WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE

Before this blog turns into Right On, complete with fold-out posters of all your fave rap celebs, let me point out this long overdue frightening profile of God’s Rottweiler and the oft-jacked style of Joan Didion, with regard to her genealogy. I read Run River and thought the prose was great but having had western expansion shoved down my throat from birth in wyoming history, I found the topic less than invigorating. Anyway, interesting point:
Because Didion’s later reporting on politics, often for this magazine, took a turn generally more critical of a reawakened American conservatism— and critical, also, of paralyzed Democratic accommodation—it’s sometimes been said that at some point in the decades after these first two books she was radicalized, or at least nudged toward something more like traditional liberalism. To argue this is to ignore how much the writing life has always been her central concern, and how much politics has always been a secondary, if all too gift-giving, subject. All along her aimed-for target has been behavior that is in error, above all behavior that resists—and therefore demands from the observing writer—irony.