I admit, Joan Didion could cough up a hairball and I’d think it was smart and interesting. No hairball at the LA Times Fesitval of Books last weekend; just a bunch of interesting things about writing and California. She was in UCLA’s enormous Royce Hall speaking to a sold-out audience (if a free evet can be sold out), answering questions from David Ulin. I was particularly interested in what she’d say about writing and Los Angeles.
David Ulin asked if, in the stories "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" and "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," she was deliberately creating a mythic framework. Joan Didion replied that she was "meeting a deadline so we could get the check before Christmas." Then she relented a little. "We had just come here. We arrived here in 1964 in the middle of the summer. [Southern California] was astonishing to me. It was all very vivid. [those stories were] a response to my enchantment with where I was."
on writing…
Joan Didion: As a writer, I’ve never made a private piece of writing. The other end of writing something is having someone read it.
on LA…
JD: The basic LA experience resists narrative.
on leaving LA…
JD: The reason we left LA has never been clear to me. John felt it was time to – he was between books, he was bored. It was my intention to tell no one. I did come out quite a bit — I started doing "A Letter From Los Angeles" for the New Yorker, which was silly [since they'd moved back to NY].
and: I still regard myself as a California writer.
on "Goodbye to All That"…
David Ulin asks about using up/having been used up by New York as Didion writes in "Goodbye to All That."
JD: What was using me up then ? I really could not work in NY because I was aware that everyone around me was doing the same thing, and they were doing it better. I couldn’t listen to people talk about their advances anymore.
My experience at this year’s Festival of books was defined by two things: helping set up the Vermin on the Mount/Swink Magazine booth
and hitting as many LA/California related panels as I could, being as I was there on an LAist press pass.That’s Jim, founder of Verminin the booth. He is probably telling me to stop messing around with my camera.
The first panel I hit was "Building Creative Community" with Richard Rayner moderating and John Baxter, Carolyn See and Michael Walker discussion various creative communities. Michael Walker will be coming soon to talk about his new book Laurel Canyon, which focuses on the brief but influential period when a bunch of ambitious, talented hippie-ish musicians holed up in a canyon over Hollywood. It seemed like a more apt title for the panel would have dropped "building." Laila summed it up nicely and her husband Alex even got a photo.
Saturday’s First Fiction panel was surprisingly dull, despite the fact that Susan Salter Reynolds can be a terrific moderator. Here’s a hint: do NOT begin a literary panel with each panelist reading from their work. Really, we’re here for the discussion: if the discussion is good, we’ll hunger to read the books themselves. Anyway, Olga Grushin was not much of a reader but she was an engaging panelist. Kirstin Allio was an excellent reader but acted like being on the panel was torture, sighing when asked direct questions and dropping her head into her hands. Uzodinma Iweala, who’d just won the first fiction award, seemed happy and a bit surprised. He mentioned his mentor (Jamaica Kincaid) more than once. With the attention she gave his work, I wonder if his classmates got much.
Next up was Joan Didion being interviewed by David Ulin. A few Didionisms: "John’s death changed me. I didn’t care about hiding things anymore…. My whole style is based on withholding information." When Ulin followed up that she’d been a character in her reporting, she answered, "I was always present in my work because I never believed in objectivity …. I could triangulate if I knew where the writer was standing, what they writer thought." You know, Joan Didion could puke on the stage and I’d think it was clever and insightful, so I’ve got lots more of these to come.
Joan Didion with LA Times Book Review editor David Ulin at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, April 29.
The thing that struck me the most about Joan Didion was how small her presence is. Her language has always been so strong, so lean and powerful. She’s tall. She was model-thin, model-beautiful in her younger days. In her stories of living in California in the late 1960s, I thought she’d been a center-of-the-whirlwing den mother to the artsy types who fluttered in and out of her home. But seeing her in person I think she was maybe more of the silent one in the corner with the mousy brown hair, the one hoping no one would notice her. The one people forgot — until her essays started being published and her inner voice thundered out.
Once she started speaking my impression of the mousy, invisible Didion waned — she’s entirely confident and fairly candid — but I couldn’t help reshaping my impression of her.
More notes about what she said will be on LAist.com tonight or tomorrow. Until then, I have to say I was really happy that David Ulin asked about Slouching Towards Bethlehem, returning to the essay "Goodbye to All That" more than once; it’s one ofmy all-time favorites.
The American Cinematheque launches its 8th annual noir festival this Friday and James Ellroy is going to be there. He’ll be talking right after Crime Wave, the first half of a double feature. I read someplace that it’s one of Ellroy’s favorites, and since he borrowed the title for a short story collection, maybe that’s true. I can’t wait. I’ve never seen him speak before and I can’t think of a better spot than a restored historic theater on seedy old Hollywood Boulevard.
Oh, some design changes around here. Some other news on the horizon, too.
Tonight editor Stephen Elliott will be at Skylight with a handful of contributors to the new Stumbling and Raging: More Politcally Inspired Fiction: Neal Pollack, Aimee Bender, Chris Abani and Eric Orner. The collection is kind of massive, which means that more writers have got parts of their brains working on politics than I thought.
Over at LAist, last week we ran an interview with Janet Fitch, the author of White Oleander. She describes her upcoming book as "Fall of the House of Usher set in 1981 punk rock LA," which is a mighty good elevator speech. Looking at it now, I see I let it go live without fixing some atrocious formatting. So I’m off for some blog repair.
LA has no shortage of literary events, but we aren’t drowning in them, either. So the occasion of conflicting excellent readings rarely happens. Sigh: this Thursday is the exception.
Tod Goldberg has just let his (I’m assuming massive) e-mail list know that he and Aimee Bender will be doing a joint reading Thursday night in Pacific Palisades. But over in Beverly Hills, David Ulin will be interviewing Paul Auster, which is where I’ll be. Sorry, Tod — maybe putting your name and "massive" in the same sentence is some consolation.
Luckily, Aimee Bender is reading next Thursday at Skylight Books in Los Feliz with Stephen Elliott and Neal Pollack, who is now an Angeleno. Welcome to the neighborhood, Neal!
This Saturday, ladies and gentlement, at the dark yet dazzling Mountain Bar on the fabulous Chinatown Plaza, it’s Vermin on the Mount! Featuring:
BoingBoing editor MARK FRAUENFELDER is the author of a book that compiles the very worst things in this terrible world we live in. It’s called The World’s Worst, and you don’t want to miss it.
MARC WEINGARTEN’S book, The Gang That Couldn’t Write Straight, offers a close look and thick description of a unique period in American journalism Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion re-wrote the rules.
BUCKY SINISTER is the author of several books of poetry, including Whiskey and Robots from Gorsky Press. Vermin has had some amazing poets, and Bucky is one of the amazingest.
ME, I’ll be reading a short essay. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hold onto your purse.
Drinks begin flowing at 8, reading start at 9. I am NOT allowed to have a martini until after I’ve read. So I hope I go on first.
Today is an amazing LA day, the kind that makes me wonder why the entire country hasn’t moved here. No snow, no transit strike, clean(sih) air, bright blue sky and brilliant, but not baking, sun.
My hands have been full at LAist but I am starting to see how this will all work. I am starting to be able to read other blogs again. I am starting to have time to read books again. And Paperhaus — oh, it’s cooking! A few more tasks at hand before the next Papaerhaus arrives on your doorstep with a thwap!
Merry and merry and merry. Time to go outside.
Why, oh why did they do it? The ever-wonderful Vermin on the Mount reading series will be this Saturday Nov.12, as always, at the Mountain Bar with an eclectic array of writers on the bill. Just a few miles away, at the very same time, Swink Magazine welcomes Small Spiral Notebook to town with readings and refreshments. I don’t even have Tivo and I’m thinking, can’t I go to one and Tivo the other? Life Tivo. Somebody oughta invent it.
