(no subject)
I've finished Joan Didion's Where I Was From and, altho this isn't my favorite of Didion's various memoirs, I did find it very engaging both from the excellence of Didion's writing and because I am also a native Californian, tho not one of such a long linage as Didion -- I'm merely a first generation native.
In this book, Didion explores both her family's history from the cross-country passage to California and the history of CA itself up to present problems and difficulties. And that's the most interesting part of this book -- the way Didion faces everything, including the flaws, delusions and ugliness in our home state. And, in spite of all that, the love of a place that's home. In this excerpt she writes about the feeling of coming back to CA after a time away, a feeling I've had myself when returning from a business trip:
Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, "come back," flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me, California. It would be a while before I realized that "me" is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.
She spends 3 chapters on the Spur Posse of disreputable memory and is quite harsh on them in her dry, detached way (tho no more harsh than they deserved):
For a moment that spring they had seemed to be on view everywhere, those blank-faced Lakewood girls, those feral Lakewood boys. There were the dead eyes, the thick necks, the jaws that closed only to chew gum.
But she doesn't just point fingers at the parents, at the school system, at modern society as so many were inclined to do in the rush for an easy answer that would solve the problem so we could stop thinking about it. She tied it into the political history of how and why cities like Lakewood were created, the changing economic and cultural realities over the years, millions of different changes that had each been a small piece of the problem.
Part of this was the deliberate self-delusion of people in this state, a Candide-like insistence that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds that led, in another example, to happy talk such as this:
Dun and Bradstreet reported 9.985 California business failure during the first six months of 1992. Analysts spoke approvingly of the transition from large companies to small businesses. The Los Angeles Daily News noted the "trend toward a new, more independent work force that will become less reliant on the company to provide for them and more inclined toward entrepreneurship," in other words, no benefits and no fixed salary, a recipe for motel people.
"Motel people" are those who live in cheap hotels because they make too little to come up with a first and last month's rent for an apartment, much less a down payment on a house. It's one step away from homeless and a particular problem in otherwise wealthy Orange County, where the separation of haves and have nots can be sharp.
One thing, a personal thing, that did strike me very strongly in this book was how much stuff Didion and various of her relatives had from their forebearers; not just such things as letters and diaries (which was impressive enough to me), but clothes, quilts, tea cups, ladles, potato mashers, belonging not just to a parent or grandparents but to people 5 and 6 generations gone. I don't even have old letters or diaries of my own, much less those of great-great-grandparents. Everything in my kitchen, bedroom, closets is only one generation deep and it probably won't stay with me for long (I have been called the queen of a good throwing-out).
My one connection to my past is a paint-stained work folder and some books that belonged to my Dad, and were sent to me by my stepmother after his death. I can see these staying with me for awhile but otherwise I let go much more easily than I hold on. The part of me that enjoys history wonders why I've kept so little evidence of my own, but the part of me that abhors clutter can't understand living with so much "stuff".
But enough about me, for anyone intersted in a clear-eyed, personal history of California, Where I Was From is definitely a worthwhile read.
I've replaced Where I Was From with another memoir, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, the story of his start as a pilot flying mail between France and North Africa in 1926. There are just two short excerpts I want to quote as an example of de Saint-Exupery's writing and of the danger and beauty of the early days of flight:
[here de Saint-Exupery is given advice before his first night flight] An airplane, of course, can be replaced. Still, the important thing was to avoid a collision with the range; and blind flying through a sea of clouds in the mountain zones was subject to the severest penalties. A pilot in trouble who buried himself in the white cotton-wool of the clouds might all unseeing run straight into a peak. This was why, that night, the deliberate voice repeated insistently its warning:
"Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but --"
And I was struck by the graphic image:
"But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity."
[here he recalls the experience of another, older pilot] Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he skipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.
Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.
I have given up what I realize now was an overly ambitious plan to read both volumes of Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible in the 3 weeks the library allows. Even with time extensions, that is out of my scope -- it'd take me at least a year to read that book thru. So, since it's Asimov, I intend to buy it instead to read it at my leisure.
In this book, Didion explores both her family's history from the cross-country passage to California and the history of CA itself up to present problems and difficulties. And that's the most interesting part of this book -- the way Didion faces everything, including the flaws, delusions and ugliness in our home state. And, in spite of all that, the love of a place that's home. In this excerpt she writes about the feeling of coming back to CA after a time away, a feeling I've had myself when returning from a business trip:
Flying to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, "come back," flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains giving way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me, California. It would be a while before I realized that "me" is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from.
She spends 3 chapters on the Spur Posse of disreputable memory and is quite harsh on them in her dry, detached way (tho no more harsh than they deserved):
For a moment that spring they had seemed to be on view everywhere, those blank-faced Lakewood girls, those feral Lakewood boys. There were the dead eyes, the thick necks, the jaws that closed only to chew gum.
But she doesn't just point fingers at the parents, at the school system, at modern society as so many were inclined to do in the rush for an easy answer that would solve the problem so we could stop thinking about it. She tied it into the political history of how and why cities like Lakewood were created, the changing economic and cultural realities over the years, millions of different changes that had each been a small piece of the problem.
Part of this was the deliberate self-delusion of people in this state, a Candide-like insistence that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds that led, in another example, to happy talk such as this:
Dun and Bradstreet reported 9.985 California business failure during the first six months of 1992. Analysts spoke approvingly of the transition from large companies to small businesses. The Los Angeles Daily News noted the "trend toward a new, more independent work force that will become less reliant on the company to provide for them and more inclined toward entrepreneurship," in other words, no benefits and no fixed salary, a recipe for motel people.
"Motel people" are those who live in cheap hotels because they make too little to come up with a first and last month's rent for an apartment, much less a down payment on a house. It's one step away from homeless and a particular problem in otherwise wealthy Orange County, where the separation of haves and have nots can be sharp.
One thing, a personal thing, that did strike me very strongly in this book was how much stuff Didion and various of her relatives had from their forebearers; not just such things as letters and diaries (which was impressive enough to me), but clothes, quilts, tea cups, ladles, potato mashers, belonging not just to a parent or grandparents but to people 5 and 6 generations gone. I don't even have old letters or diaries of my own, much less those of great-great-grandparents. Everything in my kitchen, bedroom, closets is only one generation deep and it probably won't stay with me for long (I have been called the queen of a good throwing-out).
My one connection to my past is a paint-stained work folder and some books that belonged to my Dad, and were sent to me by my stepmother after his death. I can see these staying with me for awhile but otherwise I let go much more easily than I hold on. The part of me that enjoys history wonders why I've kept so little evidence of my own, but the part of me that abhors clutter can't understand living with so much "stuff".
But enough about me, for anyone intersted in a clear-eyed, personal history of California, Where I Was From is definitely a worthwhile read.
I've replaced Where I Was From with another memoir, Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Wind, Sand and Stars, the story of his start as a pilot flying mail between France and North Africa in 1926. There are just two short excerpts I want to quote as an example of de Saint-Exupery's writing and of the danger and beauty of the early days of flight:
[here de Saint-Exupery is given advice before his first night flight] An airplane, of course, can be replaced. Still, the important thing was to avoid a collision with the range; and blind flying through a sea of clouds in the mountain zones was subject to the severest penalties. A pilot in trouble who buried himself in the white cotton-wool of the clouds might all unseeing run straight into a peak. This was why, that night, the deliberate voice repeated insistently its warning:
"Navigating by the compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is all very well, it is very dashing, but --"
And I was struck by the graphic image:
"But you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity."
[here he recalls the experience of another, older pilot] Thus, when Mermoz first crossed the South Atlantic in a hydroplane, as day was dying he ran foul of the Black Hole region, off Africa. Straight ahead of him were the tails of tornadoes rising minute by minute gradually higher, rising as a wall is built; and then the night came down upon these preliminaries and swallowed them up; and when, an hour later, he skipped under the clouds, he came out into a fantastic kingdom.
Great black waterspouts had reared themselves seemingly in the immobility of temple pillars. Swollen at their tops, they were supporting the squat and lowering arch of the tempest, but through the rifts in the arch there fell slabs of light and the full moon sent her radiant beams between the pillars down upon the frozen tiles of the sea. Through these uninhabited ruins Mermoz made his way, gliding slantwise from one channel of light to the next, circling round those giant pillars in which there must have rumbled the upsurge of the sea, flying for four hours through these corridors of moonlight toward the exit from the temple. And this spectacle was so overwhelming that only after he had got through the Black Hole did Mermoz awaken to the fact that he had not been afraid.
I have given up what I realize now was an overly ambitious plan to read both volumes of Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible in the 3 weeks the library allows. Even with time extensions, that is out of my scope -- it'd take me at least a year to read that book thru. So, since it's Asimov, I intend to buy it instead to read it at my leisure.