RIP joan didion (if it helps imagine she's joni mitchell)

'we are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. as we were. as we are no longer. as we will one day not be at all.'

great sentences (and stylish as fuck)

RIP joan didion 

so where to start reading her? 

horsemouth recommended the white album and slouching towards bethlehem. if it helps imagine she's joni mitchell. she has a very cool eye and she keeps a notebook (to aid her memory for the particular,  for that couple in the bar that one time). 

around her everything is going crazy. 

in the early stuff she comes up against that californian madness. she's the wrong generation and in the wrong place (LA rather than san francisco), she's film industry rather than music industry (all that hanging around). she's moved back to california from new york (later it's back to new york and later again...). she's too WASPish to get free, too patrician for the hippies. she's from there, she knows the evil that lurks beneath the sunshine. 

'this book is called slouching towards bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there...' 

yesterday (before the news) a podcast on yeats. 

so begins a preface. having written the journalism she must now write the preface for it. formally that space is there and it can be (carefully) filled.

look at the title of it. a preface. look at the weight of it, it's a preface (not a careless preface, not introduction). type it. look at it. feel the weight of it. strike it out if it does not work. and only it can tell you if it works.  there's a lightness to it, a sense of choice, a sense of getting the authorial voice just right.  it always reads as if it could be read out loud. 

later her husband dies (suddenly). then her daughter (who has not been well) dies. she writes a grief memoir the year of magical thinking. and it's good but  is properly irritating. irritating in the same way that discovering that susan sontag became a wholefoods and sunshine nut when she discovered she had cancer is. she tells you about the stuckness of grief. she shows you it. she shows you herself. and she makes you stay with her while she dwells with it. 

horsemouth projects similar things with joni mitchell. if it helps imagine her as joni mitchell. imagine those words in songs. imagine those scenes recalled to memory from a few lines in a notebook. 

in 77 she gives us why I write. a title lifted from orwell. it's not, on the whole, a successful piece but, together with on keeping a notebook (look at that montaigne-ish on), it gives you her the writer, some of her techniques and obsessions.  

she taught herself to write, she tells us, by retyping out hemingway. now horsemouth does not do hemingway. but he sees it. 

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and after a long break the hawkbinge podcast returns with their review of PXR 5. 

now PXR 5 is a grab-bag of an album, probably a contractual obligations album, and yet much better than it has any right to be. musically this is down to keyboard player simon house and bassist adrian shaw, lyrically this is down to bob calvert (high rise, uncle sam's on mars, robot). but soon all of these guys are gone and we are in to  the post hawklords era of the live 79 relaunch with huw lloyd-langton. this will lead to a last undisputable masterpiece levitation and then... 

the mission they have set themselves is to slog through the studio albums in the order and condition as originally released. but as a christmas gift they will go back to deal with the bonus tracks and rarities. 

and then next year it is on to the eighties. levitation  and onward. captain dave brock is indisputably in command and it's all very regular and competent and not very earth shattering. (horsemouth wonders how the young dude will do when he realises the band's glory days are over and we still have three decades of it to come). 

who knows maybe horsemouth will be tempted to listen to this stuff again and re-discover why he liked it.