"I’m not an optimist, darling, but I’m hopeful. A full-blown stom where everything changes.”īaez half- jokes that, “There’s never been a good Republican folksinger.” Celebrated, iconic, and indispensable, Joan Didions first work of nonfiction, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is considered a watershed moment in American. On the fifth day they meet as usual but spend the afternoon in total silence, which involves not only not talking, but also not reading, not writing, and not smoking.ĭidion emphasizes that Baez’s folk music career (alongside Bob Dylan) was never about the money or recognition, or even the music, but rather connecting to other people - and that politics were directly linked to Baez’s emotions. That makes you go back and think, why did she leave me with that one? And there’s a lot to be discovered in asking yourself that question.Four days a week, MIss Baez and her fifteen students meet for lunch … After lunch they do ballet exercises to Beatles records, and after that they sit around on the bare floor and discuss their reading: Ghandi on Nonviolence, Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, Krishnamurti’s The First and Last Freedom, Huxley’s Ends and Means and MclUhan's Understanding the Media. There’s never a tidy summation of her point the endings actually take you by surprise, at first seeming like just another sharp image among the many others she employs. One of the most noteworthy things about Didion’s essays in general, IMO, is her ability to stick the landing - and by that I actually mean she doesn’t “stick” it at all, but they ring out. My favorite essays were those in the “Personals” section, including “On Keeping a Notebook,” “On Self-Respect,” and “On Morality.” But I also really loved the final essay, which is called “Goodbye to All That” and is about how she fell in and then out of New York City in her 20s. There were some essays I loved and others that felt like they flew in one side of my brain and out the other, and then of course her incredible sentences, images, and structure throughout. The course was set up that way on purpose, because next we’re reading The Year of Magical Thinking, and the teacher wanted us to be able to admire the juxtaposition of her early work and her later work. This was my third Joan Didion, which I read along with a formal reading group with the Center for Fiction, but it’s Didion’s first published book. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.” “However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves.
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