Category: criticism

Reflections on Joan Didion

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Joan Didion and the Voice of America by Hilton Als, December 29, 2021

… her first two collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album.” Those books were touchstones for me on how to avoid snark and skepticism—the easy tools of journalism—and try something harder: analysis informed by context, even if what you were analyzing was yourself.

“New York: Sentimental Journeys,” a 1991 piece, in The New York Review of Books, about the Central Park Five case…

The press’s emphasis on the jogger’s “perceived refinements of character and of manner and of taste,” she writes, “tended to distort and to flatten, and ultimately to suggest not the actual victim of an actual crime but a fictional character of a slightly earlier period, the well-brought-up maiden who briefly graces the city with her presence and receives in turn a taste of ‘real life.’ The defendants, by contrast, were seen as incapable of appreciating these marginal distinctions, ignorant of both the norms and accoutrements of middle-class life.”

Her genius—and it was genius—lay in her ability to combine the specific and the sweeping in a single paragraph, to understand that the details of why we hurt and alienate one another based on skin color, sex, class, fame, or politics are also what make us American.

Joan Didion and the Opposite of Magical Thinking by Zadie Smith, December 24, 2021.

Rereading her, you find her astringency relentless, undimmed by age.

… genuinely interested in drilling down into that hardpan, no matter what she might find down there. She wasn’t looking for approval. Would not be bullied by what “everyone” was saying or what “everyone” believed. Abhorred the kind of thought that forecloses thought.

Didion was a woman who did not so much express opinions, or emotions, as interrogate both. If this still strikes us as unusual, it seemed unprecedented to me, when reading her for the first time in the late eighties. That she was a woman mattered, very much. When women writers of my generation speak in awed tones of Didion’s “style,” I don’t think it’s the shift dresses or the sunglasses, the cigarettes or commas or even the em dashes that we revere, even though all those things were fabulous. It was the authority. The authority of tone.

I remain grateful for the day I picked up “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and realized that a woman could speak without hedging her bets, without hemming and hawing, without making nice, without poeticisms, without sounding pleasant or sweet, without deference, and even without doubt. It must be hard for a young woman today to imagine the sheer scope of things that women of my generation feared women couldn’t do—but, believe me, writing with authority was one of them. You wanted to believe it. You needed proof. And not Victorian proof. Didion—like her contemporary Toni Morrison—became Exhibit A. Uniquely, she could be kept upon your person, like a flick knife, stuffed in a back pocket, the books being so slim and portable. She gave you confidence. Shored you up. And did so not by rejecting the supposed realm of women, but by drilling down into it: “All one’s actual apprehension of what it is like to be a woman, the irreconcilable difference of it—that sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death . . .”

CRITICAL REFLECTIONS – bell hooks

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Artforum, November 1994.

… demands the articulation of an agenda. It is a space where one takes a stand, expressing and revealing points of view that are particular, specific, and directed—a great place to “throw down,” to confront, interrogate, provoke

with a realm of thought that may be contemplative but is active, not passive. As Michel Foucault writes, “Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action—a perilous act.” Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, epigraph

Critical writing that remains on the edge, able to shift paradigms, to move in new directions, subverts this tendency. It demands of critics fundamental allegiance to radical openness, to free thinking. June Jordan has said that “if you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable

That moment when I whirl with words, when I dance in that ecstatic circle of love surrounded by ideas, creates a space of transgression. There are no binding limitations, everything can be both held and left behind. This intimate moment of passionate transcendence is the experiential reality that deepens my commitment to a progressive politics of transformation.

I write to live.

Attachment with feeling and imagination

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… romantics believed in a transcendental nature that moves through affects and inspires the visionary and autonomous individual. an individual who then creates their own imaginative and personal perspective on Humanity and the world. In short, they emphasized the power of the human imagination to contribute to the future,which stories we tell each other and how we tell them matters…

feelings, emotions, and the imagination …

Lewis Waller offers on the nexus of Romanticism and historiography. via aeon.

Also,

art thus becomes as Schelling famously argued the organon and criterion of truth itself

at 16:32.

Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.”

black prophetic fire

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George Yancy and Cornel West-He is a professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Princeton University. George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University.

C.W.: Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.

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G.Y.: Why the metaphor of “fire”?

C.W.: That’s just my tradition, brother. Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall. So, you straighten your back up, you take your stand, you speak your truth, you bear your witness and, most important, you are willing to live and die. Fire is very much about fruits as opposed to foliage. The ice age was all about foliage: “Look at me, look at me.” It was the peacock syndrome. Fire is about fruits, which is biblical, but also Marxist. It’s about praxis and what kind of life you live, what kind of costs you’re willing to bear, what kind of price you’re willing to pay, what kind of death you’re willing to embrace.

That was a great insight that Marcus Garvey had. Remember, Garvey often began his rallies with a black man or woman carrying a sign that read, “The Negro is not afraid.” Once you break the back of fear, you’re on fire. You need that fire. Even if that Negro carrying that sign is still shaking, the way that the lyrical genius Kanye West was shaking when he talked about George W. Bush not caring about black people, you’re still trying to overcome that fear, work through that fear.