Country: USA
Genre: Non-Fiction/Essays
Pages: 238
Any people who stick it up to Woody Allen for the fallacy of intellectual masturbation is OK with me. I like Woody, but I don't worship him. And he does a lot of name dropping and circular thinking to fill up the long discussions that happen in every single one of his movies. But when you call him out in The New York Review Of Books and you're a woman, in 1979, then you're getting all my attention. I am helpless when it's time to pick up female literature. It's a situation I'm working hard at correcting, trying to find female writers I will like and understand as well as any male ones. And Joan Didion might just have taken the lead for the much vaunted title of Most Kick-Ass Female Writer Of All Time, according to my limited perspective of the issue. But I'm working on it, I do.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is really weird in its form. It's a collection of essays, which are related by the theme of California. Although she's born in Sacramento, in most pieces she refers to Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, which was considered one of the breeding grounds of counterculture. Interestingly enough, she states in the preface she went to San Francisco because she had writer's block and a serious depression. So in that state of mind, she dove in the cultural dreamscape of millions of people, the Golden land of new beginnings and fresh opportunities. That makes her very critical of her environment, but she manages to never be judgmental or unfair to her subjects. That makes her point of view, but powerful and unique. It's indeed a book really weird in his form, it's separated in three parts: Lifestyles In The Golden Land (stories about others), Personals (conceptual essays) and Seven Places Of The Mind (stories about places). But it's also an amazing portrait of the current of thought that characterizes California even today.
My favorites essays were in order of presentation: Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, On Morality and Goodbye To All That. In those, she presents the typical adopted Californian residents, arrived with dreams of a gold rush and hurting themselves with the crude reality. Everybody is looking for the image that they already represent. The hippies, the dreamers, the fortunate, they were the original gold diggers, the ethereal image of happiness under the sun, and they were for the most part runaway kids, people living with a burden of unexplainable sadness or even people who committed betrayal and looking for a safe haven away from their lives and themselves. There were a lot of promises in California, born into the mind of the dreamers and a few opportunists on the hills of Hollywood. Joan Didion explores that in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The illusion and the real portrait of what happened in California during the sixties.
I'll say it again, I'm no reference in female writing, but I think Joan Didion is one of the great ladies of twentieth century literature. Her style is unique, light and flowing, yet breathing of the unexplainable melancholy of those born with an old soul. It happens a lot less often than it used to, but Joan Didion achieve to trigger the obsessive-compulsive part of my brain that makes me want to read everything she has ever written. The great thing about this is that she's known mainly for her essays, but she wrote also novels and screenplays. She kept active, eclectic and hell she's still kicking it today at seventy-six years old. I guess that I was seduced so much by her writing is that she keeps her preoccupations in an universal playground, while keeping a womanly perspective on everything. I can relate to sadness and disillusion, while it's enlightening to have a point of view on the situation that is not entrenched in male ego. So get ready. I will go over Joan Didion's stuff here for the next two years with a feverish enthusiasm. You should all do the same.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is really weird in its form. It's a collection of essays, which are related by the theme of California. Although she's born in Sacramento, in most pieces she refers to Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco, which was considered one of the breeding grounds of counterculture. Interestingly enough, she states in the preface she went to San Francisco because she had writer's block and a serious depression. So in that state of mind, she dove in the cultural dreamscape of millions of people, the Golden land of new beginnings and fresh opportunities. That makes her very critical of her environment, but she manages to never be judgmental or unfair to her subjects. That makes her point of view, but powerful and unique. It's indeed a book really weird in his form, it's separated in three parts: Lifestyles In The Golden Land (stories about others), Personals (conceptual essays) and Seven Places Of The Mind (stories about places). But it's also an amazing portrait of the current of thought that characterizes California even today.
My favorites essays were in order of presentation: Some Dreamers Of The Golden Dream, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, On Morality and Goodbye To All That. In those, she presents the typical adopted Californian residents, arrived with dreams of a gold rush and hurting themselves with the crude reality. Everybody is looking for the image that they already represent. The hippies, the dreamers, the fortunate, they were the original gold diggers, the ethereal image of happiness under the sun, and they were for the most part runaway kids, people living with a burden of unexplainable sadness or even people who committed betrayal and looking for a safe haven away from their lives and themselves. There were a lot of promises in California, born into the mind of the dreamers and a few opportunists on the hills of Hollywood. Joan Didion explores that in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The illusion and the real portrait of what happened in California during the sixties.
I'll say it again, I'm no reference in female writing, but I think Joan Didion is one of the great ladies of twentieth century literature. Her style is unique, light and flowing, yet breathing of the unexplainable melancholy of those born with an old soul. It happens a lot less often than it used to, but Joan Didion achieve to trigger the obsessive-compulsive part of my brain that makes me want to read everything she has ever written. The great thing about this is that she's known mainly for her essays, but she wrote also novels and screenplays. She kept active, eclectic and hell she's still kicking it today at seventy-six years old. I guess that I was seduced so much by her writing is that she keeps her preoccupations in an universal playground, while keeping a womanly perspective on everything. I can relate to sadness and disillusion, while it's enlightening to have a point of view on the situation that is not entrenched in male ego. So get ready. I will go over Joan Didion's stuff here for the next two years with a feverish enthusiasm. You should all do the same.
