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A review by lpm100
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Book Review
"Slouching Toward Bethlehem"
3/5 stars
"Moderately interesting, but has not aged well"
*******
Of the book:
-238 pages/20 chapters≈11.9 pages per chapter
-Chapter length range: 4- 47 pages.
So many thoughts about this book.
1. Even though it did have (a bit of) something to say, and even though it said it (mostly) well, it's neither a book worth keeping nor returning to.
The '60s was a lost decade, and it's probably better to just let it sink into the abyss of history.
2. If you want a taste of Joan Didion at her best, I would instead recommend "The Year of Magical Thinking." One reason that that book is better than the one currently being reviewed is that the '60s were issues of moment at a particular moment, but the feelings of dealing with the death of a spouse are time-independent. (The people in this book are long dead, and a significant number forgotten.)
3. Exquisite though Didion's prose may be there are some things that are just not worth my time to try to unpack. And let's be clear that: Bored Young White People Seeking Inner Peace (and what better place to find them than 1960s California?) is the backbone of the book--the description of hippie acedia takes out 47 pages of 238 page book.
Any book about their attempts at self- actualization therapy should only (questionably) be read once, and (definitely) never twice.
*******
The book is titled after the WB Yeats poem "The Second Coming," because Didion, at that time, saw a parallel between a society entropically tearing itself apart and the chaos that Yeats described at the end of WWI.
But, I wonder: might she have more judiciously chosen the poem "Ozymandias"?
As clear and present as these events were, what do they look like to somebody reading this many decades after they have come to pass?
Few of these names that were dropped are even still alive, and even fewer are remembered: (Joan Baez is 83 years old).
Rosemary Park was a chancellor of the UCLA system about a half century ago; Michael Laski was profiled here as the head of the CPUSA.
Both have disappeared without a trace, as has Suzy Parker.
The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has been defunct since 1987 (37 years ago).
It was mentioned in a book before that the entire hippie movement ultimately turned into Whole Foods.
The Big 5 families that owned everything in Hawaii have been bought out long ago-- some of them just a few years after the publication of this book.
A less dramatic (Yeats inspired) reading of the changes that happened in this book shows them as something much more mundane: The only constant is change.
All of these happenings appear as events that increase social entropy IF and ONLY IF one imagines that there is some state to which some given fraction of humanity is headed.
But we all know that's not the case: It may have turned out this way, but there's no reason it could not have well been otherwise. ("Es konnte auch anders sein.")
And it reduces many of Didion's vivid descriptions of events into so much minutiae.
That said: "Good vocabulary is like wearing designer clothing: people may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of the cloth."
The best thing to do is extract out the most pithy turns of phrase crafted by our author.
Quotes:
1. Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one.
2. It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.
3. For time passed is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the Golden Land where every day the world is born anew.
4. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.
5. [Joan Baez] The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people; The hardest is with one.
6. Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be.
7. Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about and gets picked up by 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 [micrograms of acid] and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy.
8. 5 years old. On acid.... For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote.
9. This book is called "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.
10. 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
11. What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?
12. We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, and indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.
13. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
14. It is not that Punahou is not still the school of the island power elite; it is. But where in 1944 there were 1,100 students and they had a median IQ of 108, now there are 3,400 with a median IQ of 125.
Verdict: Weak recommendation
"Slouching Toward Bethlehem"
3/5 stars
"Moderately interesting, but has not aged well"
*******
Of the book:
-238 pages/20 chapters≈11.9 pages per chapter
-Chapter length range: 4- 47 pages.
So many thoughts about this book.
1. Even though it did have (a bit of) something to say, and even though it said it (mostly) well, it's neither a book worth keeping nor returning to.
The '60s was a lost decade, and it's probably better to just let it sink into the abyss of history.
2. If you want a taste of Joan Didion at her best, I would instead recommend "The Year of Magical Thinking." One reason that that book is better than the one currently being reviewed is that the '60s were issues of moment at a particular moment, but the feelings of dealing with the death of a spouse are time-independent. (The people in this book are long dead, and a significant number forgotten.)
3. Exquisite though Didion's prose may be there are some things that are just not worth my time to try to unpack. And let's be clear that: Bored Young White People Seeking Inner Peace (and what better place to find them than 1960s California?) is the backbone of the book--the description of hippie acedia takes out 47 pages of 238 page book.
Any book about their attempts at self- actualization therapy should only (questionably) be read once, and (definitely) never twice.
*******
The book is titled after the WB Yeats poem "The Second Coming," because Didion, at that time, saw a parallel between a society entropically tearing itself apart and the chaos that Yeats described at the end of WWI.
But, I wonder: might she have more judiciously chosen the poem "Ozymandias"?
As clear and present as these events were, what do they look like to somebody reading this many decades after they have come to pass?
Few of these names that were dropped are even still alive, and even fewer are remembered: (Joan Baez is 83 years old).
Rosemary Park was a chancellor of the UCLA system about a half century ago; Michael Laski was profiled here as the head of the CPUSA.
Both have disappeared without a trace, as has Suzy Parker.
The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has been defunct since 1987 (37 years ago).
It was mentioned in a book before that the entire hippie movement ultimately turned into Whole Foods.
The Big 5 families that owned everything in Hawaii have been bought out long ago-- some of them just a few years after the publication of this book.
A less dramatic (Yeats inspired) reading of the changes that happened in this book shows them as something much more mundane: The only constant is change.
All of these happenings appear as events that increase social entropy IF and ONLY IF one imagines that there is some state to which some given fraction of humanity is headed.
But we all know that's not the case: It may have turned out this way, but there's no reason it could not have well been otherwise. ("Es konnte auch anders sein.")
And it reduces many of Didion's vivid descriptions of events into so much minutiae.
That said: "Good vocabulary is like wearing designer clothing: people may not like your style, but they will pay attention to the cut of the cloth."
The best thing to do is extract out the most pithy turns of phrase crafted by our author.
Quotes:
1. Unhappy marriages so resemble one another that we do not need to know too much about the course of this one.
2. It seemed that the marriage had reached the traditional truce, the point at which so many resign themselves to cutting both their losses and their hopes.
3. For time passed is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the Golden Land where every day the world is born anew.
4. And in a world we understood early to be characterized by venality and doubt and paralyzing ambiguities, he suggested another world, one which may or may not have existed ever but in any case existed no more: a place where a man could move free, could make his own code and live by it.
5. [Joan Baez] The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people; The hardest is with one.
6. Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be.
7. Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it's all about and gets picked up by 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 [micrograms of acid] and raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight street gangbang since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy.
8. 5 years old. On acid.... For a year now her mother has given her both acid and peyote.
9. This book is called "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there.
10. 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
11. What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?
12. We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind's string too short to use, and indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.
13. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
14. It is not that Punahou is not still the school of the island power elite; it is. But where in 1944 there were 1,100 students and they had a median IQ of 108, now there are 3,400 with a median IQ of 125.
Verdict: Weak recommendation