A prayer to Our Lady Joan
Joan, our lady of the incisive observant pen, pray for me.
I want to be an observer like you, but it’s so, so hard. It used to be kind of easy, before I was living life at any level. Now I’m either out of practice, or things are perhaps less new to me than they used to be, or I’ve just got too much other shit on my mind.
Were you somehow immune to these forces, Joan? Did your mind never succumb to the entropy of contentment? And if not, were you happy? Were you at least not regretful of having taken on opposing roles that demanded your nature be two separate things--coldly observant and warmly humane?
Or did you find it easy to compartmentalize when occasion called?
As for me, I have become lazy or else found my powers lacking. Playing an active role in the world I inhabit has made my life happier and more dynamic, but it has made me less devoted and punctilious an observer.
The impressions have not left me. When I decided to, I found I was able to tap back into the habit again. But catching them all is so difficult. They show up while I’m doing other things, like washing dishes or taking a shower. (The sound of water helps, though alas, sitting beside water with no other task at hand but to observe and writer has so far been mostly useless.) I receive these impressions with both immense gratitude for their visitation and resignation at how quickly, in the time it takes me to extricate myself from the task, they will evaporate, leaving me to scratch out clumsy sketches of the vanishing imagery left in my head.
For that matter, there are so many of them. Even when I steel myself for the crazy task of commanding them to appear, I can’t make up my mind which to focus on. How do you know which impressions, which themes, are the important ones for you that day? How do you know what to keep a lookout for? (Because surely no one, not even you, has the strength to hang onto everything your creative mind attracts.)
It’s so easy to hang it up on time and place. You lived and worked within the late 1960s and 70s, in the cities, among the musicians and the politicians and the celebrity criminals. Your work was cut out for you. Here in the rare and isolated north, mine is mine to invent. Maybe sometime an obvious assignation (no offense) will find me. But for now, I’ve got to decide which stories are worth telling. And it takes a long fucking time to discover that, without some preconceived idea serving as my northstar.
I don’t want to complain. The last thing I want to do is sigh and give up. I just want your advice, your help. How did you know what to write for that “Prix de Paris?” How did you find your way from precocious moralistic essays to the New Journalism you helped pioneer? How did you convince the tastemakers and the publishers that you knew what you were doing and were the one to do it for them? How did you convince the world that your observations were what they needed?









