joan didion has died
the queen of glamorous fatalism has kicked it. strange, i was reading her last week. writers are generally a dowdy and poorly socialized bunch, but didion was perennially cool, cruising around the california roads in a yellow Corvette Stingray, documenting the decline of a civilization with a cigarette in her hand.
i've never really been a didionhead tho i find her deadpan style and use of parataxis enjoyable to read. maybe i've never given her a real shot. i read The Year of Magical Thinking when it came out while i was in high school, having stolen a hardcover copy from my local books-a-million. perhaps i was underwhelmed because i knew nothing about death then, though now i think constantly about the way grief suspends the rules of reality.
A passage i re-read last week, from her essay "Why I Write."
I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the Bevatron up the hill.
