Hi everyone, just a reminder the SSC Library March Adult Book Club gathering will be this Friday, March 11, 2022.

We’ll be meeting from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Conference Room and discussing the novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

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For those who wish to read ahead, our April read will be Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Our April meeting will be on Friday, April 8 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.and we’ll be meeting in our usual location — the Conference Room at the library.

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And here, finally – but at least before our March meeting, are the notes from our February gathering:

The February Adult Book Club meeting was held on Friday, February 11 in the Conference Room at the library from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

The February read was Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion. The book consists of twelve essays written by Didion between 1968 and 2000.

And it was noted that if readers would like a more in-depth understanding of Didion, as a means of gaining insight into her writing style; they should watch the 2017 Netflix documentary on Didion, titled Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold; the documentary, incidentally was directed by Didon’s nephew Griffin Dunne.

With that as a preface, here is a brief overview of the twelve essays in the book:

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

1. Alice and the Underground Press (1968):

In this essay Didion discusses American newspapers of the day both the established newspapers and counterculture newspapers. She notes that all writers have a “particular bias” which they must explain to readers to connect with them; and if writers explain their bias they make their writing accessible to readers.

And Didion notes, regarding the accessibility of articles to the news reading public,

“I am talking here about something deadening and peculiar, the inability of all of us to speak to one another in a direct way, the failure of American newspapers to “get through.” The Wall Street Journal talks to me directly (that I have only have a minimal interest I what it tells me is beside the point), and so does the “underground” press.

And Didion goes on to describes the way most newspaper articles, and by extension newspapers in general, don’t offer that direct connection with article writers by noting: “The Only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Open City, and the East Village Other.

Her essay thus offers her humorous take on how newspapers do or do not get the reading public to read them.

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2. Getting Serenity (1968)

In her second essay, Didion discusses attending a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and speaking with several of the attendees.

She notes there are many gambling clubs in the area where the meeting was held, Gardena, California

Didion observed that most of the attendees blamed someone or something other than themselves for their gambling addictions and that they all wanted to achieve what they referred to as “serenity.”

Didion was most impacted by speech of attendee Frank L., who had been attending meetings for six years and had just completed his first complete gambling free year. He noted “in the last three, four weeks we’ve gotten a…a serenity at home.”

 Another attendee notes of serenity that “That’s my ideal,” someone added. “Getting serenity.”

And Didion had a major issue with the Gambler’s Anonymous attendees working toward “serenity>

She stated “There was nothing particularly wrong with any of it, and yet there was something not quite right, something troubling.” And she further noted that she was disquieted by the whole ideal; and that after Frank L. gave his speech she made a beeline for the exit for anyone could utter the word “serenity” again.

Didion concluded the essay by noting that “serenity” “is a word I associated with death, and for several days after that meeting I only wanted to be in places where the lights where bright and no one counted days.”

And this essay may be one that watching the Netflix documentary on Didion, would help one understand her point of view as the word “serenity” in common usage, is not synonymous with the word death. 

My understanding of the word is has always been that it denotes being calm and at peace with the world. And the online Oxford dictionary backs up that understanding with its definition of the word: defining serenity as “the state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled,” while noting that it can also refer to someone from a royal background. Ironically then, since Didion’s first essay was about connecting with readers, her second essay didn’t connect her writing for this reader – but her viewpoint was certainly interesting.

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3. A Trip To Xanadu (1968)

Didion’s third essay relays her tour of what she, as a California native, refers to as San Simeon Castle; it is also known as Hearst Castle, having been built by businessman and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst.

She goes on to discuss the fact that, as she saw it, Hearst built his castle to show is wealth, as a monument to all he had achieved in his life; but also as a way to emphasize living in the here and now, because Hearst feared death and wanted to deflect attention away from the idea that life is finite.

She further notes that Hearst was seen as a king in his day; and that because he was able to rise to the top of the financial and social stratospheres of American society, so too other people could looked and his castle, and felt empowered because if Hearst could become that successful, that with hard work and bit of luck they could too.

And finally, Didion notes of the castle, that when unseen it encourages ones imagination; but when in sight the castle was seen as it is and so doors of imagination that might otherwise be opened to thinkers were closed.

Didion has a quite a bit to say in essay three,  offering an interesting take on William Randolph Hearst and his castle, on how building monuments that celebrate life and achievement, lessen the fear mortals have of death, while also touching on the American ideal that anyone can rise to the top of American society.

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4. On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice (1968)

Didion begins this essay by noting that as a high school student she applied to Stanford University, and in the spring of 1952 she received a rejection letter from Stanford. From the way Didion describes the event of receiving the letter, reading it and the immediate aftermath; by quoting the letter itself, noting that after reading it she felt like she’d never amount to anything, but instead wind up a spinster like the spinster in the film Washington Square; how she re-read the letter several times in disbelief, before finally believing what the letter said and then storming upstairs to her bedroom where she locked the door and cried for several hours; readers get the distinct impression that Didion came to the conclusion that too much pressure is put on young people applying to college both in her day and the day she was writing in, the late nineteen sixties.

Didion went how young people of the sixties who were applying to college, also the pressure of having to get into prestigious schools, or the school of their choice, if they wanted to succeed. Didion’s bottom line being that American society in the early 1950s and late 1960s put too much pressure on high school students when it came to being accepted by the best universities. Or as Didion well put it “Finding one’s role at seventeen is problem enough, without being handed somebody else’s script.”

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5. Pretty Nancy (1968)

The Nancy of the title Nancy Reagan, future first lady and then wife of California Governor Ronald Reagan who, as the story opens, has a newspaper crew setting up to interview her in her rented Sacramento home. Didion noted that the report was essentially stages – “The television crew wanted to watch her, while she was doing precisely what she would ordinarily be doing on a Tuesday morning at home.”

The staged report showing Nancy cutting flowers in the garden with a basket, smiling the smile of “a woman who seems to be playing out some middle class American woman’s daydream, circa 1948.”

Didion offers glimpses into Nancy’s world describing aspects of the house including their being electric trains in the gaming room, Charles Schutz prints on the wall and an apothecary jar of hard candies on the governor’s desk. She likewise describes some members of the Reagan family including dogs Lady & Fuzzy, teenage daughter Pattie and middle school aged son Ronnie who was known as “The Skipper.”

No difference in lifestyle, as first lady of California “There’s been no difference at all as far as our friends are concerned.. If there was a difference, why, they wouldn’t be friends. Your friends are…your friends.”

Magazines on table reflect the fantasy life being portrayed – Town & Country, Vogue, Newsweek, Life, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Art News – a question being how real is the life style being presented.

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6. Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles (1968)

The story Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles  unfolds at the twenty third annual reunion of the World War II veterans of the 101 Airborne division and opens in the Crown Room of the Stardust Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, where Joan is talking to Skip Skivington who was growing a beard but assured her he wasn’t a hippie. He was in his early forties and served with the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. Skip’s son, was missing in action in Vietnam at the time.

Didion notes attendees included veterans and their families as well as Gold Star Mothers and Joan had traveled from LA to attend the gathering.

Didion describes the everydayness of the reunion by noting they had the reunion offered a “a swimming party, a buffet dinner featuring classic American cuisine “roast beef, ham, coleslaw, sliced beats, slices tomatoes, American cheese, and dinner rolls;” and  that the party favors were metal crickets because “crickets” was the code for the 101 Airborne on D-Day. She went on to note that there was a wives luncheon, army movies and that the group sent messages of support to the current members of the 101st serving in Vietnam.

And the basic gist of the essay is two-fold, firstly, that as Joan noted of the veterans who survived the war, “They had indeed had a great adventure, an essential adventure, and almost everyone in the room had been nineteen and twenty years old when they had it.”

And secondly, that in war men die as Skip Skippington was contemplating about his missing son William Edward “Skip” Skivington Jr.; who although he did not know for certain at the time, had indeed been killed in action in Vietnam*; and as veteran Walter Davis was contemplating as he noted the contrast between his thinking as a young solider vs. being a middle ages father, he said “I never thought of dying then.” I see it a little differently now. I didn’t look at it from the parents’ point of view then. I was eighteen, nineteen. I wanted to go, couldn’t stand not to go. I got to see Paris, Berlin, go to see placed I’d heard about but never dreamed I’d see. Now I’ve got a boy, well, in four years maybe he’ll have to go.” I see it differently now.”

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7. Why I Write (1976)

In Why I Write Didion explains why she became a writer. In essence, she was born to it; and she highlights this fact by first talking about how she saw writing itself and second by talking about the way she saw the world, which is what made her a writer.

Didion begins by noting that she stole the title for the piece Why I Write from George Orwell because she liked it, and liked the way it sounds; she goes on to say that “In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise it…”

She also notes that there is “no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, and invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space,” and that “Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” only excel at this one “area” the act of writing.”

And then she offers insight into just why the way she saw the world made her a writer, noting that when she was a student at Berkeley and sitting in class “contemplating Hegelian dialectic, I would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor,” and further, that when attending a class on linguistic theory she would find herself pondering “if the lights were on in the nearby Bevatron particle accelerator building, and wondering, not about the accelerator itself but instead how the lights of the building looked shining out the windows.

She sums up the whole enchilada by noting that by her temperament she was a writer although it took her a number of years to realize that fact.  

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8. Telling Stories (1978)

Telling Stories is another Didion essay which focuses on the fact that she was a natural born writer. In this piece she describes her youthful fear of not being a good writer, how she learned the importance of how words were written and placed in a sentence, how to write concise pieces while working for Vogue and that she discovered she didn’t like writing short stories because she found the form confining.

Of her youthful fear of not being a good writer, Diddion recalls that while attending an English 106 class, as an English major she was terrified of making mistakes and was convinced that she would never be as good at writing as the other students in the class. Her fear of imperfection lead her to complete only 3 of the required 5 stories she was instructed to write for the class. She was fortunate that she has a kind professor who understood that her fear of writing was a fear that should wouldn’t be as good as she thought she should be at writing and he gave her a B for the class.

She then goes on to describe her tenure of writing copy for Vogue magazine, when she learned that the way words appear in a sentence and the way paragraphs are put together is important in and of itself; of her Vogue learning experience she noted “I recall “to ravish” as a highly favored verb for a number of issues and I also recall it, for a number of issues more, as the source of a highly flavored noun” “Ravishments” as in “tables cluttered with porcelain tulips. Fabergé eggs, other ravishments;” and that the sentence “There were two oranges and an apple” read better than “there were an apple and two oranges” The bottom line being of course that when writing with a maximum word count, and a deadline, one had to “Prune it out, clean it up, make the point” and that “Less was more, smooth was better and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.”

And finally she gives more credence to why she became a writer by noting that she wasn’t fond of the short story form because it didn’t allow her to spread out while writing and including deep details; which is way she only three short stories professionally all in 1964.

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9. Some Women (1989)

In Some Women Didion recalled when while working for Vogue, she went to a photography studio and how she felt watching the women being photographed for the feature pages. All the women were celebrated for one reason or another, but not specifically for being fashionable or glamourous.  The women being photographed were told to simply be themselves; while the photographer was working on getting a certain look that meshed with the subject of the feature page.

Didion went on discuss the writing process noting that “If you say too much about a novel you’re writing you may lose the creativity to write the story i.e. “I “had” a novel when it presented itself to me as an oil slick, with an iridescent surface; during the several years it took me to finish the novel I mentioned the oil slick to no one, afraid the talismanic hold the image had on me would fade, go flat, go away like a dream told at breakfast.” And she tied her ponderings of the writing process together with the mystery of the photography process by talking about the famous photographer Robert Mapplethrope who once told an interviewer that he thought photos should have a mystery to them which was up to the viewer to solve; and that he didn’t like to comment on his photos because “If you say too much you lose some of that mystery.”

Didion went on to further discuss both related subjects, how writers and photographers create their works for the balance of the essay.

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10. The Long Distance Runner (1993):

The so called long distance runner of the story was the actor Tony Richardson a friend of Didion and her husband.

Didion describes two major sides of Richardson in her essay by noting firstly, of Richardson, that “I never knew anyone who so loved to make things, or anyone who had such limited interest in what he had already made. What Tony loved was the sheer act of doing it whether what he was making was a big picture or theater or twenty-one minutes for television.” Didion determined that Richardson loved the process of working and wanted to be working creating and that was what made his life magical. In contrast, he had no interest in his past work.

And the second side of Richardson that Didion described was that his view of the world, was, well, a bit different than the view most people would take of events. Richardson found value in things that were out of the ordinary. Didion gave an excellent example of this by describing an incident that she had a front row seat to. Didion and her husband were dinning out with Richardson and a group of people when Didion’s husband and another guest had a loud argument at the table which ended when Didion’s husband stormed out or the restaurant; and later Richardson, who she said “thrived on the very moments most of us try to avoid”; told her that the argument made the evening magical.

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11. Last Word (1998)

Didion opens the essay Last Words by quoting the first section of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell To Arms:  “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.  Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were study and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bar and white except for the leaves.”

Didion was a big fan of Hemingway and she notes of the first paragraph from A Farewell To Arms that “That paragraph which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, 126 words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them.”

The bottom line of this essay, is the Didion was what one would call a “Writer’s writer” someone who was very gifted at her craft and had insight that others who also practiced the art of writing could learn from.

12. Everywoman.com (2000)

The “Every Woman” of the final essay in the book is, of course, Martha Stewart.

And in this twelfth essay Didion offers her take on how Martha Stewart became exceptionally successful by a tremendous amount of hard work and effort – in essence, she had the dream and the drive. Didion notes of her that Martha was “the fifty-eight-year old Charman and CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia LLC needs,” who needs “ only four hours of sleep per night, unitized the saved hours by grooming her six cats and gardening by flashlight, prefers Macs in the office and a PowerBook for herself, commutes between her house in Westport and her two houses in East Hampton and her Manhattan apartment in a GMC Suburban, was raised the second-oldest of six children in a Polish-American family in Nutley NJ, has one daughter Alexis and survived a “non-amicable divorce from her husband of twenty-six years, Andrew Stewart.”

As Didion describes it this essay is a “woman’s pluck” story, the dust-bowl story, the burying your child on the train story, the I will never go hungry again story etc., the story of the sheer nerve that unskilled women can prevail and show the men they can.”

Hi everyone, just a reminder the SSC Library March Adult Book Club gathering will be this Friday, March 11, 2022.

We’ll be meeting from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. in the Conference Room and discussing the novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

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For those who wish to read ahead, our April read will be Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah. Our April meeting will be on Friday, April 8 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m.and we’ll be meeting in our usual location — the Conference Room at the library.

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What Book Club Members Have Been Reading, Watching & Listening Too: February 2022 Edition:

Books:

Doris Kearns Goodwin books, her works include:

Leadership In Turbulent Times which offers insight into how Presidents Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Teddy Roosevelt lead the country during, you guessed it – turbulent times!

Team of Rivals: which focuses on the men in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet and the era of the 1860s.

& The Bully Pulpit a biography of Teddy Roosevelt.

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A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway: Published in 1929 this Hemingway classic unfolds during World War I, during the Italian campaign and relays the story of a soldier named Henry and a nurse named Catherine – it is a classic! 

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We also discussed “Japanese interment camp fiction” and came up with the following titles:

The House of Sixty Fathers by Meindert De Jong & Maurice Sendak: “The House of Sixty Fathers is a 1956 children’s novel by Meindert DeJong. Illustrations were provided by Maurice Sendak. The novel was based on the author’s own experiences as a military flier in China during the second world war.” Wikipedia

They Called Us The Enemy by George Takei: The Star Trek actor’s biographical graphic novel; relays his experiences of being forcibly removed to an internment camp with his family during World War II.

Videos:

All Things Great And Small (2022): This PBS series follows a young veterinarian in the English countryside in 1930s Yorkshire.

Dickensian TV Series (2015-2016: Drama set within the fictional realms of Charles Dickens critically acclaimed novels, bringing together some of his most iconic characters as their lives intertwine in 19th century London. –  IMDB

The Gilded Age TV Series (2022) (HBO): The new series by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellows set in New York City in the 19th Century.

Heaven’s Garden (2011-2012): A Korean Drama, with English subtitles that tells that tale of a mother with two young daughters, who returns to her family home and her disapproving father.

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017): Netflix documentary of Didion produced by her nephew Griffin Dunne.

Last Tango In Halifax (2012-2020): Cliff notes description this series follows childhood sweethearts Celia Dawson and Alan Buttershaw who meet again later in life and get married.

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Have a great day everyone,

Linda

P.S. We actually read two books for our February book club. The Didion book of essays, and just for fun the terrifically illustrated book “Tuesday” by David Wiesner – which follows the magical trip a group of frogs take on a Tuesday evening – the book is highly recommend for all ages!