"A Sense of Being Outside" - RIP J. Didion
Joan Didion tolerating some dumb college kids (incl me) in 2003 + my favorite reggae Xmas song
It has been a(nother) year of loss, and some of the writers/artists/icons passing at the end of this year have left a particular sting. I came late to Eve Babitz, but I’m grateful I first encountered bell hooks via riot grrl zines as a tween, and then a bit later in high school, Joan Didion. Her voice, her image, her peerless sentences, left an indelible imprint, which is by now a cliché in itself. Being basic for loving Joan Didion became an inescapable part of loving Joan Didion, and yet, here we are. “Certain writers are unavoidable, whether one would care to avoid them or not,” is how Matthew put it in his lovely tribute for Los Angeles Magazine; Haley Mlotek’s canonical 2015 piece about the branding of Didion also captures this dilemma.
But as an aging millennial, I’d like to point out that being a teenage Joan devotee in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, pre-Internet, was a lonelier (if no less cringey) pursuit. There was no Etsy full of prefab Didion merch when I was a high school junior and decided it would be brilliantly punk to satirize the 1990s evangelical meme WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) bracelets by making my own version - WWJDD (What Would Joan Didion Do), painstakingly punched out on loops of label-maker tape (some of these may still be rotting in storage somewhere). But by the time I got to college and was no longer wearing my allegiance quite so literally on my wrist, I found I was in good company of fellow Didion dorks, including a dear friend, the wonderful writer and editor Meredith Levine. In the fall of 2003, the news spread like wildfire that La Didion was coming to give a talk in the English department, and we scrambled to interview her for the campus quarterly nonfiction magazine I co-edited.
If I recall correctly, Meredith and I drafted the questions together, but decided that she would ask the questions (maybe we flipped a coin? Maybe we correctly assumed that I might hyperventilate Chris Farley style ?). When the day arrived, we crammed into a classroom with perhaps a hundred other kids jockeying for their this-is-more-of-a-two-part-comment-than-a-question-slot, and faculty with their own fandoms to indulge. Soon JD arrived in her signature dark sunglasses and cashmere, the sea of unwashed undergrads parting for her bird-like figure. She did not disappoint! And was incredibly gracious with all the same boring questions she had likely fielded a million times prior. Meredith did an amazing job, a Didionesque “cool customer” in her poised delivery of our question list, and I believe I only piped up once with a very lame question about Jerry Schatzberg and “Panic in Needle Park” just to assert my 1970s film knowledge (??) which we wisely cut from the final Q&A write-up.
After digging around on old hard drives for the past days, I managed to find a PDF of the final printed interview with extremely weird typeface formatting (probably because it was exported from an ancient version of InDesign). It’s short - a total of 9 questions and brief answers - and is hardly revelatory, but it felt so meaningful for us, an audience with the oracle (however much Didion herself would have shredded that sentiment with one withering glance). Of her answers, this was the one that was most urgently relevant to us at the time, and maybe resonates differently today:
How did you transition from college to journalism?
I was at Berkeley, I was an English major, and I was really intimidated by it. There was no way I could ever hang a sentence like Henry James, no way I could ever intercut like Flaubert - and your experience bank is kind of low, because you've been in college… so you have to move around, do some reporting, build up a sense of being outside.
After two years where literally being outside has been more fraught with complexity than ever before, I don’t think I’m alone in seeing it afresh as a priceless commodity in not just the creative process, but understanding ourselves and the world. If nothing else, I hope 2022 brings you more of “a sense of being outside”, however you define it. Thank you and farewell JD.
You can read the full 1-page (!) interview here as a PDF: Download “The Look of the Place”, from Wake Journal Fall 2003
Bonus Holiday Content
“Notes on Cocaine Christmas” - loved this surprisingly charming story by Jason Diamond (on his always great newsletter) about a Christmas spent DJ-ing in 2004 Brooklyn which I described to someone as “like an Electroclash O. Henry story”. (The title also feels like a nod to the epic “My Heroin Christmas” essay by Terry Castle, which Matthew has written about here)
This incredible “It’s a Wonderful Life” trailer from 2019 remixed “like an arthouse movie” to emphasize the still-bracing despair and beauty of the film (even if you’ve watched IAWL a million times, watch this anyhow, it’s <2 minutes long)
My favorite reggae Christmas song from 1968 - The Ethiopians’ “Ding Dong Bell”! That steel rhythm guitar! Loop it for the next 24 hours.
Happy and safe and bright and healthy to you all -
x shc