238 pages
English language
Published July 10, 1979 by Simon and Schuster.
Wow. What a sentences. Those alone are reason enough to read this collection of essays about life in the sixties in the USA. And about her coping with life.
This is not really a review of the book but a comment I mad in response to a New Yorker article by Morris called The Radicalization of Joan Didion which explains why I will probably never finish reading this book.
Interesting read. I never finished "Slouching" and was never sure why--I figured it was because it was dated. What was shocking back then is now ordinary, and that was part of it. But more important was that her thesis--the point she accused others of missing--was that the hippies were a symptom of a breakdown of the society that produced them. The Yeats poem about the breakdown (auguring the second coming, but ignore that part) that gave it its title was supposed to underline this, but her readers mainly wanted to gawk at the weirdos. But she was as yet unbroken-down. And she was writing for the unbroken-down.
Her "radicalization" was …
This is not really a review of the book but a comment I mad in response to a New Yorker article by Morris called The Radicalization of Joan Didion which explains why I will probably never finish reading this book.
Interesting read. I never finished "Slouching" and was never sure why--I figured it was because it was dated. What was shocking back then is now ordinary, and that was part of it. But more important was that her thesis--the point she accused others of missing--was that the hippies were a symptom of a breakdown of the society that produced them. The Yeats poem about the breakdown (auguring the second coming, but ignore that part) that gave it its title was supposed to underline this, but her readers mainly wanted to gawk at the weirdos. But she was as yet unbroken-down. And she was writing for the unbroken-down.
Her "radicalization" was yet to come. I couldn't stay with it because I, a person from the future, was already more radicalized than the Didion of 1967.
As Morris makes clear, the radicalized Didion sees the myths of America as a disguise for the predations of business. The human interest story is hiding what should be seen politically as personal.
But is all journalism just myth making for capitalism, then? Even the exposé's goal is to keep the reader entranced to the last word, perhaps by giving them the enjoyable experience of personal radicalization. Is that where Morris wanted to leave us?
