Joan didion's sacramento (Los Angeles: home, neighborhoods, live)

[sacreole]

Sactown Magazine recently republished an article about Joan Didion from a 2011 Q&A - “Where She Was From”:

“On the eve of her 77th birthday, Sacramento’s native daughter Joan Didion reflects on the untimely deaths of her husband and daughter, the difficulty of parenting, and why, as a teenager, she really, really wanted a job at the California State Fair.”

https://www.sactownmag.com/where-she-was-from/

[caravan70]

Another recent piece in the NYRB on Didion and the role of place (Sacramento in particular) in her writing:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/202...autiful-light/

[Chimérique]

As a journalist, Joan Didion is/was objective, certainly, way more objective than anyone of today or of the last ten years. "Journalism" as an honest objective reporting of facts with little slant does not exist today.

As a writer of fiction, Didion definitely has a distinctive style, some will like it, some won't.

Didion's essays, commentaires, opinions are of the objective variety, always smart, razor sharp. She doesn't pretend to be an historian.

I've been told a true cult and really they have always been a cult are historians. Many historians, not all, have us all fooled that what they say is the truth, without bias. Some say, historical writing is just another story, another distorted narrative, sometimes a false narrative, an opinionated version of the way things went down. Some say, historical writing is supposed to be the closest to the truth and most of us, think it as Gospel, the absolute truth, when we know it is not, but we still believe it. If you say something enough, over and over, people start to believe it, even if it is a lie. And, now that, history is being re-written from another biased distorted perspective, we will all believe that too, until it gets "re-written" again.

[Chimérique]

One of Didion's popular and famous quotes:

"Privilege is a judgment. Privilege is an opinion. Privilege is an accusation".
"Privilege remains an area to which — when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later — I will not easily cop".

[shelato]

Originally Posted by Chimérique

As a journalist, Joan Didion is/was objective, certainly, way more objective than anyone of today or of the last ten years. "Journalism" as an honest objective reporting of facts with little slant does not exist today.

As a writer of fiction, Didion definitely has a distinctive style, some will like it, some won't.

Didion's essays, commentaires, opinions are of the objective variety, always smart, razor sharp. She doesn't pretend to be an historian.

I've been told a true cult and really they have always been a cult are historians. Many historians, not all, have us all fooled that what they say is the truth, without bias. Some say, historical writing is just another story, another distorted narrative, sometimes a false narrative, an opinionated version of the way things went down. Some say, historical writing is supposed to be the closest to the truth and most of us, think it as Gospel, the absolute truth, when we know it is not, but we still believe it. If you say something enough, over and over, people start to believe it, even if it is a lie. And, now that, history is being re-written from another biased distorted perspective, we will all believe that too, until it gets "re-written" again.

Who actually believes historians are objective? They selectively marshal facts to advance a narrative. History gets rewritten mostly to advance a new narrative generally to advance the interests of who ever currently in power. Each time a new power structure comes in, we get a new history. Anyone who challenges their narrative is challenging their power structure.

[wburg]

There's no such thing as an "opinion of the objective variety." And there's a whole field of history (historiography) that focuses entirely on how the study of history has changed over time, from Thucydides to Marx through the present day, that is an essential part of any history major's undergraduate classes; it changes not necessarily because of changes in who is in power but as the field itself advances and grows, becoming more inclusive of different methods of analysis and more diverse points of view. Contemporary history has been heavily influenced by the philosophical movement of postmodernism, which challenged the very idea of objective reality itself, and postmodernism has given way to broader historical studies that have integrated the idea that we can tell meaningful stories about our past regardless of the nonexistence of a grand, inviolate historical narrative which nobody is allowed to question.


Now, a lot of people are uncomfortable with this: the short-lived "1776 Commission" of the previous presidential administration was intended to reinforce the idea of American history as being based on a unitary, inviolate principle of American exceptionalism, but, as it turns out, none of the people appointed to that commission were actually historians. Any first-year history major learns that history and how it is written changes over time, and one certainly doesn't get out of grad school without diving into Derrida, Foucault, etcetera.


Opinion and perspective are not the same as falsehood; one person's glorious success can most certainly be another person's crushing failure; that's a difference of perspective where multiple, coequal truths exist. Didion is a skilled and talented journalist and writer, but that doesn't make her work objective, as it was written by a person writing from a particular point of view. She certainly didn't just report facts, she added her analysis and interpretation of what those facts meant, which is very much a subjective activity; that doesn't make her a bad journalist, just a readable one (recitation of facts & dates from the official records, a la Leopold von Ranke, is boring, and the official records often don't match up with other sources, challenging their status as objective).


Our current situation has more to do with the rise of radio and cable TV news channels who classify their most popular shows as "entertainment," featuring principally opinion pieces about the news, in order to avoid the expectation of objectivity because they aren't news programs, while still being interpreted by the viewer as news, because the talking head giving the opinion on the screen looks pretty similar to the talking head reading the news an hour later. To bring this full-circle back to Sacramento, one of the main voices in that shift, Rush Limbaugh, really gained his first notoriety for this sort of "entertainment news" on KFBK here in Sacramento in the 1980s, during the era when the Fairness Doctrine (a national policy requiring equal time for differing points of view on the public airwaves) was eliminated by the Reagan administration--Limbaugh moved from KFBK to the national spotlight just a year or so later.

"Privilege remains an area to which — when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later — I will not easily cop"

Ah yes, Didion's quote where she claims that privilege doesn't exist because rich people aren't immune to (or exempt from) suffering and death. It's a nice sentence, but definitely a matter of opinion.

[Chimérique]

Originally Posted by Chimérique

One of Didion's popular and famous quotes:
"Privilege is a judgment. Privilege is an opinion. Privilege is an accusation".

Just to be clear, below is Didion's quote, not mine:
"Privilege remains an area to which — when I think of what she endured, when I consider what came later — I will not easily cop"

"I" is Didion, not me, "she" is Didion's daughter who died in 2005, Didion's quote is her response to an interview question about her daughter.

[CA4Now]

Q: Which feels more like home: New York or California?

A: Both.

How Joan Didion Is Weathering the Pandemic:
https://time.com/5932127/joan-didion...u-what-i-mean/

[Chimérique]

CA4Now,

I love it! Thanks for posting!

The Time Magazine interview:
This is exactly what I would expect of Joan at 86 yrs old, during a pandemic and a devastated and transformed NYC. I agree, an Easter dinner party would be great!

I envision myself taking a walk with her in midtown Sacramento stopping at the "Didion" having a coffee and gluten-free donut at Babes, so she can see the metal art piece of herself and her old Corvette; later lunch at Pushkins on Capitol Avenue. I'll bring a bottle of red California wine from my families winery in Amador county. Best Zinfandel in the world I'll boast, another reason to be proud she's from Sacramento.

Her Sacramento family house on 22nd and T street from last century is in between owners, so perhaps we can sit on the porch and read our books quietly, pausing here and there to read a quote, discuss, and quietly go back to reading. Sipping another glass of NorCal Zin while we refrain from discussing politics.

[CA4Now]

Originally Posted by Chimérique

The Time Magazine interview:
This is exactly what I would expect of Joan at 86 yrs old, during a pandemic and a devastated and transformed NYC. I agree, an Easter dinner party would be great!

Exactly. She's remarkably resilient.