Word: didions
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Harrison has absolutely no patience with the neurasthenic absorption and empty style of Joan Didion--who has been called "America's finest woman prose stylist," but whom Harrison finds "transparently ersatz," and "merely cheap." "All connections are equally meaningful and equally senseless," says Joan of Dark; her nihilism, says Harrison, amounts to amorality. Didion's not entitled to "fiddle while Watts burns," and her disconnection of the suffering soul from any political or spiritual meaning, sorely contrasts with Harrison's crusade to restore those vital, fading links...
...course, for America's foremost contemporary reporter-turned-essayist, Joan Didion. When Didion undertakes a character profile -- her piece on James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California, for example -- she doesn't begin with the subject, his family, philosophy, or even a recitation of his favorite food (as did Janet Flanner in a 1936 profile of Adolph Hitler). Rather, Didion begins the piece with a word about her own recollection of Pike's church, and then characteristically proceeds to lace the narrative with what she calls elsewhere, "always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I.'" "The greatest study of Mann is Mann...
...Didion is often praised for her fine, precise language, her strong voice speaking in contrast to a physical presence which is, as she tells us, "small," "temperamentally unobtrusive," and "neurotically inarticulate." In other words, she has had to fight for her language, and each stone-cut line marks some small victory...
...whose gig is communal nudity in warm pools. Now Davis, 45, feels doubly wronged: Doubleday has sued her for some $138,000, which includes legal costs, the money Bindrim won and interest. Several authors' groups and a number of writers, among them Irving Wallace, Gore Vidal and Joan Didion, have criticized the publisher for turning on one of its authors...
...protests are less evident in the streets, but no matter-- the streets themselves have changed. An intellectually subtle celebration of authenticity, group solidarity, and political direct action has left in its wake (perhaps prepared the way for) a kind of mindless incivility, a pervasive ruthlessness noted by Joan Didion when she observed "the extent to which the toleration of small irritations is no longer a trait much admired in America, the extent to which nonexistent frustration threshold is seen not as psychopathic but as a 'right.' Kill, maim, rape--the reason is always the same: somebody is 'hassling...