Joan Didion on Loss

I have written about Joan Didion, whose work I have been reading for decades, and whom I twice heard speak, on this blog (3/23/11). Her most painful book to date, and her most successful, was "The Year of Magical Thinking," a searingly sad memoir about her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, his sudden death, and Didion's struggle to come to terms with his death. Now she has written a new and equally sad book, "Blue Nights," about her daughter, Quintana Roo, her troubled life, and her far too early death at age 39, only a few months after her father died. The current (10/24/11) issue of New York Magazine has a fascinating but very painful article about Didion, her new book, and her daughter's life and death. Quintana Roo suffered from depression and alcohol abuse, and although she had started a career in photography and photo editing, she was fragile and vulnerable. Didion worried about her, of course, and also worried that she, Didion, had not been a good enough mother to her daughter. Didion says in an interview for the magazine that as much as she loved her daughter, she didn't truly know or understand her. So "Blue Nights" is as much about Didion herself as it is about her daughter. Quintana Roo remains an enigma. Didion is clearly ambivalent about her reason for writing the book; she states in the New York interview that she wanted to get her preoccupation with understanding her daughter "off her mind," but then contradicts herself and says she wrote the book to "bring [her] back." The New York photos of the aging, fragile looking Didion show a person who has suffered greatly, who is overwhelmed with loss, yet still able to use her gift of writing in order to try to understand these two terrible blows, these shocking deaths, she has endured.

"Whiter Shades of Pale," by Christian Lander

Being very interested in the critical and complex topic of race in America, I often read serious material on the issue. But despite all the very serious problems inherent in this difficult subject, there is a humorous side of the topic as well. I know this is a delicate area, but I think most topics can both be serious and, sometimes, have a lighter side. For examples, see the work of many great comics and “serious but comic” commentators on race, gender, class, religion, and more. (Think the late Richard Pryor, or Chris Rock, for example; these are quite different in some ways, but both were/are fearless in using comedy to illuminate and confront racial issues.) This is a preamble to saying that I just read the book “Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, From Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews” (Random House, 2010), and found it quite funny, in a good-humored “poking-fun-at-ourselves” way. The author of this book, Christian Lander, already well known for his blog, StuffWhitePeopleLike.com, and for his 2008 book, “Stuff White People Like,” is no Richard Pryor, but writes on this topic in a light vein. This current book, “Whiter Shades of Pale” (note the reference to the iconic Procol Harum song) consists of 92 short chapters on topics such as “Ivy League,” “Single-Malt Scotch,” “Unpaid Internships,” “Nannies,” “Messenger Bags,” “Bumper Stickers,” “Flea Markets,” “Anthropologie,” “Frisbee Sports,” “Trader Joe’s,” “Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore,” “The Huffington Post,” “Heirloom Tomatoes,” “Expensive Jeans,” and “Ikea.” These chapters are interspersed with wonderful line drawings of individuals deemed representative of major North American cities such as Boston, New York, Washington, Asheville, Chicago, Madison, Boulder, Los Angeles, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, and of course my city San Francisco. For each full-page drawing, there is hilarious annotation of the person’s clothing and other accessories. Of course all of this is very tongue-in-cheek. It isn’t really about all white people, but about what others have called “bobos” – bourgeois bohemians –, in other words, self-styled liberal, hip, usually urban, and generally privileged white people; Lander includes himself in this category. He also notes that sometimes this group of “white people” actually includes members of all races. The book and its chapters and drawings are all part of a gentle send-up of an all-too-easily-parodied "type." In conclusion, I am tempted to include lots of quotations here, but will limit myself to one representative example: “White people have plunged headfirst into world music. If they play it loud enough…, people are almost guaranteed to say, ‘Who is this?’ To which the white person can say, ‘You know, when I was in Bolivia, I really got into this flute music. I got this CD from a group of musicians on the streets of La Paz.’”

Famous Writers Who Were Alcoholics

Sadly, many, many famous writers were alcoholics. A few were also addicted to various drugs. Many of them died early of cirrhosis and other alcohol-related diseases. This reminds us that alcohol not only caused much misery for the authors themselves and their families and friends, but also deprived us all of the literature they would likely have written if they had not been battling alcoholism, and if they had not died earlier than they likely would have otherwise. There have been various studies done, and much speculation, about why such a large proportion of writers have been alcoholic; there do not seem to be any clear answers to the question. The theory that alcohol and/or drugs sometimes actually fueled the writing has been pretty much discredited, Coleridge aside. Below is a partial list of famous writers who were known to be alcoholic. It is an astonishing roll call of some of the greatest writers of the past century or so.

James Agee
Kingsley Amis
Sherwood Anderson
James Baldwin
John Berryman
Richard Brautigan
Charles Bukowski
Truman Capote
Raymond Carver
Raymond Chandler
John Cheever
Stephen Crane
William Faulkner
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dashiell Hammett
Ernest Hemingway
O. Henry
James Joyce
Jack Kerouac
Arthur Koestler
Ring Lardner
Sinclair Lewis
Jack London
Robert Lowell
Malcolm Lowry
Norman Mailer
Eugene O’Neill
Dorothy Parker
Edgar Allen Poe
Theodore Roethke
Francois Sagan
Delmore Schwartz
Anne Sexton
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Jean Stafford
William Styron
Dylan Thomas
Paul Verlaine
Tennessee Williams
Edmund Wilson
Elinor Wylie

On Listening to "To the Lighthouse" on CD

Back on 2/6/10, I wrote about how I love listening to audio books while in my car, and how I especially like to listen to the “classic” novels that I have read before. I enjoy audio versions of new novels as well, but it is a particular pleasure to listen to well-loved books that I not only have read before – often several times – but feel I know well. Hearing those novels read to me shows me new aspects of their language, themes, and characters. This is partly because it forces me to slow down and listen to every word, whereas when I read, I am sometimes rushing forward and not feeling the import of every word or phrase. When I listen, I feel the weight and gravity and beauty of every word, phrase, and sentence. I can savor the language and the insights in a different way, a way that is mentally, emotionally, and aesthetically powerful. These past few days I have been listening to the wonderful English actor Phyllida Law (who is Emma Thompson’s mother) read Virginia Woolf’s great novel “To the Lighthouse” on CD. I have read this novel a few times before, and have been awed by it, but have always preferred Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway.” This time, having the novel read to me by this gifted actor, I am savoring, more than ever before, the access to the consciousnesses and experiences of the two main female characters, Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe. These two women, quite different, one married with eight children, and the other a single painter, both wonder about the ways they have chosen to live their lives. They are also both -- especially Mrs. Ramsay -- highly conscious of and tuned into the feelings and needs of those around them. I also admire the novel’s insights into the complex world that each marriage grows into, gender roles, and the importance of the small daily events in life. I may write again about this rich tapestry of a novel when I finish it, but here I wanted to focus on the unique and lovely experience of listening to its being read aloud.

Tea and Celebration with My Dear Friend B.

My dear friend and loyal reader of this blog, B., noticed even before I mentioned it here that I was approaching my 500th blog post. She invited me to tea to celebrate that occasion, and we enjoyed our celebratory tea this afternoon. What a good time we had! I appreciated so much her honoring me and the blog with her recognition of this milepost (a small one in the scheme of things, I know, but meaningful to me, as I have so much enjoyed writing this blog). I thoroughly enjoyed her company, our conversation about books (among other things), and our tea and delicacies, served in pretty teapots and teacups for the tea and multilayered trays for the sweet treats. It happens that B. and I both love tea -- the drink and the meal -- and have shared many delightful afternoon teas together over the years. As B and her husband often say, and as I heartily agree, what could be better than breaking bread -- OK, scones and crumpets in this case -- with good friends? And if you and your friend share a great love of books, lend and give each other books, exchange recommendations, and in general celebrate books, that is even better! Thanks, B.!

Why Don't I Read More Plays?

An intriguing item in today's (10/20/11) San Francisco Chronicle tells of one of Eugene O'Neill's seemingly lost plays, "Exorcism," turning up in a researcher's archives. It had apparently been given to the writer Philip Yordan as a Christmas gift by Agnes Boulton, O'Neill's second wife. Besides being interested in this news, and, as always, being happy when a lost book or any work of art is re-found, I started musing about why I almost never read plays any more. When I was in college and grad school, and even for a little while afterward, I read plenty of plays by many playwrights, from Euripides and Shakespeare to Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, Miller, Albee, Pinter, Beckett, Williams, Hellman, Mamet, Hansberry, and many more. (Note that only two of these are female, and that to this day there are far too few women playwrights.) I do go to the theater occasionally (well, to be honest, these days very occasionally), but I never wake up and think "I should read a play today!" or "Why don't I re-read O'Neill, or Williams, or Albee?" in the way that I often DO think, "I want to re-read Eliot, Dickens, Cather, Wharton, Woolf (and many more)." (In fact, I actually and frequently DO re-read these authors.) In a time period in which I have read hundreds of books -- novels, short story collections, memoirs, essay collections, professional books, etc. --, why haven't I read more than a very small handful of plays? Is it because a play on the page seems like a poor substitute for a performance? Does the play seem rather inert on the page? Is it the chopped-up visual look of the play in print? I am not sure. I am curious: Do any of you read plays? Why or why not?

Julian Barnes Finally Wins the Man Booker Prize

It was announced yesterday that Julian Barnes won this year's Man Booker Prize for fiction, for his novel "The Sense of an Ending." The Booker is Britain's most prestigious literary prize. I haven't read the novel yet, because it has only very recently been released in the U.S., but I plan to. Readers of this blog may remember that I have written about several of Barnes' books, and highly appreciate his work, perhaps his short stories even more than his novels. Barnes, a very well-respected writer, had been nominated three times before, so it was not a surprise that he won this time. There was, parenthetically, a bit of a kerfuffle about the judges' stating that they were looking for "readable" books, which was interpreted as not putting literary value first. This criticism was not aimed at Barnes, but at the Booker judges, and at the fact that writers such as Alan Hollinghurst and Ali Smith were not shortlisted this year. There is talk that a group of British writers and publishers plan to set up a new Literature Prize "where the single criterion is excellence rather than other factors," as Andrew Kidd, spokesman for the proposed new prize, puts it. One difference from the Booker will be that any English-language writer whose work has been published in Britain will be eligible, unlike the Booker, which does not give the prize to Americans. We shall see if the Literary Prize will actually be set up, and if it becomes as prestigious as the Booker Prize is now. (Thanks to the AP and to the Guardian UK for some of this information.) In any case, back to Julian Barnes: I congratulate him on his well deserved (if this new book is anything like his earlier books) win.