Paris to the Moon... rocket just crashed.

I finished "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and started Adam Gopnik's "Paris to the Moon." To be sure, I might have not given this book a fair chance, but 37 pages through it I had to stop before I choked on the extreme usage of French and the seemingly endless comparisons between American ways and the all-powerful, all-superior French. The reason I stopped reading this is because Gopnik states early in the book that his family is no Francophile... really, it is a statement that dooms the entire narrative. I might be ready to read this book some other time; right now, however, is not the time.

Didion's fantastic collection of essays ended with passages that were so well-written perhaps that's the reason why I couldn't get into Gopnik's glorification of the French. Here's a passage from Didion that is rapidly climbing to the top of my favorite passages: "That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it." And then... "From my office I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled out TIME and LIFE above Rockefeller Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o'clock of early summer evenings and looking at things, Lowestoft tureens in Fifty-seventh Street windows, people in evening clothes trying to get taxis, the trees just coming into full leaf, the lambent air, all the sweet promises of money and summer." Maybe this is the reason why I can't read about Paris... after reading such wonderful descriptions of New York. This last passage reminds me of one by F. Scott Fitzgerald that reads like a description of manic-depression: "And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between the very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and I knew I would never be so happy again."

So, I am putting Gopnik's book aside, until I feel better prepared to face the "Paris-is-the-new-Jerusalem" prose he presents.

Phrase and Style in Joan Didion's Writing

One of the most interesting things in reading "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is really not the majority of the dated subjects and content she is dealing with here. I guess it is true what they day about the sixties... "if you can remember the 60s, you weren't there." I wasn't there... at least not consciously. I was born in 1967; a latest arrival to a couple whose best days were almost behind them (my sisters are all baby-boomers). I suppose I am not quite Generation X but not old enough to be a baby-boomer. At any rate, Didion has made me remember the sixties in a way that offers a magnificent style and phraseology (pick up "The Year of Magical Thinking" and see what I mean). She discovers a country not "in open revolution" or "under enemy siege," but rather a U.S. doting one of the strongest economic rides in recent history. The latter part of the collection are essays dealing with personal views about writing and living in California. I love the essay "Why I Keep a Notebook." She details her account of how she came to realize she was a writer and could do nothing else with her life. She states: "Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrengers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss." I believe that is the same reason I write in my notebooks, on and off, for whatever reason that doesn't fit my interpretation of how I want things to evolve. Failed relationships? Sure, quite a few... and being able to re-write them in some way helps not only the healing process, but also the dark and endless days of grief. Perhaps it all turns into a short story and one gives it the ending one really had in mind from the very beginning. In that way I do claim myself as a malcontent, anxious, as Didion says, and worst off than most. The Moleskines are public and they speak for themselves.

Eugene and Ilse left Monday at noon. Since then I have kept a strict schedule of running, working for the new semester and sleeping. I have been reading for an hour or so, hence the lack of posting. I was up until very late last night converting documents into pdf files for my students. I just finished posting it on my courses website. It's sort of funny that for more work I do, it seems that there is three or four times more work to be done before the semester begins. What to read next? I am looking at my list for this year and thinking I might just change a few titles around. Malcontent as I am :-) I am already planning my reading list for 2008 to include only "classics" I have not read and a few I would like to re-read. For example, I went to Barnes & Noble the other day and bought 4 classics for $10, among them "Great Expectations" and "Madame Bovary." I'll be reading only classics of the Western canon next year.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem -- Joan Didion

This collection of essays marks the crowning of Didion as the master of the American essay. I particularly liked the essay on John Wayne; it brought a plethora of black and white Western memories and the excitement of old time war movies. These essays--although dated--depict an era of history in the United States that could be interpreted in a million different ways. Didion's essays make it sound like the conventional wisdom about the 1960s generally holds: that everyone was out there living it up and being a hippie. But, I wonder, how did Nixon get elected in '68? He said it best when accepting the Republican nomination for president he referred to the "silent majority." I really think that was the case in the 1960s. Sure the hippies and the social activists were more visible, always on television, etc. But the truth was the the "silent majority" still ran the country.... the 9 to 5 worker, the housewives, the young men who volunteered for service in Vietnam (only a small percentage of those drafted actually served any combat time in Vietnam--the majority were volunteers).

Didion gets it all right. I think she does because essentially it did happen that way, whether to a certain degree or another that's beside the point. She is illustrative and precise in her depiction of the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco. I love her reference to the Yeats poem, particularly the lines "the center cannot hold" and "The falcon cannot hear the falconer."

So, I am half way through this book which I began yesterday, including the fact that I am taking notes and also the fact that I am taking my friends from Holland for drives around the city. So I promise to do better this week. By the way, today is the FIRST YEAR ANNIVERSARY of this blog, and also my wedding anniversary! What a day!