What’s the point in comparing Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace? The first reason is mere coincidence. After a long trip abroad and away from my books, I finally returned to finish two books I began long ago – Slouching Toward Bethlehem and A Supposedly Fun thing I’ll Never Do Again. And if my college classes were any indication, Didion and Wallace are held respectively as the queen and king of nonfiction by young aspiring writers. The last reason, the only one with some analytical depth, is that the same current of geographic dislocation runs through the essays of both writers: Didion as the Californian girl who went East, Wallace as the Midwestern boy who went East. I think that is where the similarities end.
This post is essentially about why I prefer Wallace to Didion, even though I once placed her highly in my literary pantheon. The more I read of Didion, the less I like. (Unfortunately, this is often true. When you read a writer’s most famous and presumably best works first, it follows that the other writing will not be as good by simple regression to the mean.) Somewhere in her essay on Newport, I had to stop and wonder, has Didion ever felt anything but her own despair? By all accounts, both Didion and Wallace were or are depressed individuals, but their writing cast a very different effect on the reader. When Didion takes her scalpel to a subject, you’re glad that she has down the nasty work so that you see only the final dissected specimen. Everything she writes about seems somewhat airless. You don’t want to go the places she goes for fear of suffocation. (Does the California of the 70s seem like a place you want to go?) Even when Wallace is describing the awfulness of a particular experience – e.g. a cruise or the Illinois State Fair – he makes it sound infinitely rich. He shows us that there is much to analyze in these mundane activities that his essays made me actually want to go on cruises and to state fairs. Even though his prose is terribly self-conscious, there is a warmth and sweatiness to it that feels very human.
To belabor the metaphor “gems of insight,” reading Didion is like passing by a jeweler’s display case but reading Wallace is like digging for black lumps of carbon in a diamond mine while sweating profusely. (Has anyone written a scholarly work on Wallace’s copiously deployed mentions of his own sweat yet?)
The very last essay in Slouching Toward Bethlehem is “Goodbye to All That.” It was the first Didion essay I ever read and my rereading to finish the book coincided with my own move to New York. I remember vowing to reread “Goodbye to All That” every once in a while because, in my adolescence, reading this essay that sliced so surgically through naivete made me feel knowing and wise. It no longer makes me feel that way.
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Because my reading of the two books overlapped so, I noticed how both essay collections contain a passage about the Santa Ana wind, a phenomenon so weird to a (nearly) lifelong Easterner like me. It should be easy to guess who wrote which.
“Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit — a sort of perpetual muddling through. Every facility is inadequate — the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin — the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.“
“Halay found evidence of a 19th-century woman so destitute her only possession was her mattress. Every morning, she would carry it to the bank and pawn it. With that money, she’d buy potatoes, sell them for a profit during the day and buy back her mattress at night.”
A spontaneous road trip to Canterbury, Brighton, and the White Cliffs of Dover. Twilight makes the English landscape look magical.
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is one of my favorite poems, but while googling around for a version to post here, I came across Anthony Hecht’s, “The Dover Bitch,” which is not as lyrical or ponderous as Arnold’s original poem but far more hilarious.
“We will see that the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of bees in a honeybee swarm, just like the 1.5 kilograms (3 pounds) of neurons in a human brain, achieve their collective wisdom by organizing themselves in such a way that even though each individual has limited information and limited intelligence, the group as a whole makes first-rate collective.”
— Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (via David Dobbs, The True Hive Mind)
Dear Anna Kendrick, thank you for existing! Or, thank you for being the kinda awkward love interest in an indie dramedy who is neither manic or pixie.
I watched 50/50 a few days ago, and I adored it. Since the last film I saw with Joseph Gordon-Leavitt was 500 Days of Summer and he plays a character similarly out of touch with his own emotions, it was hard not to compare her to Zooey Deschanel, who has ascended to new levels of manic pixie nightmaredom on New Girl. I’m sympathetic to the idea behind 500 Days — the mistake of believing someone is the person we want them to be — but damn was that an aggressively quirky movie. It acted like someone trying way to hard to impress you with their taste in culture.
Anyways, it’s refreshing to see female characters who don’t need their awkwardness to be cloaked in quirk to be made palatable to males, age 18 to 24 and 25 to 40. To Anna Kendrick’s character and her awkward seal flap! Though it’s not that awkward in this photo than it was in the movie.
