I must have read
this years ago, because I found a well-read copy in my book
collection, but I have almost no memory of the contents. Perhaps
that’s because the writing is more about a feeling – what it
feels like to be Joan Didion – than anything else. There are essays
about how it felt for her to be a young woman moving from California
to New York in the early 1960s, and how it felt for her a little
later when the attractions of the city began to pall. There is a
sneering piece about a middlebrow, middle of the road think tank
called the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions, another
in much the same tone about a ‘school of non-violence’ run under
the auspices of Joan Baez, and a rather long essay about
Haight-Ashbury in the later 1960s that put me in mind of ‘Through a
Scanner Darkly’.
It’s nicely
written, and I’ll seek out more of her old stuff, even though I
don’t quite like her.
I was mainly struck
by how contemporary it all feels, even though it was written and
describes a world of fifty years ago. It’s recognisably still my
world, despite the absence of all the technologies that I make use of
during most waking minutes. Even the cover photo, which shows Didion
and a beardy man in some sort of tent with a vase of flowers and a
bottle of wine in front of them, could have been taken at last year’s
Womad. That’s weird, isn’t it? We talk so much about how fast
things are changing – but I am sure that if my parents had read a
book in 1958 (the year of my birth) that depicted the world of 1908
they wouldn’t have felt it was their world. So when was the
disjuncture? The war, or the post-war boom?
No comments:
Post a Comment