Main Menu

Tip jar

If you like CaB and wish to support it, you can use PayPal or KoFi. Thank you, and I hope you continue to enjoy the site - Neil.

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Support CaB

Recent

Welcome to Cook'd and Bomb'd. Please login or sign up.

March 28, 2024, 08:23:16 PM

Login with username, password and session length

Joan Didion RIP

Started by Astronaut Omens, December 24, 2021, 03:46:35 PM

Previous topic - Next topic
This was already mentioned in the Eve Babitz thread, but the amazing US journalist/novelist Joan Didion has just died. Her 1968 collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a brilliant depiction of the Californian hippy dream going horribly wrong and is well worth your time. As well as been a fantastic prose stylist, there was something about her stance that was really unique, which perhaps stems from her being born in the 1930s, being just young enough to write sympathetically about hippies (and later baby-boomers in general), but just old enough to be distant and witheringly questioning about their worldview.

Twit 2

Joan Deadion?

Joan Diedion?

shoulders


Twit 2


Catalogue of ills

She was a terrific writer. The only collection of hers that I read was The White Album, a great example of her somewhat detached "don't mind me I'm just jotting all this down" style. As a knowing observer, her quality ranks alongside Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin - close enough to get access, not close enough to get carried away. Her essays on Californian water management systems, which she was a bit obsessed with, give a possible insight into Frank Herbert's own preoccupations with water conservation, him having lived in California for a time.

shagatha crustie

Play It As It Lays is a novel I won't forget in a hurry. An almost unbearably harsh illumination of counterculture-era LA, Hollywood's entertainment underworld, the networks of sexual coercion and extortion.