Last night, Joan Didion spoke at the New York Public Library. Though I wasn’t there, plenty of acquaintances, mostly of the online variety, were. They kept me posted through Twitter, with photos, observations, and snippets of her quotes.

There was a piece in the NYTimes — rather outdated at this point, at least, considering the rapid-fire way in which every newspaper, literary magazine, literary website, litblog, and more have covered Didion in the past month — that describes Didion’s writing in “Magical Thinking” and “Blue Nights” similarly: “‘Magical Thinking’ narrated the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, through the rhythms of obsessive memory. ‘Blue Nights’ takes a similar approach.”

I think it’s crucial to point out a recurring theme in these profiles, in these interviews; a repeating note, if you will: all of this talk about rhythm.

It’s always been true that one cannot speak of Didion without speaking of rhythm, and while this is still true, the proverbial page has turned.

NYC-based writer Hannah Miet, who attended last night’s NYPL event, wrote about it here and said, “It was hard to write because it needed a new rhythm, one she had never used before. She said she had to make up the rhythm as she went along.”

So always, it is back to the rhythm.

((**More to come on last night’s NYPL event, from a fellow Didion devotee. Stay tuned!**))

“‘Blue Nights’ (is) a searing recounting of the death of her daughter, Quintana Roo, and Didion’s own struggles with aging and illness…So it seems only fitting that her nephew, actor and director Griffin Dunne (with Susanne Rostock), would at her request turn his camera on her to produce a mesmerizing glimpse of the writer. She can be seen reading from her new work in what Dunne describes as an “audiobook for the eyes” filled with family photos.”

— From “Joan Didion: Video of ‘Blue Nights’ and Daughter Quintana” on The Daily Beast.

The Los Angeles Review of Books is dedicating a whole week to Didion. This thrills me in ways I can’t explain, especially because I’ve been on a kick of voraciously devouring everything written in the past month about Didion (there has been a lot) and greedily awaiting my copy of her upcoming memoir Blue Nights, which I pre-ordered almost two months ago (it has been too long).

Below is the kick-off to Didion Week at LAROB by Matthew Specktor, titled “Positions of Privilege.” Naturally, the subhead is “on Joan Didion’s Blue Nights.”

“Joan Didion is, as we know, a cool customer. Long before The Year of Magical Thinking, in which a social worker calls her just that, we understood Didion to be cool in every sense of the word. Whatever was happening behind those bug-eyed sunglasses, within that frail frame, the author’s relentless arrangement of information — the research, the reshuffling — kept hot feeling in line. This was true in Play It As It Lays, where the institutionalized Maria Wyeth’s separation from her young daughter exists mostly between parentheses, and it was true in The Year of Magical Thinking, where the immediacy of loss is often cut with diagnostic material: W.H. Auden, observations about grief, and observations about those observations (‘the question of self-pity’) interceding before anyone gets wet. There is a moment in Blue Nights, in one sense The Year of Magical Thinking’s logical extension but in another sense unlike any book in Didion’s corpus, that seems to me specifically revealing: leaving a physical therapy session where she’s been working out alongside members of the New York Yankees (!), Didion remarks upon her declining capacities. ‘My cognitive confidence seems to have vanished altogether,’ she writes. ‘Even the correct stance for telling you this, the ways to describe what is happening to me, the attitude, the tone, the very words, now elude my grasp.’”

Read the full article here.

Over at Specter Literary Magazine, Will Henderson talks Didion, loss, A Year of Magical Thinking and her newest, Blue Nights (which will be released Nov. 1, for those of us who are counting).

“I couldn’t read books, and I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and I wondered why I couldn’t read books, and why I couldn’t concentrate on much else, and then I was moving into a new apartment, and I was unpacking my 124 boxes of books – true story; I have 12 six-shelf bookshelves in my living room, double filled – and I came across The Year of Magical Thinking and I thought I’d like to re-read this book, and I re-read the book and this time, I recognized loss because I had lost and I recognized how vulnerable she is by writing so honestly about loss and I wrote down several of her sentences because I didn’t want to forget these sentences.”

Read the full column here.

This is the post I have been promising to write for days, but then, you’re not here to hear me pontificate on any number of problems that have come between me and my self-imposed literary duties.

So, it will be different. Stylistically-speaking, that is. I have learned that even when I don’t know what I’m writing, the most important thing is to start writing. The whole thing sorts itself out in the end.

Didion is known for her high style, and in reading the essay “On Morality” from Slouching Towards Bethelehem, there are a few things that literally jump out and grab the reader by the throat. The thing to remember with Didion, though, is that it’s not the crazy, overwrought, overly violent image that grabs you — it’s something much more nuanced, something with the heft of surprise behind it. Her transitions are striking, but not in an overly obvious way. I can say with some surety that certain phrases that I may have blindly overlooked before now reach out to me, like the seemingly harmless “As it happens” or seemingly obvious “Let me tell you.” But these few words, these seemingly benign phrases, completely transform the whole thing when placed within the context of the piece.

Take the first sentence, for example:

“As it happens I am in Death Valley, in a room at the Enterprise Motel and Trailer Park, and it is July, and it is hot.”

Which brings me to another point — the extended use of the comma. Some people have railed against comma use. I understand that. But Didion makes it work. So much, in fact, that her profuse comma usage has been permanently stamped in my brain as a Didion-esque hallmark, therefore having an obvious impact on the way I write. Did you count my commas? There are many. But not as many as Didion, who, in the first sentence of “On Morality,” uses three. In her first paragraph of four sentences, she uses nine commas.

This says something about the way the brain works. There is much to appreciate of well-polished sentences that punch to the gut with very little grammatical fanfare (here, Hemingway comes to mind), but at the same time, I am a sucker for things which replicate life — specifically, things that replicate how minds work, how memory works. In that, I feel that Didion has somehow bridged the gap between both worlds. Her prose often borders on over-the-top grammatical choices and a seemingly endless sequence, but because her words are — for lack of a better word — so damn well-chosen, it works.

And so there you have it: a well-polished thought with particularly placed words and carefully crafted phrases that bounce and lap into one another like small waves, carrying you through a sentence that deceptively seems to mirror how our brain might process a thought. You start with one thing, and three commas later, you’re in a wonderful (albeit unexpected) place. That’s part of the joy I take in reading Didion — despite having heard critics describe her writing as expected, guarded, or even boring — but then, my response would be this: you’re not reading close enough.

And my 19-year-old reader self, as much as I love her — well, she just didn’t pay enough attention at the time.

As it happens I am in Death Valley…

ashleybethard:

I’ve been quite fascinated with letters as of late.

(Via The Casualty Chronicles.)

I think we can argue that an essay is (or can be) a very close sibling of the letter. For that reason, I have been dabbling in them, both nonfiction & fiction versions. Though Didion’s nonfiction demands the most attention, I don’t think that we should overlook the fact that i.) She wrote fiction (five novels, perhaps the best known being “Play It As It Lays”) and screenplays (also five) and ii.) Multiple ways of writing and/or disseminating information overlap — even to the point of lending to one another. 

Truth is truth, wherever we find it.

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.”

When I read that first sentence, I knew I was reading what, for me, was a perfect essay for the time.

I was especially struck by it because I’ve been wrestling with turning my thesis, which I finished this summer, into a relatively workable manuscript — with very little luck, I might add. The first part of the problem is “missing” stuff — the things that are necessary to form what will eventually be a book, but that aren’t written yet. But the other part, and mostly why that initial sentence knocked me beautifully breathless, is the fact that I don’t know how to end it. More specifically, I don’t know what the end is.

But neither does Didion, really. Or at least, that’s what she tells us. Endings are difficult things, often unclear, hiding themselves in the rather fuzzy haze of experience. And so instead of providing a clear one in her essay, she explores the meaning of an ending, and more importantly, the elusive nature of them.

That’s not to say that the essay is merely extrapolation on an abstract topic. It’s easy to assume, though, if you’ve only read that first sentence. For most writers, beginning an essay with a weighty generalization on something of an interior, philosophical idea is dicey territory — but Didion sets it up so that the narrator’s experience of coming of age in New York City illustrates the concept in a way that’s accessible.

And a coming of age essay is essentially what it is. The narrator recalls the moment she stepped off the train in NYC, telling us what immediately hit her, what still stuck with her, the scents and smells of the city, describing what would be “home” for the next eight years. There is no moment of textbook climax, wherein the narrator is faced with a horrible trial or devastating experience. Instead, the change that occurs is internal, making it all the more difficult to classify. There wasn’t some crucial, cliffhanging moment, she says. It was much different than that. One day, she thought one way; the next, she thought differently. It was all about the shift in thinking, really, or the evolution of beliefs — or, if you listen to how Didion tells it, the replacing of one with another. 

Can she pinpoint the moment when everything internally changed? No. But the ambiguity makes the essay all the more poignant — and it is poignant — because for many of us, these shifts of belief happen almost unknowingly. We wake up one morning, and the suddenness lies only in the realization that something inside of us changed.

One might argue (and Didion doesn’t really get into this, but for the moment, I will) that this type of subtle suddenness of the mind is more jarring — and more frightening, if you will — than a devastating outside experience. I say this because when some “external” crisis happens to you, part of its impact is partially absorbed by those around you. You have support system of people who, in some way or another, are there for you, who make life easier. When the change is internal, the resulting crisis of realization is all the more terrifying when you have to face it yourself.

With that, I leave you with the essay’s ending paragraph, which just pierces my heart with its gorgeous melancholy:

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young any more. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles ‘the Coast,’ but they seem a long time ago.”

Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That,” written in 1967, was published in her essay collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”

Today, I give you a phenomenal essay and thinkpiece on the intersection of Didion, Kanye and the self from writer friend Brian Oliu. In fact, it is way more than that, and the only way to know, truly, is to go read it on Flip Collective now:

“Kanye West And Our Days Of Magical Thinking”

I think that many of my own issues in writing stem from the fact that I’m in hyper speed mode most of the time, that I’m constantly rushing forward, through the sentence, the paragraph, the page, without offering it a more considerate amount of thought. This, in many ways, is why I’m embarking on my “Didion, Daily” project. Her sentences don’t have a word out of place, no extra to be trimmed from the edges.

To begin the project, I read “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” the first essay in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Here, she begins with telling us: “This a story of love and death in the golden land.” Anyone who’s read this before will immediately catch on to the irony that it ends, quite literally, with a dead end — the dead end of the ambitious Lucille Miller. But really, without reading the ending yet, we already know it, as Didion entices us into this foreboding place with her beautiful (yet warning) images:

“San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by way of the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place:  not the coastal, the California of subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific, but a harsher California, haunted by the Mohave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the Eucalypts windbreaks and works on the nerves.  October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April.  Every voice seems a scream.  It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.”

It is there that we get a sense of what is to come, because she’s told us a version of the soon-to-follow story in that first paragraph — of the haunting Mojave, the devastating Santa Ana, the whining and nerves, difficulty breathing, blazes, screams, suicide, divorce and — my personal favorite — “prickly dread.” Can’t you feel it?

And so, upon reading, I found myself inspired by her first line, taking part of it to use as a prompt: “…and begins with a country.” I thought I’d take some of my own local landscape and try to describe it as Didion would do, with the submerged current of reality — ideas, culture, habits, the people — transposing itself onto the actual description of the thing. And while I didn’t exactly set out what I intended to do (I did describe the place, just not in the way that I wanted to), I did end up writing several pages in a frenzy.

So, tonight’s plan: read another essay by Didion, and try rewriting a couple of paragraphs describing the place. Practice makes perfect.

I’ve noticed a great proliferation of blogs dedicated to shameless-yet-intelligent hero-worship and adoration that I really love. So upon careful consideration, I’ve decided to create my own.

Okay, so it’s not exactly “careful consideration” — that’s a lie. More like, “Oh shit, I just bought the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion and will NEVER EVER get through all of this, so let’s come up with a plan so that I do.” Or something like that.

Joan Didion was one of the first writers in college that I completely latched on to. Some might even say, “became obsessed with.” Either way, her careful eye and perfect sentences illuminate the very things that I want to do as a writer, and she’s been nothing short of an inspiration since.

I first read her at age 19, a sophomore in college, in a course on the essay. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was the collection we were assigned, and I carried that book around even when I had finished reading my assignment, as if it were some mystical object, a talisman of sorts that would somehow make me a smarter, more graceful writer by simple osmosis.

But I soon realized that osmosis was not exactly simple, and, upon the purchase of the massive hardback this past weekend, sadly admitted that I knew less about Didion’s work than I should. Hero worship — and the resulting inspiration — cannot be completed with the simple carrying of a book, as much as I’ve wished otherwise. Instead, it should be done through careful study, a continuous approach, with the understanding that one essay per day is better than trying to cram sections in at once and then losing interest for the following weeks — which, to be honest, is far too close to the all-nighters I pulled in college.

So I’m employing a more experimental, flexible approach: read Didion’s collected nonfiction, one essay per day. In this way, it doesn’t carry so much studious pressure — though I plan to keep careful notes, learning as much as I can — as it becomes a lifestyle choice. And, after all, shouldn’t the pleasures and benefits of reading become a lifestyle?