Joan Didion (1934 - 2021)

[version]

Apparently she's just died of Parkinson's. Terrible loss.

 

[version]

Eve Babitz died the other day too.

 

[linebaugh]

 

[version]

On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue

Joan Didion’s seminal 1961 Vogue essay on self-respect.

www.vogue.com

 

[Corpsey]

You're the first person I thought of when I heard the news.

 

[woops]

You're the first person I thought of when I heard the news.

i know exactly what you mean

 

[sus]

Terrible. Absolutely terrible. As a writer.

 

[Corpsey]

 

[version]

Terrible. Absolutely terrible. As a writer.

Mate, you like Ben Lerner.

 

[sus]

Yes, he's wonderful, and her writing on the counterculture was condescending, smug, insulated, the exact opposite of everything you want

 

[sus]

“The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately.”

—Robert Warshow, “E. B. White and the New Yorker”

 

[Corpsey]

I should read some Didion - she wrote the things about LA/Manson etc right

 

[sus]

Also I think she made up loads of her reporting. A proto Stephen Glass if you will. When it's too sensational to believe, it was probably fabricated. Con artist of a thinker; control freak of a person.

 

[jenks]

I’m not going to waste time trying to persuade you I know the general tenor in recent months is to trash reputations of anyone considered to be good so I shan’t be engaging in a discussion on this but I think Didion has been poorly represented here. I am a big fan, read pretty much her entire oeuvre. The Year of Magical Thinking is a brilliant piece on grief and loss. The early non fiction has lasted unlike much of what got called ‘new journalism’ and I’d rather read her than Ben Lerner, whom I like but isn’t in the same league.

 

[sus]

Give us some of her prose jenks

 

[version]

Also I think she made up loads of her reporting. A proto Stephen Glass if you will. When it's too sensational to believe, it was probably fabricated. Con artist of a thinker; control freak of a person.

I think they all do tbh.

 

[version]

Yes, he's wonderful, and her writing on the counterculture was condescending, smug, insulated, the exact opposite of everything you want

There's more than enough writing out there sympathetic to the counterculture, isn't there? Didion was my first exposure to some of the very real problems with it after years of hearing how free and revolutionary the whole thing was.

 

[version]

I should read some Didion - she wrote the things about LA/Manson etc right

Yeah, the title essay of The White Album's partly about Tate, Manson and a member of the family. She's a California writer.

 

[sus]

There's more than enough writing out there sympathetic to the counterculture, isn't there? Didion was my first exposure to some of the very real problems with it after years of hearing how free and revolutionary the whole thing was.

Fair

 

[sus]

Let's get some excerpts in here so we can all discuss