Tag Archives: Joan Didion

THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT

Robert Silvers was a brilliant, demanding, funny, painstaking, and inspiring editor, a walking chronicle of postwar literary-political history, an intimidating sweetheart, and very dear to me. At the end of an editorial session, once he had identified all your piece’s weaknesses, evasions, and missed opportunities, he would close with a brusque, even peremptory, but always, somehow, hopeful, “See what can be done.” In the world according to Silvers, there was always something to be done. — Michael Chabon

The New York Review of Books was founded in 1963 by Barbara Epstein, Jason Epstein, and their West 67th Street neighbors Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell during an extended newspaper strike in New York City. They asked their friend Robert Silvers to edit the broadsheet—and he agreed, if Barbara would join him as co-editor.

The Review was an immediate success, and during first decades published Mary McCarthy on Vietnam, James Baldwin (“An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis”), Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Richard Hofstadter, Edmund Wilson, Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, I. F. Stone, W. H. Auden, and many more. Today, Zadie Smith, Yasmine El Rashidi, Zoë Heller, Janet Malcolm, Hilton Als, Darryl Pinckney, James Fenton, Colm Tóibín, and Daniel Mendelsohn continue the intellectual tradition.

Before Silvers died in 2017, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi filmed the editor in his domain. The resulting film—THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT, narrated by Michael Stahlbarg—documents the history of the paper with in-person interviews and a rich selection of clips. The film is available through HBO Max and is streaming free in September, courtesy of the Review.

See link below.

THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT

Directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi.

Now streaming.

From top: Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers in 1963 in their first office in the Fisk Building, New York City, photograph by Gert Berliner, courtesy and © the photographer and The New York Review of Books; David Moore, Mary McCarthy, New York, 1956, courtesy and © the photographer and the National Portrait Gallery, Australia; The New York Review of Books, May 25, 2017; Gore Vidal (center) with John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy; Nina Simone and James Baldwin, early 1960s, photograph by Bernard Gotfryd, courtesy and © the photographer’s estate and the Library of Congress Collection; Isaiah Berlin (left) and Silvers, photograph by Dominique Nabokov, courtesy and © the photographer; Darryl Pinckney in London, 1991, photograph by Nabokov; Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, The 50 Year Argument (2014), image courtesy and © HBO Documentary Films; W. H. Auden; Joan Didion, photograph by Jill Krementz, courtesy and © the photographer; Francine du Plessix Gray and Silvers, photograph by Nabokov, courtesy and © the photographer.

STAGING THE WHITE ALBUM

Everyone knows the opening sentence of Joan Didion’s 1968–1978 essay “The White Album”:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The 40-page piece jump-cuts through the undefined haze of Didion’s version of the 1960s in California. Stories are told, interpretations are made, impressions and coincidences noted, but verifiable sense and significance remain elusive:

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while.

For Didion, things began to change in 1966:

I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling… During these years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another… This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and I had mislaid it.

Didion—who lived during this period in a large rented house on Franklin Avenue, in a part of Hollywood that had once been expensive and was now described by one of my acquaintances as a “senseless-killing neighborhood”—takes us to a recording session with Jim Morrison and The Doors, and to the murder trials for the killers of Ramon Navarro and Sharon Tate. She spends time with the Black Panthers—with Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver in their home and with Huey Newton in jail:

As it happened I had always appreciated the logic of the Panther position, based as it was on the proposition that political power began at the end of the barrel of a gun… and I could appreciate as well the particular beauty in Huey Newton as “issue.” In the politics of revolution, everyone is expendable, but I doubted that Huey Newton’s political sophistication extended to seeing himself that way: the value of a Scottsboro case is easier to see if you are not yourself the Scottsboro boy.

At a university protest, she clocks the privilege of some of the participants:

Here at San Francisco State only the black militants could be construed as serious… Meanwhile the administrators could talk about programs. Meanwhile the white radicals could see themselves, on an investment of virtually nothing, as urban guerrillas.

Didion is beset by neural damage, and an attack of vertigo and nausea, [which] does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.

But the drift is more profound:

I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.

Sound familiar?

Lars Jan and Early Morning Opera will make theatrical sense of Didion’s essay in the CAP UCLA presentation of THE WHITE ALBUM, a staged performance at the “intersection between observation, storytelling, audience participation, choreography, and architecture.”* Mia Barron, as Didion, recites the entire essay from memory, while a group of actors and recruited audience members flesh out Didion’s famous take on “accidie.”

THE WHITE ALBUM*

Friday and Saturday, April 5 and 6, at 8 pm.

Saturday, April 6, at 3 pm.

Sunday, April 7, at 7 pm.

Freud Playhouse, UCLA

245 Charles E. Young Drive East, Los Angeles.

All italicized passages are by Joan Didion, “The White Album,” in The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 11–48.

From top: The White Album, by Joan Didion, performance created by Lars Jan / Early Morning Opera, image courtesy CAP UCLA; Joan Didion, photograph by Julian Wasser; Kathleen Cleaver and Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers in 1969, photograph by Bruno Barbey; Huey Newton, (center right); Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate; Jim Morrison, photograph © Joel Brodsky, 1967.

SAM MCKINNISS AT TEAM BUNGALOW

Sam McKinniss is back with a new exhibition at Team Bungalow. The show—DAISY CHAIN—features a portrait of Joan Didion, and gives depth to such subjects as Drew Barrymore, Lana Del Rey, A$AP RockyBeck by way of the late James Blake, and JonBenét Ramsey.

 

SAM MCKINNESS—DAISY CHAIN, through February 25.

TEAM BUNGALOW, 306 Windward Avenue, Venice Beach.

teamgal.com/daisy_chain

See: iriscovetbook.com/studio-visits-sam-mckinniss

From top:

Team Bungalow installation view, with Didion portrait.

Sam McKinniss, Lana & Rocky, 2017. Image credit: Sam McKinniss and Team Gallery.

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JOAN DIDION — THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD

“It occurred to me during the summer of 1988, in California and Atlanta and New Orleans, in the course of watching first the California primary and then the Democratic and  Republican national conventions, that it had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.” — Joan Didion*

The documentary JOAN DIDION—THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD, directed by Didion’s nephew, actor Griffin Dunne, will screen at the Hammer this week. Following the screening, Dunne will participate in a Q & A.

 

JOAN DIDION—THE CENTER WILL NOT HOLD, Tuesday, February 6, at 7:30 pm.

BILLY WILDER THEATER, Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Bouleverd, Westwood, Los Angeles.

hammer.ucla.edu/joan-didion-the-center-will-not-hold/

* Joan Didion, “Insider Baseball,” in Political Fictions (New York: Knopf, 2001), 19.

Joan Didion. Photograph by Julian Wasser. Image credit: Danziger Gallery.

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WOMEN AT WORK

The new interview book by The Paris ReviewWOMEN AT WORK, with an introduction by Ottessa Moshfegh—is limited to 5,000 copies, and is available only through the journal’s website.

Included in the book are interviews with Dorothy ParkerClaudia RankineIsak DinesenSimone de BeauvoirElizabeth BishopMarguerite YourcenarMargaret AtwoodGrace PaleyToni MorrisonJan MorrisJoan Didion, and Hilary Mantel.

 

WOMEN AT WORK—INTERVIEWS FROM THE PARIS REVIEW

theparisreview.org/women-at-work/

Image credit: The Paris Review.

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