The End of Promise

"This book is called “Blue Nights” because at the time I found my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the dying of brightness."A tumblr about Joan Didion and also literary journalism. thx

[daloy-politsey]

Instead of making posts about what people halfway across the world should do on a dying website, I'm going to link to organizations that you can donate to that can actually help.

Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) works for the health and dignity of Palestinians living under occupation and as refugees. They provide immediate medical aid to those in great need, while also developing local capacity and skills to ensure the long-term development of the Palestinian healthcare system. 

Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association is a Palestinian non-governmental civil institution that works to support Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli and Palestinian prisons.

Samidoun is an international network of organizers and activists working to build solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in their struggle for freedom.

Refuser Solidarity Network provides crucial support to Israel's military refusers in the toughest of political circumstances. They provide funds for for demonstrations outside prison, for legal fees, for media campaigns that tell conscientious objector’s stories to the general public, for education programs for Israeli and American audiences about their important resistance to the occupation.

Feel free to reblog with links to other groups and other places people can donate to.

[theendofpromise]

Oh! But on the subject, if you want to read something that is definitely descended from the best parts of Didion, I would recommend ‘The Collected Schizophrenias’ by Esme Weijun Wang. Read it a couple years back, cried, then read it again a bit thereafter.

[theendofpromise]

I was collecting a number of my books from my father’s house, where they’ve sat for quite some time, and finally brought the rest of my Joan Didion collection home to my current apartment. I had some select things, but left the fiction (bleh) there for years, and left the academic criticism books there as well. But now it’s all here. I think every now and then about how stupid my undergrad project was, how I wish I had a better idea earlier on and could have focused on ‘Salvador’ more and not had to stick with her boring, mediocre fiction.

So. I don’t know. If I have time in life, and that’s hard to come by, I think, I think, I think I want to write something better, deeper, less juvenile about Ms Joan. I absolutely don’t want to be an apologist for her, as so many have been, myself included, but I swear I would never turn on her. Here: her fiction is shit, as anyone knows, and her earliest most famous works are not all they’re cracked up to be - though there are some absolute gems. But ‘Salvador’ stands to me as a favourite, as an absolute turn in where she found her greatest power. ‘Political Fictions’ and ‘Miami’ if I recall had some great writing in them.

So with all her books plus five books of criticism, I think I have enough material to work with. I miss being academic. Hopefully I’ll have the time and energy to do it.

This blog is kinda embarrassing. Some of it I stand by, and some of it I just thought was decent material. Kinda just wanted to have a nice library of quotations for other folks. And them reblogs, yknow? Microfame etc. Joan meant a lot to me. And, perhaps, she still does.

[theendofpromise]

goodnight

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Joan Didion is undeserving of much of praise she gets; but she is fully deserving of a lot of the praise she doesn’t get.

I won’t elaborate now, but there, I said it.

[theendofpromise]

Well, there you are. I could definitely do that. I know the conventions and how to observe them, how to fill in the canvas I have already stretched; know how to tell you what he said and she said know above all, since the heart of narrative is a certain calculated ellipsis, a tacit contract between writer and reader to surprise and be surprised, how not to tell you what you do not yet want to know.

Joan Didion, Democracy.

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The apparently pressing need to commit so many and in many cases such marginally troubled Californians to indefinite custodial detention seems not at the time to have struck their fellow citizens as an excessive lust for social control. Nor did these fellow citizens appear to see their readiness to slough off bothersome relatives and neighbors as a possible defect in their own socialization. Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes. The first State Lunatic asylum in California, that at Stockton, was established in 1853 specifically to treat those believed to have been driven mad by the goldfields. According to an 1873 State Board of Health report, this endemic madness had to do with ‘the speculative and gambling spirit’ of the California settlement. It had to do with ‘heterogeneous elements,’ it had to do with ‘change of climate, habits, and modes of life,’ it had to do with being ‘isolated, without sympathy, and deprived of all home influences.’ California itself, then, according to its own Board of Health, was ‘well-calculated to break some link in reason’s chain, and throw into confusion even the best balanced properties of mind.’

Joan Didion, Where I Was From.

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This had been a familiar enough pattern throughout the South, but something else had happened here. Desegregation had not just come hard and late to South Florida but it had also coincided, as it had not in other parts of the South, with another disruption of the local status quo, the major Cuban influx, which meant that jobs and services which might have helped awaken an inchoate black community went instead to Cubans, who tended to be overtrained but willing. Havana bankers took jobs as inventory clerks at forty-five dollars a week. Havana newspaper publishers drove taxis. That these were the men in black tie who now danced with the women in the Chanel and Valentino evening dresses on the ballroom level of the Omni was an irony lost in its precise detail, although not in its broad outline, on the sons of the men who did not get jobs as inventory clerks or taxi drivers, the children downstairs, in the high-topped sneakers, fanning in packs through the dim avenues of the locked-up mall.

Joan Didion, Miami.

[theendofpromise]

The last time I saw Nancy was at the Outrigger Canoe Club in Honolulu, during the Christmas season of the Iran hostage crisis. She was at the next table, having dinner with her husband and children. They were laughing and arguing and interrupting just as she and her brothers and her mother and father had laughed and argued and interrupted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I would have dinner at their house two or three times a week. We kissed, we had a drink together, we promised to keep in touch. A few months later Nancy was dead, of cancer, at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. I sent the recital program to Nancy's brother, to send on to her daughter. I had my grandmother's watercolor framed and sent it to the next oldest of her three granddaughters, my cousin Brenda, in Sacremento. I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Joan Didion, Where I Was From.

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Susan Brownmiller, during a year spent monitoring newspaper coverage of rape as part of her research for Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, found, not surprisingly, that "although New York City police statistics showed that black women were more frequent victims of rape than white women, the favored victim in the tabloid headline … was young, white, middle class and 'attractive.'" In its quite extensive coverage of rape-murders during the year 1971, according to Ms. Brownmiller, the Daily News published in its four-star final edition only two stories in which the victim was not described in the lead paragraph as "attractive": one of these stories involved an eight-year-old child, the other was a second-day follow-up on a first-day story that had in fact described the victim as "attractive." The Times, she found, covered rapes only infrequently that year, but what coverage they did "concerned victims who had some kind of middle-class status, such as 'nurse,' 'dancer' or 'teacher,' and with a favored setting of Central Park."

Joan Didion, 'Sentimental Journeys' from After Henry.

[theendofpromise]

You know what you're getting when a news organisation promotes a grumpy old white guy as their no-holds-barred, unconventional, question-everything 'journalist'.

[theendofpromise]

What seemed markedly different a decade later, what made crime a "story," was that the more privileged, and especially the more privileged white, citizens of New York had begun to feel unnerved at high noon in even their own neighborhoods. Although New York City Police Department statistics suggested that white New Yorkers were not actually in increased mortal danger (the increase in homicides between 1977 and 1989, from 1,556 to 1,903, was entirely among what the NYPD classified as Hispanic, Asian, and black victims; the number of white murder victims had steadily declined, from 361 in 1977 to 227 in 1984 and 190 in 1989), the apprehension of such danger, exacerbated by street snatches and muggings and the quite useful sense that the youth in the hooded sweatshirt with his hands jammed in his pockets might well be a predator, had become general. These more privileged New Yorkers now felt unnerved not only on the street, where the necessity for evasive strategies had become an exhausting constant, but in even the most insulated and protected apartment buildings.

Joan Didion, 'Sentimental Journeys' from After Henry.

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The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the victims' rights movement. The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the 1994 'three strikes' legislation and initiative, the act that mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for any third felony conviction, even for crimes as minor as growing a marijuana plant on a windowsill or shoplifting a bottle of Ripple. The prison guards were the political muscle that had by the year 2000 made the California corrections system, with thirty-three penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates, the largest in the western hemisphere.

Joan Didion, Where I Was From.

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“I sometimes find myself in the role that Didion casts aside—the aisle-wandering, detail-pillaging self, who comes for water-purifying tablets and leaves with the price-tagged Cliff Notes of a country’s suffering. More specifically, reading her, I find myself in a Bolivian supermarket in 2007, taking notes: […]”

[theendofpromise]

“The Reagan administration made its certification to these points on January 28, 1982, the day after Bonner’s and Alma Guillermoprieto’s extensive reports from Morazán appeared in the Times and the Post. Mark Danner’s true subject in The Massacre at El Mozote, then, is not the massacre itself but the way in which the story of the massacre, which was carried out by troops trained by the US Special Forces and equipped with US manufactured M-16s and with ammunition manufactured for the US government at Lake City, Missouri, came to be known and discounted in the United States, the way in which the story of El Mozote ‘was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark.’”

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“This was not a woman who wore a flak jacket (at least not in San Francisco), this was a woman who drove a Corvette Stingray, who hid her delicate bone-structure behind oversize sunglasses and who had early childhood dreams of wrapping herself in swathes of sable, who understood the telegraphed distinctions between different hem lengths and the mood-altering powers of several yards of theatrical yellow silk. This was a woman who was at one time a Vogue editor, for Pete’s sake. And this was the list that, for years, she kept taped inside her closet door, for when she had to leave town at a moment’s notice.”

[ladyjournos]

If we know of him at all, it’s of his position as second fiddle, as Prince Philip to Joan’s Queen Elizabeth in the “first family of angst,” as the Saturday Evening Post dubbed them.

The American Reader || December 2012