the same situation

+ i think i knew that joan didion was specifically referenced in court and spark - the book, about court and spark - the album. but i didn't consider that when i started to think about joan didion while listening to joni mitchell, when i listened to the hissing of summer lawns while washing dishes. joan didion comes up with trouble child, well, of course - 'breaking like the waves at malibu.'

it is now impossible for me to read anything of joan didion's without using the year of magical thinking as a lens, as a final rejoinder to being dismissed as distant or removed. she wrote herself into all of it, in and out of her subjects and i use the year of magical thinking to focus. but i use it on more than that - i use it as a frame, the point you will arrive at and the place that i need to keep in mind.

i only pose ann patchett's truth and beauty against joni mitchell, court and spark, joan didion, and california because i happened to read it in sequence. and not even by design, but because i happened to listen to the hissing of summer lawns while washing dishes. but truth and beauty does not even go to california - it moves from iowa to tennessee to boston and to new york again and again. (and joan didion goes between new york and california.) but more than anything else i read truth and beauty as a book about writing. and, on writing, as a counterpoint to the smug winking shit of bookmark now, unfortunately subtitled writing in unreaderly times. it is the boho dance again, "the virtue of your style inscribed on your contempt for mine." just a series of distancing devices - "artists in noble poverty / a little lace along the seams." bookmark now made me want to stop writing but truth and beauty changed that. i guess joan didion changed that too.

but the year of magical thinking and truth and beauty are both about grief - they both start with a death. joan didion works away from the moment while ann patchett works towards it.

i read court and spark while listening to court and spark and thinking about joan didion, but people's parties puts me right back into truth and beauty. subtitled 'a friendship,' and it is that but also more. "going to people's parties, fumbling deaf dumb and blind."

i've posed california and bob dylan as things i would never understand, parts of the world that my life was complete without tackling. but i re-situate court and spark, an album i've been listening to since i was twelve and have heard since i was born, in california, and in joan didion, and between mcgovern's defeat and the resignation of richard nixon. after the carpenters sang at nixon's inauguration, it all fell apart. on the morning after the sixties.