/lit/ - Literature

she murdered millions…

>>19618480
Worse, she's the Eagles of American literature.

Like milk

Ok, was she based? What I must to read from her?

>>19618493
Very based. Slouching Towards Bethlehem

She will be smoking the devil’s cock in hell tonight.

this is who we have to blame for the self-important shit we now call “creative nonfiction”

>>19618478
RIP. Tough old broad to not have just killed herself when her husband and daughter died in the same year.

>>19618487
I hate the fuckin eagles man

rip

>>19618524
Isn't blood meridian creative non-fiction?

>>19618489
Who cares what you look like when you are that old anyway

>>19618478
Loved her essay On Self-Respect

>>19618478
Covid takes another. RIP.

>>19618489
she had MS you fucking faggot

>>19618478
lived to her late 80s with multiple sclerosis in the time of COVID. Changed American literature, showed how to effectively criticize the liberal elite. Truly a legend.

>>19618524
+ Annie Ernaux

>>19618524
I think of John McPhee as the father of creative nonfiction, but there's nothing self-important about his books.

>>19618480
>>19618518

Explain.

RIP an incredible author.

>>19618798
She was evil

can someone post some of her essays?

>>19618798
Women are evil anon
At least middle class white women are

>>19618489
if you're lucky you'll get there some day, silly nigger

terrible fiction writer (play it as it lays) but really good stylist (slouching, white album). politically kinda worthless (fixed ideas).

what else by her is worth a read?

>>19618843
>>19618878
Am I going to get anything more specific out of this thread?

>>19618478
They have a collection of her work at my bookstore that I often consider buying. How would you describe her style?

>>19618918
She was a Clinton supporter also

>>19618895
I have Year of Magical Thinking on my book shelf. I hear it's grand, but I'm worried I'm too depressed to read something so depressing.

>>19618478
A real shame, haven't read much of her stuff but what I've read was really excellent. Los Angeles Notebook is one of my favorite mood pieces ever written. Not sure how she kept going after her husband and kid died in the same year, but kudos to her for sticking it through to the bitter end. I should read more of her stuff.

>>19618478
Spitefully outlived the superior Eve Babitz by 4 days.

>>19619155
Look at those tits!!!!
Wholly fuck
Big Khazzar milkers

>>19619176
It's art, anon. Marcel Duchamp doesn't pose in lewd pictures for your enjoyment.

>>19619155
Damn, I didn't even know that she passed away. She made Bookie's chart last month too :(

>>19619184
Yeah; it's been a rough week for LA writers.

>>19618918
This is /lit/ anon. We hate female authors here.

>>19619155
Why is Morty in the background with clock eyes?

>>19618918
From OP’s pic we can see that not only did she smoke, she unashamedly allowed herself to be photographed while smoking. She deserves hellfire.

>>19618493
She's based. Possibly BEE's biggest influence.

>>19619311
BEE is absolute dog water.

>>19619181
Patently false

>>19619184
I have yet to see one of these threads which supposedly keep happening and have been happening for some time now

>>19619084
I read it when I was very depressed and it helped. Also: F
Also: No sticky? Fail.

F

Anyone read Run, River or A Book Of Common Prayer?

>>19618478
RIP Joan.

F

I used to tell people I wanted to write like her when I was at uni. I still pretty much do.

dumb yankee bitch

>>19619155
Disgusting stomach

>>19619155
based whore and simps, trully peak atheism

I heard her essays are good

>>19620532
>>>
>Anonymous 12/23/21(Thu)19:53:49 No.19620153▶
> I used to tell people I wanted to write like her when I was at uni. I still pretty much do.
>>>
>Anonymous 12/23/21(Thu)20:37:25 No.19620337▶
> dumb yankee bitch
>>>
>Anonymous 12/23/21(Thu)20:41:57 No.19620349▶
> >>19619155
> Disgusting stomach
>>>
>Anonymous 12/23/21(Thu)20:43:30 No.19620355▶
> >>19619155
> based whore and simps, trully peak atheism
>>>
>Anonymous 12/23/21(Thu)21:28:28 No.19620532▶
> I heard her essays are good

So what is she known for? Is this some hyper liberal lot shit?

>>19618478
I want to stick my peenor in her

>>19620620
Not at all. She's silent generation, older sister to the hippies. Being a wife and mother was important to her in a way it can't be to the liberated. Read Slouching Towards Bethlehem for her take on the 60s. And after you get a sense of her, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights show that same perception forced to focus on herself. She's really great. Slouching is an essay collection, so if you don't like it it's a low investment to bail early. But you will so no worries.

Rip to the babe. Mods should sticky this if they had any sense.

post some essays ffs

>60 posts into thread
>still don't know what the fuck she's about
Be more clear you retards.

>>19621230
She was the "writer of a generation" yet all of us here have only heard of her for the first time yesterday

merry christmas

>>19618733
>covid is real
back to re*dit cumsuck

>>19620349
ok virgin

>>19621245
What the fuck did she write about

Title essay of her collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/

>"Of course the activists — not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic — had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Or maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, diet pills, the Bomb.

>They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words — words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just another ego trip — their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are 14, 15, 16 years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words."

>>19621327
Her essay "On Self-Respect"
https://yale.learningu.org/download/85e1ca3695ab0e000f2c8bf10be1a59d/S574_didion_respect.pdf

>"In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.

>Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: "Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke about it." Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, "fortunately for us," hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnée."

>>19621327
Well said, although could be simplified to two key points:

1. Jews
2. Women shouldn’t have been given rights

>>19618489
she was around 80 years old....

>>19621339
The title essay of her collection "The White Album"
https://www.reachcambridge.com/wp-content/uploads/Friday-5th-August-Afternoon-Session-Oversharing-Joan-Didion-The-White-Album.pdf

>>19621327
>We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed.
So they did know about the kind of retards boomers would grow up to be huh? Disappointing they didn't do anything about it. At that stage it still could have been reversed if they made a conscious effort to do so. If she'd see the state of things now...

>>19621385
this is exactly the kind of things boomers say about young people now

>>19621346
She's wasn't a brainlet like you.

>>19620879
thanks, in not quite sure really how someone gets famous for papers and is not in education, i guess she wrote in every kind of format

>>19621440
the essay in nonfiction publishing isn't the same essay as an academic paper.

>>19618478
I read that as Joan Dildo for a moment.

>>19621395
nice cope, kike

>>19621391
Has anything been done socially to reverse the changes made by the boomer generation?

>>19621391
Except boomers really were a new paradigm of human scum.

>>19621453
ah i see

>>19621245
>all of us
Speak for yourself you uncultured schmuck

I guess this raises a question of how does /lit/ feel about new journalism?

>>19621564
The man in the white suit is one of our patron saints. We are in general in favor.

F

rip joanie

play it as it lays is in its low-key way probably one of the most influential books in american postwar fiction

>>19621253
>I believe what 4chan tells me to believe

I recall her voice as one that called out BS in a world obsessed with surface qualities.
Also Bret Easton Ellis digs her writing.

>>19621051
I wish they would, but they never do.

>>19618478
Who Whodion?

>>19618493
Read "Political Fictions". Here's a sample:

https://thirdworldtraveler.com/Political/Political_Fictions_Didion.html

>>19618478
I literally have no idea who this is. And I'm not a zoomer. Is this another ploy to convince everyone that women are more important than they really are?

RIP sweet lady

sticky when

>>19619155
What was her elo

>>19621385
>At that stage it still could have been reversed if they made a conscious effort to do so
Except her whole point, as someone who was an eyewitness to that era, was that it was already too late by then.

>>19621612
>The man in the white suit
Chinese Gordon?

>>19623901
5318008

>>19619184
I was one of the anons who voted it last month. Great read and what a lively person she was. Anyone who likes the 60s should read it. The chapters about taquitos and going out with a party of Italians are the best

>>19619247
This

>>19618698
Apparently she died from Parkinson's complications so I guess she had Parkinson's which I don't think was public until she died.

RIP. Loved Play It As It Lays tbf.

>>19621327
>>"Of course the activists — not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic — had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Or maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, diet pills, the Bomb.

The irony is all her female fans are like this.

>>19624337
The real irony is all anonymous are tremendous fags

>>19624036
it's all I have read of hers but I really enjoyed it. rest in peace joan.

>>19618489

Stay away from Pumpkinhead...

>>19618478
Whoa, Rupi Kaur died?

>>19618478
Literally who?

>>19623990
Tom Wolfe

Essential New Journalism texts:
Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood
HST - Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Tom Wolfe - Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Norman Mailer - Armies of the Night
Michael Herr - Dispatches

>>19618489
Some people like the feeling of sun on their face.

>>19619194
>we
kill yourself

>>19626387
Excellent list.

>>19626387
this + Hiroshima by John Hersey

>>19619181
evidently he did

>>19618616
>Isn't blood meridian creative non-fiction?
are you fucking stupid?

>>19626387
Good list. Dispatches is often overlooked.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was one of my favorite reads of last year. Rest in peace :c

>>19618478
it's him