Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Joan Didion
4.19
65,284 ratings6,238 reviews
Want to read
Buy on Kobo
Rate this book
The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.
It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.
GenresNonfictionEssaysMemoirClassicsHistoryShort StoriesJournalism
...more
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
Book details & editions
Julie
6 books · 1,976 followers
Follow
December 14, 2022
My mother was a freshman in college when I was a freshman in high school. Married at seventeen, her 1960s and 70s were spent as a young wife and mother of four. It wasn't until she divorced at thirty-six, the same year Ronald Reagan ushered in the folly of trickle-down economics and the prison-industrial complex, that she discovered "the sixties". She majored in English and one day brought home, as a reading assignment, a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I recall the cover: gun-metal gray with white lettering. I recall her clutching the book as though it were a lifeline, a rope to a past she never had. I felt the book must be some passageway to adulthood, some essentialness of feminism that both intrigued and bored me. I recall loving the title--the evocation of the Bible that seemed almost sacrilegious to me, a child of a conservative Christian family. Slouching . . . Bethlehem . . . nothing but trouble can come from such a book.
I wonder what my mother must have thought of this collection of essays about people, places, lifestyles so radically different than anything in her experience, yet which were happening simultaneous to her sheltered life. While her days were filled with Sesame Street, Tang, laundry, cutting crusts from bread for fussy her elementary school-kids' lunches, Joan Didion was writing of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury, where runaways were drugged and traded as sex toys, used up and strung out by nineteen; of Howard Hughes buying up blocks of Las Vegas like she bought boxes of Cheerios; of Joan Baez, wispy, earnest, and reclusive in the Monterey County Courthouse, trying to save her Institute for the Study of Non-Violence from the squares who worried that the hippies would drive down their property values.
Did my mother dream California dreams? Did she wish for a New York interlude, to be young and in love, with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge, such as Joan Didion had in 1960s? Did she yearn for the warm waves of the Pacific curling on the sands of Hawaii? Such freedom young Didion had, such time to feel angst, to observe others, to write clear-eyed and fiercely about her time and place in a world where people filled their voids with drugs, sex, and rock-n-roll.
I imagine my mother reading about a gathering of earnest young activists and intellectuals "reluctant about gathering up their books and magazines and records, about finding their car keys and ending the day, and by the time they are ready to leave Joan Baez is eating potato salad with her fingers from a bowl in the refrigerator, and everyone stays to share it, just a little while longer where it is warm" and wishing she were in their midst, instead of pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of Pak-n-Save, filling it with boxes of Kraft Mac-n-Cheese and Hamburger Helper.
This collection of twenty essays, originally published in a variety of magazines, chronicles Didion's internal and external worlds at a singular time in modern American history. Her cool, unsentimental observations that have come to exemplify California during the mid 60s and 70s, her unwavering voice carrying the mantle of feminism, unafraid to admit how very angry and afraid she really is. Unabashedly admitting a lifelong crush on John Wayne, a manufactured, wooden caricature of the American man.
Perhaps it is this voice my mother held onto so tightly, searching in Didion's words for the key to self-expression, independence, and experimentation—all the things my mother missed as she moved straight from childhood to motherhood. Perhaps she longed to belong to Didion's California where
". . . time past is not believed to have any bearing on time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew."
Oh, don't we all?
bio-autobio-memoir read-2015 shorts
...more
632 likes
8 comments
Like
Comment
Jeffrey Keeten
6 books · 250k followers
Follow
December 24, 2021
”My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”
One of the cornerstones of friendship is developing some level of trust. It might be possible to be friends with Joan Didion, but the very thing that makes her a wonderful dinner companion, her wonderful insights into the human condition, will also be the very thing that will make it difficult to develop an intimacy like one should with a best friend. She talks about this difficulty in one of the essays in this collection. “‘The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people,’ she said. ‘The hardest is with one.’”
She was asked to write an essay about John Wayne, and she wrote this fantastic scene of having dinner with him. I didn’t know what to expect. Was she going to fall in bed with him? Was she going to cut Wayne up into little pieces? Love him or hate him, the man was always consistently himself. The Duke always had to be the Duke. There was no down time from being the American icon of western films. I enjoyed this very Didion observation that she makes about Wayne: ”For a while it was only a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s.”Wayne was renowned for getting everyone at his table drunk, and Didion was no exception.
These essays focus almost exclusively on California. Though, I wouldn’t call this collection an ode to her home state. Let’s just say the Bureau of Tourism for California didn’t choose to use any of her unflinching observations about the state. Her family has deep roots in California. They were early pioneers who invested in land and did very well. She realized this upbringing gave her a different perspective of life. ”I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it. I could write a syndicated column for teenagers under the name “Debbi Lynn” or I could smuggle gold into India or I could become a $100 call girl, and none of it would matter.”
I will admit I have put off reading Joan Didion because I thought her essays might prove dated. From the very first essay I was disabused of that notion. These pieces are all from the 1960s and, nearly without exception, are as relevant today as they were when they were written. Couldn’t this comment be as insightful about our current situation as it was in the 1960s? ”Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.”
I was expecting elegant writing, and certainly I got that, but what surprised me was the muscular nature of her prose. She hits you in the stomach, follows that with an uppercut, and she may not even let you get off the canvas before she hits you again. She might be small, but she is certainly scrappy. Her writing is as tight and crisp as a tuned piano wire. After I finished the book, I read that she had spent hours typing Hemingway’s prose into her typewriter to try and capture some of his style. This Hemingway connection runs counter to my perception of Didion, but maybe it is just an example of how difficult it is to wrap your arms around her and say this is Joan Didion. She would slide away from you and reemerge across the room in dark glasses with a smoldering cigarette trapped between her fingers, uplifted in the air, the smoke forming a question mark. Can you ever really know someone like Joan Didion? She is quiet. She is unassuming. She lets people talk, and when they mention something of interest to her, can’t you just hear her softly saying...tell me why you believe that?
These essays were trending subjects in the 1960s, but now they have, with infinite grace, metamorphosed into historical record. For those who follow my reviews, I can assure you there will be more Joan Didion in my reading queue over the coming months.
If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
1960-s california hollywood
...more
331 likes
Like
Comment
emma
1,949 reviews · 61.5k followers
Follow
February 16, 2023
joan forever!
i still like didion's longform (longest form?) writing the best, but in truth no one was doing it like her and no one is doing it like her and no one ever will.
absolutely one of a kind.
bottom line: the very best.
-----------------
tbr review
the best you can look is if you're carrying a copy of this book around as you browse at an indie bookstore
Show more3-and-a-half-stars classics couldn-t-wait-to-read
...more
183 likes
Like
Comment
Bill Kerwin
3 books · 83k followers
Follow
June 14, 2020
Days after Manson died, I kept thinking about him, how he and his Family had summoned the darkness at the heart of the Summer of Love. I remembered how surprised we all were, that the drugs and the smiles and the flowers had come to this, but then I thought, no, not all of us. Joan Didion would have understood; Joan Didion would not have been surprised.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem, a collection of magazine essays and Didion’s second book, is about many things, but mostly it is about ‘60’s California. In its first section “Life Styles in the Golden Land”—slightly longer than half the book--every piece but one is set in California: a San Bernadino Valley murder, profiles of California icons (John Wayne, Joan Baez, Howard Hughes), characteristic California political institutions (the Communist splinter group the CPUSA, the now defunct liberal think tank the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions), and the California nexus of the Hippie Explosion, San Franciso’s Haight-Ashbury district during the Summer of Love. (Even the short piece not set in California, “Marrying Absurd,” about the Las Vegas wedding industry, is about California and its culture too.)
But the California connection does not stop there. Didion was a product of the Sacramento Valley, the descendant of settlers who—before the Gold Rush—crossed the plains in a covered wagon (Joan’s great-great-great grandmother travelled with the Donner party, but, unlike the Donners, her family avoided the fatal short cut and instead followed the old Oregon Trail.) Thirty additional pages of Bethlehem, some of the most personal of the book, describe her California and how it has shaped her character and her perspective.. She recognizes that, even for a Native Daughter like herself, the oldest of California traditions are too recent to constitute roots, that the culture of the ‘60’s Golden Land is always changing: from orange groves to real estate to aerospace (and, later, to high tech and beyond). In her title essay, Didion lays bare the predispositions of the lost freeway children who inhabit the Haight in the late '60's: aimless, disconnected from culture, lacking the principles that might help them fashion a viable alternative, they are people for whom any hypnogogic amusement, any superficial enlightment, even a dark savior, will do.
You can learn much about the ‘60’s from this book, but its real pleasure lies in its elegant, sinewy prose. If there is a single clumsy sentence in this book, I failed to find it (and I am one of those irritating fellows who looks). Here is just a taste, from “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” a description of the San Bernardino Valley:
This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdressers' school. “We were just crazy kids” they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past. Here is where the hot wind blows and the old ways do not seem relevant, where the divorce rate is double the national average and where one person in every thirty-eight lives in a trailer.
Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find it in the only places they know to look: the movies and the newspapers.
20th-c-amer essays
162 likes
Like
Comment
Michael
655 reviews · 962 followers
Follow
August 4, 2018
First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem considers what happens when the center cannot hold and things fall apart: the three-part collection's twenty essays confront the onset of an age of cynicism in American political and social life. The first part contains pieces specific to California, the second personal essays, the third portraits of places significant to both Didion and America at the end of the 1960s. Didion's prose sprawls with meticulous detail, and is tinted with the journalist's ironic and aloof sensibility. At her best, Didion offers astute critiques of the failings and pretensions of the sundry parts of her nation. Favorite essays included "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," "On Keeping a Notebook," "On Self-Respect," and "Goodbye to All That."
2015 recs
142 likes
Like
Comment
Kevin Kelsey
419 reviews · 2,256 followers
Follow
July 2, 2018
Just unbelievably good. I'm not the right person to write about Joan Didion, but my God, she is real and she can write.
favorites read-2018 read-it-again
130 likes
Like
Comment
Orsodimondo
2,233 reviews · 2,082 followers
Follow
March 9, 2019
BEI TEMPI ADDIO
La ex casa dei Grateful Dead a 710 Ashbury Street.
======
Although in a chapter (this book collects articles published in magazines) entitled I Can't Get That Monster Out of My Head, Mrs. Didion expresses trenchant opinions on Kubrick, Antonioni, Visconti, Bergman, demonstrating for the first and only time that even she can make mistakes, make mistakes and say bestiality, I loved this book and I deeply love this wonderful writer, a feeling built on a brief intense acquaintance (met for the first time not even five months ago, it is her fourth work that I have read and thoroughly appreciated).
Joan Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in April 1967.
She is defined as the best living writer in the English language (and I wish her a thousand years beyond the age of 80 which she will turn 80 on December 5th) and it is said that in journalism she proposes the best of himself. The New Journalism, the journalism that is Literature, the journalism that is Art: the one consecrated with the publication of “In Cold Blood”. I don't know: I love her very much both as a novelist and as a memoirist and journalist. The five victims of August 9, 1969 in Polanski's Benedict Canyon villa: from left, Voityck Frykowski, Sharon Tate, Stephen Parent, Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger. What is striking about this collection? The fact that Joan Didion is always inside the narrative, that her ego is close to the object of the story. Not in the annoying way that pushes one to bring the whole universe back to oneself, to measure abysses and skies on the yardstick of one's own experience: but with that ability to transform one's difficulties and weaknesses into levers of strength, informing and enlightening without interfering in the tale. Ruth Ann Moorehouse and two other Charles Manson girls. Didion does not write to reveal, but to understand, she does not write to amaze, but to 'read' her time, she manages to go beyond the here and now with words that will remain true forever. Rarely do you come across writing that says so much about the writer. And every word of Didion tells us of a fragile woman, but with a sharp mind, a problematic woman, but strong and intense... a narrator capable of touching the soul of things, and making it seem like the easiest thing in the world. As involved, involved, close and attentive, Joan Didion is a very acute observer, who manages to maintain a spontaneous detachment in order to grasp a singular and precise perspective. Joan Baez sings during a protest. Didion describes and narrates, without comment, an America in transformation, very different from the one in which she was born and from the one that emerged after the Second World War - a country moving towards a future that does not seem radiant, while the present is: at beginning of the sixties, the US is prosperous and effervescent - but it is already a people and a land that have lost their innocence, where even alternative voices show limits and falls, a golden land essentially in disarray. Didion is in some ways a forerunner, certainly a look without patterns or veils. She tells a crime story and the suspense devours the reader. You talk about Joan Baez and you manage to encapsulate it all in one sentence. She talks about San Francisco and her writing becomes jam like those of the Dead in Golden Gate Park. She talks about herself, "about keeping a notebook", and it gives me goosebumps.
======
Nonostante in un capitolo (questo libro raccoglie articoli usciti su riviste) dal titolo Non riesco a togliermi quel mostro dalla testa, la signora Didion esprima opinioni tranchant su Kubrick, Antonioni, Visconti, Bergman, dimostrando per la prima e unica volta che perfino lei può sbagliare, prendere cantonate e dire bestialità, ho amato questo libro e amo profondamente questa meravigliosa scrittrice, sentimento costruito su una breve intensa conoscenza (incontrata per la prima volta neppure cinque mesi fa, è la sua quarta opera che leggo e apprezzo a fondo).
Joan Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, nell’aprile del 1967.
Viene definita la migliore scrittrice vivente in lingua inglese (e io le auguro mille anni oltre gli 80 che compirà il 5 dicembre prossimo) e si dice che proprio nel giornalismo proponga il meglio di sé.
Il New Journalism, il giornalismo che è Letteratura, il giornalismo che è Arte: quello consacrato con la pubblicazione di “In Cold Blood”.
Io non saprei: la amo molto sia come romanziere che come scrittrice di memoir che giornalista.
Le cinque vittime del 9 agosto 1969 nella villa di Polanski al Benedict Canyon: da sinistra, Voityck Frykowski, Sharon Tate, Stephen Parent, Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger.
Cos’è che colpisce in questa raccolta?
Il fatto che Joan Didion sia sempre dentro la narrazione, che il suo io sia in prossimità dell’oggetto del racconto.
Non nel modo fastidioso che spinge a riportare tutto l’universo a se stessi, a misurare abissi e cieli sul metro del proprio vissuto: ma con quella sua capacità di trasformare le proprie difficoltà e debolezze in leve di forza, informando e illuminando senza intromettersi nel racconto.
Ruth Ann Moorehouse e altre due ragazze di Charles Manson.
Didion non scrive per svelare, ma per capire, non scrive per stupire, ma per ‘leggere’ il suo tempo, riesce ad andare oltre il qui e l’ora con parole che rimarranno per sempre vere.
Poche volte si incontra una scrittura che dice così tanto di chi scrive. E ogni parola della Didion ci racconta di una donna fragile, ma dalle mente affilata, una donna problematica, ma forte e intensa… una narratrice in grado di toccare l’anima delle cose, e farla sembrare la cosa più facile del mondo.
Per quanto coinvolta, partecipe, vicina e attenta, Joan Didion è un’osservatrice molto acuta, che riesce a mantenere un distacco spontaneo per riuscire a cogliere una prospettiva singolare e precisa.
Joan Baez canta durante una manifestazione di protesta.
Didion descrive e racconta, senza commentare, un’America in trasformazione, molto diversa da quella in cui è nata e da quella emersa nel secondo dopoguerra – un paese in movimento verso un futuro che non sembra radioso, mentre il presente lo è: all’inizio degli anni Sessanta, gli US sono prosperi ed effervescenti – ma sono già un popolo e una terra che hanno perso l’innocenza, dove anche le voci alternative mostrano limiti e cadute, una terra dorata sostanzialmente allo sbando.
Didion è per certi versi un’anticipatrice, sicuramente uno sguardo senza schemi né veli.
Racconta un fatto di cronaca nera e la suspense divora il lettore.
Racconta di Joan Baez e in una frase riesce a racchiuderla tutta.
Racconta di San Francisco e la sua scrittura si fa jam come quelle dei Dead nel Golden Gate Park.
Racconta di sé, “sul tenere un taccuino”, e mi fa venire la pelle d’oca.
Show moreamericana reportage
124 likes
Like
Comment
Darwin8u
1,604 reviews · 8,773 followers
Follow
March 1, 2016
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
- The Second Coming, Yeats
“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people 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.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I'm sure at some point Joan Didion will disappoint. I'm positive the honeymoon period will run out. I'll discover a fatal flaw, a series of articles, or a minor novel that she just 'phoned in', but not yet bitches.
Seriously, if prose could make me pregnant, I would now be Nadya Suleman.
I know this is just the normal hormonal response I get whenever I really seem to mesh or synch with an author or artist. I felt this way when I first read DFW's and McPhee's nonfiction. This is the same brain-storm that happened when I first read Delillo & Bellow's fiction; the same awe I felt when I walked into the Paris Opera and saw that giant Chagall ceiling hanging beyond that infamous, 7-ton bronze and crystal chandelier. Those same chills ran down my spine and flushed my face the first time I swallowed a Vicodin. I felt just as complete the first time I watched a Coen brothers movie. I also felt this the first time I discovered my arm naturally guided my hand to my lap. No, this isn't a revolution. It isn't even revolutionary. It a euphoria and I know it. I get it. I'm already cooling down. But I'm just going to leave the book here on my chest for awhile until my heart slows down a bit.
2015
104 likes
Like
Comment
Cheryl
465 reviews · 647 followers
Follow
May 10, 2016
"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."
Somehow, I usually read Didion on a blue night, when it's so bright outside that I open my curtains to search for the moon; instead, what greets me is a pale hue of blue sky. When I read Blue Nights, I had a similar experience. These are the kind of nights that reminds a reader of what she is, of what she is not: "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give." Oh how I would love to teach Didion's "On Self-Respect," if only to garner the provocative perspective of a generation not yet born when she experienced and wrote this collection.
People debate the essay form often; some think it is simply nonfiction, some are not even sure about the distinction between nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir, and the personal essay. The art of nonfiction is intrinsically disconcerting and perhaps intentional in its derived eclecticism. Still, it is beautiful. Thank goodness we have modern essayists like Leslie Jamison to remind us of the form, an essayist who in my opinion, resembles Didion in style and concept. Any debate of the essay as an art form, should be silenced by Didion's slouching. Why did I take so long to read this, I asked myself as I palmed my forehead, for I drooled through each page, not even noticing when it was time to clear my desk for office hours with students.
These essays illuminate the America of the 1960s that will never exist again, and yet it is the America of today - the odd juxtaposition confuses, I know. Didion has managed to illustrate a landscape of hurt and pain, of music and money, of politics, drugs, rehabilitation, and gain. This is New York, this is California, this is a slouch towards Bethlehem. I was moved by her memoirs Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking; however, with this book, I was inspired by not only the stories and the essay form, but also by the art of the craft of narrative nonfiction in some of her pieces, this art that places a writer within the center of observation, and yet silences her persona.
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Didion was a compulsive notetaker and eavesdropper. Because of this, we get stories about: the Los Angeles Santa Ana, a party in Beverly Hills, a story of Sacramento, a "hallucinatory" view of New York, a riff "on morality," a behind-the-scenes look at a Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, an intense look at acid, alcohol, promiscuity, and all of the hurt that evolves with flashing. Some things we see, we know we'll never see again.
I loved reading "Goodbye to All That," Didion's meditation on New York City, a place she loved and loathed, the city wherein she lost herself. Yet my favorite essay was "Where the Kissing Never Stops," an essay which allowed me to view myself, to think about those intrinsic values placed aside for work; after all, isn't this the beauty of the personal essay, that it teaches us something about ourselves? I found oneness with Joan Beaz, the artist, humanitarian, renegade, and recluse; the woman whose life Didion explores in this piece. Perhaps this is one of those essay collections that leaves each of us with something of ourselves:
The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.
fav-authors literary-essays mesmerizing
...more
90 likes
Like
Comment
leah
342 reviews · 2,205 followers
Follow
======
Nonostante in un capitolo (questo libro raccoglie articoli usciti su riviste) dal titolo Non riesco a togliermi quel mostro dalla testa, la signora Didion esprima opinioni tranchant su Kubrick, Antonioni, Visconti, Bergman, dimostrando per la prima e unica volta che perfino lei può sbagliare, prendere cantonate e dire bestialità, ho amato questo libro e amo profondamente questa meravigliosa scrittrice, sentimento costruito su una breve intensa conoscenza (incontrata per la prima volta neppure cinque mesi fa, è la sua quarta opera che leggo e apprezzo a fondo).
Joan Didion in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, nell’aprile del 1967.
Viene definita la migliore scrittrice vivente in lingua inglese (e io le auguro mille anni oltre gli 80 che compirà il 5 dicembre prossimo) e si dice che proprio nel giornalismo proponga il meglio di sé.
Il New Journalism, il giornalismo che è Letteratura, il giornalismo che è Arte: quello consacrato con la pubblicazione di “In Cold Blood”.
Io non saprei: la amo molto sia come romanziere che come scrittrice di memoir che giornalista.
Le cinque vittime del 9 agosto 1969 nella villa di Polanski al Benedict Canyon: da sinistra, Voityck Frykowski, Sharon Tate, Stephen Parent, Jay Sebring, and Abigail Folger.
Cos’è che colpisce in questa raccolta?
Il fatto che Joan Didion sia sempre dentro la narrazione, che il suo io sia in prossimità dell’oggetto del racconto.
Non nel modo fastidioso che spinge a riportare tutto l’universo a se stessi, a misurare abissi e cieli sul metro del proprio vissuto: ma con quella sua capacità di trasformare le proprie difficoltà e debolezze in leve di forza, informando e illuminando senza intromettersi nel racconto.
Ruth Ann Moorehouse e altre due ragazze di Charles Manson.
Didion non scrive per svelare, ma per capire, non scrive per stupire, ma per ‘leggere’ il suo tempo, riesce ad andare oltre il qui e l’ora con parole che rimarranno per sempre vere.
Poche volte si incontra una scrittura che dice così tanto di chi scrive. E ogni parola della Didion ci racconta di una donna fragile, ma dalle mente affilata, una donna problematica, ma forte e intensa… una narratrice in grado di toccare l’anima delle cose, e farla sembrare la cosa più facile del mondo.
Per quanto coinvolta, partecipe, vicina e attenta, Joan Didion è un’osservatrice molto acuta, che riesce a mantenere un distacco spontaneo per riuscire a cogliere una prospettiva singolare e precisa.
Joan Baez canta durante una manifestazione di protesta.
Didion descrive e racconta, senza commentare, un’America in trasformazione, molto diversa da quella in cui è nata e da quella emersa nel secondo dopoguerra – un paese in movimento verso un futuro che non sembra radioso, mentre il presente lo è: all’inizio degli anni Sessanta, gli US sono prosperi ed effervescenti – ma sono già un popolo e una terra che hanno perso l’innocenza, dove anche le voci alternative mostrano limiti e cadute, una terra dorata sostanzialmente allo sbando.
Didion è per certi versi un’anticipatrice, sicuramente uno sguardo senza schemi né veli.
Racconta un fatto di cronaca nera e la suspense divora il lettore.
Racconta di Joan Baez e in una frase riesce a racchiuderla tutta.
Racconta di San Francisco e la sua scrittura si fa jam come quelle dei Dead nel Golden Gate Park.
Racconta di sé, “sul tenere un taccuino”, e mi fa venire la pelle d’oca.
Show moreamericana reportage
124 likes
Like
Comment
Darwin8u
1,604 reviews · 8,773 followers
Follow
March 1, 2016
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;"
- The Second Coming, Yeats
“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people 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.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
I'm sure at some point Joan Didion will disappoint. I'm positive the honeymoon period will run out. I'll discover a fatal flaw, a series of articles, or a minor novel that she just 'phoned in', but not yet bitches.
Seriously, if prose could make me pregnant, I would now be Nadya Suleman.
I know this is just the normal hormonal response I get whenever I really seem to mesh or synch with an author or artist. I felt this way when I first read DFW's and McPhee's nonfiction. This is the same brain-storm that happened when I first read Delillo & Bellow's fiction; the same awe I felt when I walked into the Paris Opera and saw that giant Chagall ceiling hanging beyond that infamous, 7-ton bronze and crystal chandelier. Those same chills ran down my spine and flushed my face the first time I swallowed a Vicodin. I felt just as complete the first time I watched a Coen brothers movie. I also felt this the first time I discovered my arm naturally guided my hand to my lap. No, this isn't a revolution. It isn't even revolutionary. It a euphoria and I know it. I get it. I'm already cooling down. But I'm just going to leave the book here on my chest for awhile until my heart slows down a bit.
2015
104 likes
Like
Comment
Cheryl
465 reviews · 647 followers
Follow
May 10, 2016
"To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference."
Somehow, I usually read Didion on a blue night, when it's so bright outside that I open my curtains to search for the moon; instead, what greets me is a pale hue of blue sky. When I read Blue Nights, I had a similar experience. These are the kind of nights that reminds a reader of what she is, of what she is not: "We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give." Oh how I would love to teach Didion's "On Self-Respect," if only to garner the provocative perspective of a generation not yet born when she experienced and wrote this collection.
People debate the essay form often; some think it is simply nonfiction, some are not even sure about the distinction between nonfiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir, and the personal essay. The art of nonfiction is intrinsically disconcerting and perhaps intentional in its derived eclecticism. Still, it is beautiful. Thank goodness we have modern essayists like Leslie Jamison to remind us of the form, an essayist who in my opinion, resembles Didion in style and concept. Any debate of the essay as an art form, should be silenced by Didion's slouching. Why did I take so long to read this, I asked myself as I palmed my forehead, for I drooled through each page, not even noticing when it was time to clear my desk for office hours with students.
These essays illuminate the America of the 1960s that will never exist again, and yet it is the America of today - the odd juxtaposition confuses, I know. Didion has managed to illustrate a landscape of hurt and pain, of music and money, of politics, drugs, rehabilitation, and gain. This is New York, this is California, this is a slouch towards Bethlehem. I was moved by her memoirs Blue Nights and The Year of Magical Thinking; however, with this book, I was inspired by not only the stories and the essay form, but also by the art of the craft of narrative nonfiction in some of her pieces, this art that places a writer within the center of observation, and yet silences her persona.
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.
Didion was a compulsive notetaker and eavesdropper. Because of this, we get stories about: the Los Angeles Santa Ana, a party in Beverly Hills, a story of Sacramento, a "hallucinatory" view of New York, a riff "on morality," a behind-the-scenes look at a Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, an intense look at acid, alcohol, promiscuity, and all of the hurt that evolves with flashing. Some things we see, we know we'll never see again.
I loved reading "Goodbye to All That," Didion's meditation on New York City, a place she loved and loathed, the city wherein she lost herself. Yet my favorite essay was "Where the Kissing Never Stops," an essay which allowed me to view myself, to think about those intrinsic values placed aside for work; after all, isn't this the beauty of the personal essay, that it teaches us something about ourselves? I found oneness with Joan Beaz, the artist, humanitarian, renegade, and recluse; the woman whose life Didion explores in this piece. Perhaps this is one of those essay collections that leaves each of us with something of ourselves:
The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who 'feels' things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.
fav-authors literary-essays mesmerizing
...more
90 likes
Like
Comment
leah
342 reviews · 2,205 followers
Follow
No comments:
Post a Comment