Oh Joan

I've been reading a lot of Joan Didion lately because I love her. It's partly her ideas, partly her honest acidity, partly her deft writing, but mostly it's that she writes about a country (and, more particularly a state) that is no longer here but which is infinitely intriguing to me. A Year of Magical Thinking was about her husband's death, but it was also about when she and her husband lived in California in the 60s and 70s. And now I'm reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem which is all essays written in the 60s and 70s. I love the 70s conception of California as this strange, desert-ish place where people really want to have souls but kind of fail (cf. Pynchon). California is a weird place, but I feel like I don't have as unified a sense of it as I would have in the 70s before all the orange groves were mowed down and all the strip malls went up. I think another reason why I love it is because it makes my think of what California must have been like when my grandparents all moved out here from the Midwest ("Of course she came from somewhere else, came off the prairie in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio, for this is a Southern California story").

Anyway, I could go on and on about my friend Joan but I won't. Here is just a passage I like from an essay referring to Death Valley: "this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter." I read this last night and I was actually envious for a minute. I want to live with antimatter - or more accurately, I want to be able to sense that kind of alienness, that strangeness. For all the weirdnesses of California now, I don't feel like it is alien, or fundamentally oppositional to a normal way of life. I think it's faded - maybe because it has gotten older, maybe because the dream of the West is fading, maybe because there are too many freeway overpasses and not enough Dashiell Hammett - but either way I don't believe that "living with antimatter" is possible now. Maybe I don't live in Death Valley or the Inland Empire - but even the Inland Empire has changed since Didion wrote "Some dreamers of the Golden Dream" which is where that quote about the "Southern California story" comes from. It's bland - hot and dull and there are a few meth labs, but it seems bland to me as a whole - there isn't any longing for humanity there.

More from the same passage: "people whose instincts tell them that if they do not keep moving at night on the desert they will lose all reason." Another change - I feel like now, those people have become trapped. The Inland Empire/CA desert is now stagnant. You go there, you do not leave (for those of you who live there, I guess I should clarify that it's not your fault, but the stereotype, the image of the area is one of stagnation. You have to get out to get anywhere - see Julie Cooper on the OC). Perhaps this is because it has become "civilized" to an extent - there are outlet malls and golf courses and music festivals - but as a result I think it's lost its foreignness. And it's lost its status as a land of opportunity, a place where you can move because it has cheaper rent and because it's in California and that's where you want to be, a place where you can move up in the world (also I suspect that the middle-class "moving up in the world" value has changed since Didion as well). You can't just visit the area, get an understanding of it, write a brilliant essay, and leave. You just go. And stay. Or, more accurately perhaps, you are just there.

I guess all of this is complete projection and also sort of abusive to the poor Inland Empire. But I am really fascinated with the concept of place (especially in Didion). Setting is so important. More so, perhaps, I'm interested in the romance of futility and otherness in Didion. And she's writing non fiction. I wish I could be somewhere that was so bizarrely unique as Didion's California - or rather, I wish I could have a sense of somewhere that is as bizarrely unique. I wonder if it's really gone, or if it's just hiding and I just haven't gone looking for it, or if I just don't have the sense to notice it. I hope it's not the latter. (But it could be. Maybe I should go meet random people in Haight Ashbury and keep my mind open and write it all down and edit it well, and then maybe I, like Didion, will find something strange and beautiful in the futility of everyday life. Are people looking for enlightenment anymore? These are things I'm not sure I know the answer to.)

Something to think about. Pardon my incoherent English major thinking.

The quote about a "Southern California" story is from the essay "Some dreamers of the Golden Dream" and is on page 7 of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The other quotes are from "On Morality" and are on page 159.