an insistent voice in my head telling me to look away, I continued to observe, bending my head farther down for a closer view. As I did so, I failed to notice that my necktie had slipped down through the slats of the louvred screen and was dangling into the motel room within a few yards of the woman’s head. I realized my carelessness only when Foos grabbed me by the neck and, with his free hand, pulled my tie up through the slats. The couple below saw none of this: the woman’s back was to us, and the man had his eyes closed.

And: "Foos made it clear to me from the beginning that he regarded his voyeurism as serious research, undertaken, in some vague way, for the betterment of society." And: "During the spring of 2013, thirty-three years after I had met him, Foos called me to say that he was ready to go public with his story.... How could he assume that going public with his sinister story would achieve anything positive? It could just as easily provide evidence leading to his arrest, lawsuits, and widespread public outrage. Why did he crave the notoriety?"

RELATED: "Gay Talese has a lady problem -- he can't think of any female writers that inspired him."

Talese... explained that the problem with female journalists was they were limited by their desire to stay above the fray, according to an audience member who spoke to the Washington Post. Amy Littlefield, 29, said that Talese explained "how educated women don’t want to hang out with antisocial people."

His answer seemed to shock the audience, with one person shouting out the name of Joan Didion....

A hashtag happened: #womengaytaleseshouldread.

"The cover of the Post was a photograph of a slightly sinister man, looking like a dealer, in a top hat and face paint—an evil Pied Piper."

"That photograph was what the Diggers meant by 'media poisoning.'"



The Diggers refused to talk to Joan Didion as she tried to gather material in 1967 for the essay that became the famous "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." They discerned (correctly) that she was part of the mainstream media's agenda, demonizing the hippie counterculture, according to Louis Menand in his New Yorker article, "Out of Bethlehem/The radicalization of Joan Didion."

Didion presented her article as an investigation into what she called “social hemorrhaging.” She suggested that what was going on in Haight-Ashbury was the symptom of some sort of national unravelling. But she knew that, at the level of “getting the story,” her piece was a failure. She could see, with the X-ray clarity she appears to have been born with, what was happening on the street; she could make her readers see it; but she couldn’t explain it....

Didion came from a family of Republicans.... [I]n 1960, she began contributing to The National Review, William F. Buckley’s conservative weekly. She wrote pieces about John Wayne, her favorite movie star, and, in the 1964 Presidential election, she voted for Barry Goldwater. She adored Goldwater. It was hardly a surprise that she found Haight-Ashbury repugnant. Her editors at the Post understood perfectly how she would react. They designed the cover before she handed in the piece....

Something Joan Didion wrote in 1977 struck me as explaining the disconnect between elite opinion and the public's acceptance of Donald Trump.

I've been listening to the audiobook of "The White Album" and this passage (from an essay about the Getty Museum) jumped out at me:

There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole ‘the critics’ distrust great wealth, but ‘the public’ does not. On the whole ‘the critics’ subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but ‘the public’ does not. In the end the Getty stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them least.