Well, that's one of the few criticisms of the writing, anyway. Nobody writes like Joan Didion, and if I could explain what makes her writing special--the combination of intimate personal detail with seeming cool detachment, the combination of ambiguity and moral clarity, the sharp social and cultural observation, both micro and macro--then maybe I'd be a better writer. But I can't explain it, so I won't try.
Even the best writers write some silly things, though. In "Notes from a Native Daughter," an essay about the Central Valley of California and her native Sacramento, she writes about the ruins of a huge estate that had once belonged to a Sacramento woman and her husband, a European nobleman. All that remained of the once-grand estate was a house trailer occupied by the couple's only son and heir. Commenting that the young people of Sacramento, the "children of the aerospace engineers," would never know about the grand estate and its occupants, and that they would grow up believing that "the Embarcadero....has about it the true flavor of the way it was," she laments that they "will have lost the real past and gained a manufactured one..."
When I was young, I read United States, a book of Gore Vidal essays. I don't remember much about it other than sharp writing and meanness. Gore Vidal was mean. But I think I remember a similar mournful thread of complaint about loss of authenticity in material things; paper napkins rather than cloth, paste rather than diamonds; and tiny, prefabricated suburban houses instead of stately Newport cottages. From Vidal, this kind of complaint reads as nothing much more than mid-century East Coast American snobbery. From Joan Didion, it reads as real sorrow over an actual loss. In both cases, a huge point is missed; that point being that either everything manmade is authentic, or nothing is. Either every aspect of our past is manufactured, or none of it is.
*****
Unrelated: Why are Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin wearing "You Can Play" lapel pins? I just looked it up, and found nothing. And now I have a strange desire to collect lapel pins, or maybe even to wear one.
*****
It's the next day now. There was an additional point to the Joan Didion/Gore Vidal thread, but in typical fashion, I have forgotten it. So I'm going to let it stew for day or so, just allow it to marinate until it all comes back to me. Meanwhile, my 13-year-old made a special point of coming to find me and tell me that my favorite SpongeBob episode ("Tentacle Acres") was on TV. We watched it together. Like most SpongeBob episodes, "Tentacle Acres" is about original sin, which I think is a pretty profound observation, so don't ever say that you don't get deep philosophical insights around here. Joan Didion should call me, because I have more where that came from. Meanwhile, still nothing about the pins. I'm really eaten up with curiosity about this.
I'm going to Philadelphia again this weekend. Another family party at the Canoe Club. The Canoe Club has been there for a long time, but I didn't know it when I was a child, so it's not part of my past. The stadium where I watched the Phillies play is no longer there; it was demolished in 2004. The parish school that I attended has closed, though the church remains. John Wanamaker's flagship store is now a Macy's, and Strawbridge & Clothier is gone. There are lots of other places from my Philadelphia childhood and youth; some gone forever, and some changed beyond recognition. Children who are growing up there now will have their own places. If they're young, they probably think that those places have been there forever, will be there forever, and will never change. Their parents know better. But it's all real, as real as anything built by people can be.
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