Literary Chicago - Joan Didion "The White Album"

I wrote this post a few months ago. Not sure why I never uploaded it. I was planning on originally trying to find somewhere else to publish this, but I never really expanded on it in any meaningful way. I still think it's worth posting based upon the connection between the writer, the artist, this city, and my experience.

(via the Art Institute)

I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgie O'Keefe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O'Keefe "Sky Above Clouds" canvases floated over the back stairs in the Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it once, ran to the landing, and kept on looking. "Who drew it," she whispered after a while. I told her. "I need to talk to her," she said finally.

Joan Didion wrote this in 1976 in an essay titled "Georgie O'Keefe". It was released in her collection called The White Album, chronicling the death of the sixties and the uncertainties of the seventies, covering everything from the Doors to dams to horticulture to Hawaii, Bogota to bureaucrats, to the women's movement and how an artist creates.

I've gotten into the habit of marking whenever Chicago is mentioned in fiction. This year however, I've been a bit out of character. I've read less fiction, and more non-fiction and, especially recently, poetry. I've read Didion in the past, and as I began reading this collection, I'd wondered if she would mention Chicago.

This essay was a pleasant surprise. It got me to rethink my previous notions of O'Keefe. Personally, I've never been a huge fan of her work (nothing against her personally, the works of European artists and authors have always appealed to me more). I've probably walked by these clouds dozens of times.

But last Thursday was different. I wanted to see what Didion saw and what her daughter saw in these clouds.

Year in Reading 2015

End of year lists. A bit played out and commenting on them being played out is too. But I think it's important to look back on what this year meant for me, literaturely. Along with starting to volunteer at Open Books as well as working on an event with Asymptote (stay tuned!), I've been writing more, sometimes for money, sometimes creatively, sometimes not at all (more often than I should). But the bones of a novel came out of it. If you're reading this blog and are interested in reading a surrealist tale about language, identity, memory, and perception, with indulgent experiments in form and more namedrops to philosophers, writers, musicians, and other pop culture references than I probably should have made, I will absolutely let you read it while I figure out where to go with it next.

But enough about what I wrote, here is what I read:

Uki Goni - 'The Real Odessa'

Reading this book, and certainly writing about it, takes me a little bit out of my comfort zone. I'm used to reading and writing about fiction, yet this is non-fiction. The subtitle for the book is "How Peron Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina." Which tells you exactly what the book is about. And while it may not be fiction, I still have many thoughts about the book, not to mention having learned some of the more atrocious secrets of Juan Peron's regime and Argentina's shameful complicity with saving Nazi war criminal and the real Odessa*.

First off, this story is thoroughly well researched. It's an amazing story, hard to believe at points how various governments of the world (including the USA) were complacent in the transfer of Nazis from post-WWII Europe to South America. That said, I thought the writing was a bit stiff and hard to follow at points. To that point, the book may have been too well-researched for only being 326 pages (not including the Afterward added to the second edition).

Another issue I had was how little mention there was of Eva 'Evita' Peron. She is mentioned numerous times throughout the book, sure, but is barely mentioned in the index when trying to find references to her. But, to be fair, this book is meant to focus on the war criminals. The book leaves her sympathies ambiguous: she did stand up to a Nazi war criminal when she refused to fire a Jewish employee. Yet, she was very welcoming and apparently charmed by multiple Nazis that visited la Casa Rosada.

But enough about the issues. The story is fascinating and I recommend it to any history buffs out there. Here are some of my major takeaways from the book:

Joan Didion - 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem"

Finally introduced myself to Joan Didion. This book is a collection of essays written between 1965-7, primarily taking place all over the West Coast, including a reminiscence of her childhood in Sacramento, following John Wayne to a movie set in Mexico, an in depth look at the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Fran, an essay on self-respect and more. I might have glazed over one or two of the twenty collected essays, but for the most part I was quite captivated in subjects I didn't think I held much interest in.

The title of the collection (and my favorite essay of the bunch) comes from a Yeats poem, quoted in the epigraph. I was almost turned off there since Romantic poetry ain't my jam, but I kept an open-mind. But the first essay, describing the trial of a husband's alleged murder by his wife, gripped me from the start. Didion was quite enmeshed in the West Coast culture; she understands it on a more personal level than Thompson's drug-punctured mind, though their comparison may only be apt in regards to the Haight-Asbury essay. In 'Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,' Didion talks about the appeal of the West, how in 60s (and probably still today) it still holds the illusion of frontier. "The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past."

Other out of context yet aphoristic lines that shimmer like gold as I, the reader, pan through her prose like a 49er:

"...the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live."

"But Durango. The very name hallucinates."

"The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."

"Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question."

"Perhaps in retrospect this has been a story not about Sacramento at all, but about the things we lose and the promises we break as we grow older."

On fiction vs. non-:

"...not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters."

And more proof that any online thinkpiece you read about the "death of the novel" is bullshit:

"Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over." (written in 1967)

If there's one thing I want to hate Joan Didion for, it's for spreading the secret that only those of us that wield language as our weapon formerly knew. "Writers are always selling somebody out." It seems like one of those romantic and generalized notions of writing that I read all too often on pretentious twitter accounts, but I can't say I'd want to read a story where nobody got hurt.