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𝘵𝘩𝘦 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎𝘰𝘧 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎𝘢 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥.

[taxidermiedfawn]

Now is the time between birth and slaughter. Another Summer has arrived. I spend my days waiting for something to happen. Something glorious, even something tragic. Nothing ever happens.

 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth.

[taxidermiedfawn]

"I talk to you at all," he said, "only as a calculated risk. Of course your function is to gather information for the intelligence services. Basically you want to conduct the same probe the F.B.I. would carry out if they could put us in a chair." He paused and tapped the small red book with his fingernails. "And yet," he said finally, "there's a definite advantage to me in talking to you. Because of one fact: these interviews provide a public record of my existence."

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A (M.-L.)” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

(...) I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A (M.-L.)” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

With his striking appearance and his relentlessly ideological diction, he looks and talks precisely like the popular image of a professional revolutionary, which in fact he is.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A (M.-L.)” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

(...) she does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone's adolescence.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Where the Kissing Never Stops” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who "feels" things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Where the Kissing Never Stops” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

She did not want, then or ever, to entertain; she wanted to move people, to establish with them some communion of emotion.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Where the Kissing Never Stops” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

She was the right girl at the right time. She had only a small repertory of Child ballads ("What's Joanie still doing with this Mary Hamilton?" Bob Dylan would fret later), never trained her pure soprano and annoyed some purists because she was indifferent to the origins of her material and sang everything "sad." But she rode in with the folk wave just as it was cresting. She could reach an audience in a way that neither the purists nor the more commercial folksingers seemed to be able to do. If her interest was never in the money, neither was it really in the music: she was interested instead in something that went on between her and the audience. "The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people," she said. "The hardest is with one."

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Where the Kissing Never Stops” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

"You really missed something, Durango," they would say, sometimes joking and sometimes not, until it became a refrain, Eden lost.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “John Wayne: A Love Song,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

"Some guy just tried to kill me he wouldn't end up in jail. How about you, Duke?" Very slowly, the object of Hathaway's query wiped his mouth, pushed back his chair, and stood up. It was the real thing, the authentic article, the move which had climaxed a thousand scenes on 165 flickering frontiers and phantasmagoric battlefields before, and it was about to climax this one, in the commissary at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City. "Right," John Wayne drawled. "I'd kill him."

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “John Wayne: A Love Song,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

There, a meeting with John Ford, one of the several directors who were to sense that into this perfect mold might be poured the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pass the trail had been lost. "Dammit," said Raoul Walsh later, "the son of a bitch looked like a man." And so after a while the boy from Glendale became a star. He did not become an actor, as he has always been careful to point out to interviewers ("How many times do I gotta tell you, I don't act at all, I re-act"), but a star, and the star called John Wayne would spend most of the rest of his life with one or another of those directors, out on some forsaken location, in search of the dream.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “John Wayne: A Love Song,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

Where did he come from, before the tall grass? Even his history seemed right, for it was no history at all, nothing to intrude upon the dream.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “John Wayne: A Love Song,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

(...) and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in the picture called War of the Wildcats that he would build her a house, "at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow." As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I wait to hear.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “John Wayne: A Love Song,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

A hot wind blew through that summer, blew until it seemed that before August broke, all the dust in Kansas would be in Colorado, would have drifted over the tar-paper barracks and the temporary strip and stopped only when it hit Pikes Peak.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “John Wayne: A Love Song,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

(...) for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

By the time the trial opened, Lucille Miller's appearance included maternity clothes, for an official examination on December 18 had revealed that she was then three and a half months pregnant, a fact which made picking a jury even more difficult than usual, for Turner was asking the death penalty. "It's unfortunate but there it is," he would say of the pregnancy to each juror in turn, and finally twelve were seated, seven of them women, the youngest forty-one, an assembly of the very peers—housewives, a machinist, a truck driver, a grocery-store manager, a filing clerk—above whom Lucille Miller had wanted so badly to rise. That was the sin, more than the adultery, which tended to reinforce the one for which she was being tried. It was implicit both in the defense and the prosecution that Lucille Miller was an erring woman, a woman who perhaps wanted too much.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” by Joan Didion.

[taxidermiedfawn]

(...) a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past.

‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎Excerpt from Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” by Joan Didion.