a domestic conversation. recorded in the style of 'on keeping a notebook'.

 'there's a letter'

'look! there's something in it!'

'could be a postcard.' - domestic conversation. recorded in the style of on keeping a notebook. 

'if I knew what this book was about I wouldn't be writing it.' - a day in the life of joan didion, susan braudy, (1977).

 a day in the life of joan didion

horsemouth has been reading lots of snippets of joan didion on google books, introductions mostly. (often the most carefully written and the endlessly revised bits of books).  she really is very good. such seemingly harmless set up lines. 'during the blue nights you think the  end of day will never come...'

hemmingway and mailer are big influences. she thinks in terms of sentences and their weight. she taught herself to type by copying out hemmingway introductions. orwell too, orwell is in there.

she discusses orwell's why I write. she notes the weight of this phrase. the even strokes. she discusses and discards orwell's motives for writing (egoism, historical enthusiasm, aesthtics, to make a living). she discards them all, including 'to make a living' but both her and her husband made a living as writers.

'I write entirely to find out what is on my mind, what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I'm seeing and what it means... I'm not very interested in psychic cause and effect, in why I am the way I am, why you are the way you are...' 

joan didion is not writing this to you from a soviet gulag (not making the argument that this cannot stand) but instead from the demi-paradise of california. this love of the mythic california (of the moonlight drive) is all through her earlier books, as is the horror of it. she does not repudiate it until where I was from, where she suddenly sees the life of her family not in terms of the pioneer myth (redeemed by merely having got there and thus entitled to acres of free land) but in terms of the vast subsidies (for the railroads, for irrigation, for the aerospace industry and the military-industrial complex) that enabled california's colonisation. it's a chinatown moment. 

she has left california. she took her family back to new york city. there her husband and daughter have died leaving her with an apartment full of dangerous memorabilia. 

the blue nights,  those evenings in the northern hemisphere when the sun seemingly will not set, round about the summer solstice, but we all know the end of the day will come. thus they cannot really be separated even if we tell ourselves in what we experience that they can. 

this tension repeats in the tension between sound and silence in a documentary on free improv. for there to be the possibility of a sound there must be the possibility of silence. it's lovely it's all the new thing new york jazz guys (and the guys from chicago too) but  they've grown old... look there's marion brown, and john tchicai, and alan silva and roswell rudd...

it is a relief to return to these themes (writing, music) after the insanity on capitol hill. but of course we are not out of the woods. we are at the opposite end of the year from the blue nights. the days are short, the nights long, the time in between brief. and we are further north. the world is in a strange condition. alan silva with buddhist robes, john tchicai with buddhist curtains, like venerable monks.