Bloodsport

I was becoming more and more isolated in the splendor of my office. It was a tiring little game once the glamor of being student council president wore off. I longed to return to the potato patch and raise hell with kids who didn’t know the difference between Weejuns and Old Maine trotters. But those kids grew up and wore tons of eye-makeup, iridescent pink fingernail polish and scratched each other’s eyes out over the boy with the metalflake, candy apple red ’55 Chevy with four on the floor. There was no place to go back to. No place to go to. College was going to be like high school, only worse. But I gotta go. I don’t get that degree and I’m another secretary. No thanks. I got to get it and head for the big city. Got to hang on. That’s what Carl told me once, you got to hang on. It would be nice to talk to Carl. God, it would be nice to talk to someone who wasn’t fucked up.

— Rita Mae Brown

This blog has not been following the Democratic presidential contest too carefully, partially because its author seeks to be resistant to easy polemic, which unfortunately has tended to characterize the contest so far, but also because the balls have remained largely in the air, although there is a strong feeling now for most about where they will fall. But more importantly has been my own sense of ambivalence over choosing: a veritable embarrassment of riches, as much as one can say that for presidential candidates in the United States at this moment, which is to say, imperfectly and perhaps ironically. This putative richness of course is representational, but also exists in relation to the lifting the socio-political pall that has fallen over the United States since the turn of the century under its current political leadership, which is a polite way of saying, well, lots of things.

So, my aim here is not partisan politics, of which I remain, at least in the current contest and at the current moment, somewhat disinterested in, although natürlich I have made my own choice in the matter. Rather, it does seek to engage some interesting observations made regarding the leading candidate over the past few weeks. The most immediate is the subject of a recent ill-considered editorial that is making the rounds across the interwebs. But another is a piece a few weeks ago by Maureen Dowd that sought to consider why it would be that Barack Obama seemingly cannot connect with the working-class people and their communities that his own youth is firmly rooted in.

The question of full-blooded American identity as deployed by Kathleen Parker is easy enough to dismiss almost out of hand: incoherent as it is, it is rather simple work to cherry-pick the piece not only for its historical inconsistencies but its reliance on the murky concept of blood, the one thing that, remarkably enough, has generally not been an organizing principle in American juridical tradition. Of course, blood here really means race, and some commentators have drawn the obvious connections between American identity, blood, race, and whiteness.

Dowd, admittedly not one of my favorite journalistic commentators, and her foray into the cultural politics of Obama’s perceptual class anxiety, strikes at notes familiar to most professionals, racialized or otherwise, who have had to significantly transform themselves on the pathway to success. She writes, not without a strange dose of smugness,

“It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.
[…] It’s hard not to be who you are, but it’s doubly hard to be who you’ve strived not to be. Obama not only has to figure out how to unwind with a Bud. He has to rewind his life.”

But is this not the putative American Dream? To leave behind our old selves like so many used clothes and emerge from our chrysalis state into something more beautiful, more capable, more free? Isn’t this American success writ large? To move on up, to make one’s self better through class advancement? The fact is that this transformative social politic remains, at best, available only to certain Americans. The rest of us, to a large extent, must continue to labor under our old selves, even when those old selves have long outlived their usefulness, not to mention their relevance. Self-transformation can be an awfully tricky thing in a white supremacist and anti-intellectual society.

Obama’s story of self-improvement and class transformation through education and opportunity lies at the heart of the very processes of the formation of the professoriate of color, and ostensibly what we seek to bring to our students, again racialized or otherwise, similarly situated. While Parker’s narrative of race forever delimits citizens of color to the margins of authenticity, reinscribing the racialist, anti-republican politics of the 18th and 19th centuries, Dowd’s critique punishes Obama, and by extension all accomplished people of color, for being Zip Coons, striving for something that is just beyond their purported natural reach. It is a curious racialist pastoral, one embraced across the political and social spectrum, not the least of which would be the university. But it does little to address the dynamism of our society, much less those of us who actually live within it.

There is no required rewind, for the simple fact of the matter is that education and experience do, in fact, change the student, irrevocably. That is the point, arguably, of education. That does not erase what existed before, but rather, as in Freud’s invocation of Rome as an allegory for the mind, layers different experiences and selves on top of one another. Self-reflection tends not to be a strength in American media or political culture, but if one were to reflect on the strange career of race, class, and gender in our society, one would be forced to recognize, a bit more forcefully than either Dowd or Parker, that the interstices of the three largely determines who we were, who we are, who we hope to become, and a host of other life factors that are material as well as representational, empirical as well as ephemeral.

Just as the spectre of the full-blooded American elides our complex and violent history of national formation, the house of which we continue to live in rather vividly, so the pantomime of ersatz populism masks a decidedly more brutal regime of class warfare. And both boil down to the question of essence, of true selves constantly elusive to the American experience, yet irrationally and violently insisted upon. Do I, in my most private moments, seek a return to the prelapsarian state, to the real me, under all the other real mes, the really really real me? Not on your life. Like Gertrude Stein once famously said of Oakland, “There is no there there.” And in this refusal there is elegance, which perhaps is what Obama might be touching: a truer, deeper vein of the American character, which also explains why it must be so violently disavowed.

Madonna: A Comment

The new fascination with the diva as kitsch, a laughingstock, a reptile in a dress who cussed like a trooper and threw drunken tantrums in public places, was the result, not only of a contradiction intrinsic to the gay sensibility, but of a contradiction intrinsic to two extremely important things, to the very nature of glamour and the medium of film itself […] They provided the impetus for a form of gay mockery that originated in our disillusionment with our once “empowering” role models who, as they became older and lost their position of preeminence in American society, could not sustain their prestige in the eyes of their gay fans […] What happened to the real diva also happened to the imaginary one, so that the fate of these two mythical beings was closely linked. They had become part of us; we had incorporated their style onto our own. When they declined, we declined; when they were discredited, we were discredited.

— Daniel Harris

Madonna recently released her latest album, Hard Candy, to decidedly mixed reviews, the strangely overriding note seemingly being “Isn’t it great she can still walk and talk?” I am hardly an avid Madonna fan now, imbued as I am in the feeling that most popular culture, in its ephemera, cannot answer the questions I face now as a middle-aged man. I have returned to literature, to the somber embrace of private words and images, personally interpreted in the quiet of my garret.

Yet, Madonna, her image and sound, do form a soundtrack to my life, even if such a soundtrack is now but an echo rather than vibrantly pounding, an occasion for sentimental nostalgia. What once proved endlessly fascinating for a more innocent American public (not to mention a generation of overly enthused feminist scholars) is now inundated in a sea of flesh: part-time Lolitas and full-time Gold Diggers now shake their posteriors lasciviously before cameras, and the spectacle of unleashed female sexuality, so beguilingly apparent in Madonna’s earlier work, now all seems rather old hat. And while Rolling Stone may proclaim, incoherently, “name another near-fifty-year-old who can still rock a hot crotch shot on her album cover,” to paraphrase Andrew Holleran, the thousandth crotch shot is not what the first one was.

Gay men and the iconography of the star has been the subject of much debate and speculation: how gay men came to identify with the star and her glamour, the social and political implications of such identificatory displacement, the use value of such adoration from the position of Capital. On the release of this latest album, and through some heated discussions with other gay men on Madonna, I began to think through the decomposition of the star, but in particular the personal eroding of Madonna’s star image.

Again, part of this is hardly Madonna’s fault. Our popular culture is now a 24-hour media-saturated abattoir that is fleeting, scopophilic, and full of schadenfraude and glee. What once made Madonna so spectacularly special is gone, and therefore, so is much of her iconographic power. As a long-term survivor of popular culture, there is little left she could do anyway, other than perhaps a more radical mutilation of the body itself, akin to Michael Jackson. But such changes do not demonstrate relevance, only spectacle. Changing one’s hair color or wearing outrageous clothing will clearly no longer cut it.

And one of the most distressing aspects of the new album for me was not the music, which is appropriately banal, but the still photography associated with it, which does indeed show Madonna ‘rocking’ a crotch shot in boxer’s gear and a unitard. But, present there too is the tell-tale marking of entropic decomposition: the hair is wrong, matron-like and dull; her skin coloring is off, waxy and ashen; the ridiculous open-legged poses in ostensibly sexual clothing, the obligatory salacious tongue displayed, only sets off just how unsexy the whole performance is. Isn’t there a better way to reflect middle-aged sexuality and sensuality beyond the patently obvious? If there is (and of course, there is), Madonna has not discovered it, or perhaps she feels she cannot afford it. Apparently, she’s dancing as fast as she can.

I suppose for many younger gay men, Madonna still strikes at some heart of their identity. She did for me, as well, when I too was younger. But this dissonance is not necessarily only a paean to middle age curmudgeonry, although there is some of that here too. Rather, it is, in some larger part, reflective of an evolution beyond the mere symbolic, beyond the star as displaced apotheosis of voice, of identification and desire. Quite frankly, I don’t need Madonna anymore, because I have myself, in its fractured, curious, confused, questioning glory.

In thinking through this point, I returned again to Daniel Harris’s rather smart disquisition on the star and gay men, “The Death of Camp,” where he locates the decomposition of classic camp star culture for gay men in post-Stonewall socio-economic politics, when gay men no longer needed the cipher of the star to articulate their inner selves. This argument is compelling, for it locates the increasingly abuse of the star (“the change from reverence to ridicule, from Joan Crawford as the bewitching siren to Joan Crawford as the ax-wielding, child-beating, lesbian drunk…”) in a hyperconsciousness of her degradation, through aging and the contrast of image and reality, which strips gay men of their cult of adoration and forces them, on some level, into the light of day through a recognition of materiality and an evisceration of the glamour of the image. In Harris’s perhaps cynical calculations, gay men do not evolve to higher level of consciousness however, but rather replace the cult of the Star with shopping and other mainstream consumerist practices.

This is most likely truer than not, and to be fair, aside from the most fiercely engaged partisans, Madonna is an ironic icon for most gay men, a decidedly guilty pleasure, or as one gay man put it to me recently, “That bitch can put on a good show.” However, one of the most compelling aspects of Harris’s essay is his discussion of the literary end of the cult of the Star for gay men confronted by the HIV crisis, by mortality, by the body itself, that for many men, unhooks representation from reality. Harris quotes John Weir’s The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, one of the most powerful eighties fictions of AIDS, as the protagonist recognizes the ineffectiveness of star worship upon confronting his impending death—

"Who’s the main character in my life? … Who is starring in my life? It can’t be me… I’m just a walk-on… Not even a supporting player. Not even a cameo appearance by a long-forgotten star. I’m just an extra. No one else is starring in my life. That’s why they’re halting production. It’s a bad investment for the studio."

So, invariably, part of the fall of Madonna for me, and the greater decomposition of Star iconography, is a recognition that, in the end, we ourselves are the stars of our lives, we must be the stars of our own lives. As comforting as the image of the Star might be, it strikes me as far more important to turn towards one’s own self, and invest in that particular limelight, even or perhaps especially if one is not quite ready for one’s close-up.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Richard Rodriguez

St. Augustine writes from his cope of dust that we are restless hearts, for earth is not our true home. Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality. Intuition tells us we are meant for some other city. Elizabeth Taylor, quoted in a magazine article of twenty years ago, spoke of cerulean Richard Burton days on her yacht, days that were nevertheless undermined by the elemental private reflection: This must end. […] I have never looked for utopia on a map. Of course I believe in human advancement. I believe in medicine, in astrophysics, in washing machines. But my compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy. If I respond to the metaphor of spring, I nevertheless learned, from my Mexican father, from my Irish nuns, to count on winter. The point of Eden for me, for us, is not approach but expulsion.

— Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez is a liberal, not a revolutionary of the barricade sort, and as to whether he remains a true favourite is debatable. I feel I have lived within his work so long that I can’t remember a time before. A certain listless ennui has set in: Her again? Which triggers another thought: is there actually anything left to be said about Rodriguez that hasn’t already been played in stereo? But in terms of revolutions of thought, of important shifts in pathway and standpoint, yes, Rodriguez still counts. Rodriguez, of course, is the bête noire of Chicana/o Studies, the greatest sell-out of all, the face that launched a thousand articles, that still even today attempt to undermine his work, as if picking over the bones of a very old carcass that has been striped clean.

Why Chicana/o intellectuals would still engage so vociferously with Rodriguez speaks to his power as a particular type of avatar. His three autobiomythographies, Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown, have unevenly traced out the Mexican American condition, but most critics in the academy still focus on his first work, Hunger of Memory, for its advocacy of assimilation and its stances against bilingual education and affirmative action. Because Rodriguez is primarily a journalist (and at the time, a polemicist), his critiques were weakly supported and rather easily dismissed, but the critical reaction to them revealed more about the fears of the Chicana/o professoriate than the work itself, which of course was fascinating to me. What becomes a thought criminal most? Apparently devising a million ways to label him wrong, over and over again.

Hunger of Memory was a standard on course syllabi in the eighties, assigned by liberal white teachers to spark lively discussion on American society, race, and immigration (a cheap trick), or by professors of colour to display inappropriate political thoughts (another cheap trick). But what little of the discussions I remember from my seminars was relatively myopic, both in using any text as evidence of experience and the thoughtless, knee-jerk dismissal of its perceptions. There was little detailed investigation into Rodriguez’s arguments and stylistic presentation, giving way rather to an expulsion through identity politics.

This intellectual deadlock started to ease a bit by the early nineties, when it was clear that Rodriguez was a) not a flash in the pan (with his second, stylish anthology Days of Obligation) and b) with the shift towards cultural studies, which sought to reevaluate his work. The complexities of his political illness, his reasons for alienation from the Mexican American socio-political Left, and especially his sexuality (he was famously closeted upon the publication of Hunger of Memory), began to figure more prominently in the analyses of his work. This was also the time I started to re-read his essays, and uncover some sort of strange lineage for gay Chicanismo, along with some others, many of whom were also gay Chicanos.

The effects of this reappraisal were mixed. On one hand, suddenly it seemed every Chicano Homo was talking at every conference about Rodriguez as our bastard father, as the shame we must live down if we were ever to join the ranks of bright, shiny warriors for Chicanismo. On the other, there was space to begin mining his work for greater meaning, even if that meant a certain professional risk: a peer warned me at the time I would never get a job doing Rodriguez. And indeed, as my study progressed, other graduate students began to use the fact of my work on Rodriguez to dismiss me, transferring Rodriguez’s political stain onto me. All of which taught me much more of the unconscious fears and mobbing effects of the profession than anything else, but was depressing nonetheless.

What I resented most about such criticisms was that they were easy, too lazy, simple. If you want to position someone or some work in opposition, at least know it coherently. Many Chicana/o scholars and graduate students did not, but rather had taken a cursory reading, or worse, a reading of the secondary criticism, and reached conclusions that were as firm as Gibraltar. This is not necessarily surprising, since academics are as vulnerable, ironically enough, to received knowledge as anyone else. But, in this twist of intellectual fate, what drew me to Rodriguez in the nineties was exactly his position as iconoclast, as thought criminal, as sick aunt.

And he is sick, interestingly enough. While I appreciate the beauty of his language, the astuteness of his insights, the cleverness of his writing, he is an ambivalent father figure. If his alienation does determine a particular gay and Mexican American relationship to assimilation, culture, and values, than that is a decidedly mixed legacy. Of course, this is also a problem of reading. While texts are forever, the author is not, and his perspectives have shifted and changed (his most rigorous work remains Days of Obligation; Brown is stylistically lazy and Hunger of Memory too minimalist). But for many of us, we remain stuck in his Ur-text of pain, Hunger of Memory. And one of the reasons, arguably, is that this is the work that speaks to our own experiences of assimilation, of shame, of the electric trauma of becoming an educated person in a white supremacist society.

And this is an aspect of the critical foray that I have found distressing in Rodriguez and the reception of his work. His delineations of those traumas, or as one early critic put it, “difficult to write, difficult to read,” have not triggered sympathetic understanding (or even sympathetic dismissal), but rather a rejection that is Freudian in its vociferousness, the repression of something too close, too personal, too close to the bone. There is little generosity in reading schemes of Rodriguez, and this lack of generosity demonstrates, on the surface, the ideological rigors scholars of colour face in maintaining appropriate socio-political positions in their work and their personal lives. But more deeply, it also uncovers, arguably, our loathing of the faggot, of the vulnerable sissy, as Randy A. Rodriguez so revealing analysed in what is probably the best interpretive piece on Rodriguez’s work.

If it is true that Rodriguez is, in Randy’s analysis, El Malinche, the gay version of the race traitor so integral to Chicana feminist theorising, then how does one embrace this crown of thorns? Here the differences between men and women are instructive, for gay men have no overarching critique of gender, so our male paradigms stand alone, in glorious masculine individuality, instead as avatars of greater consciousness. This is why, among myriad other reasons, Rodriguez is an ambivalent figure for me. There is, to paraphrase Lee Edelman, no future there.

If this strange isolation is indicative of gay Chicanismo I cannot tell for sure, but suffice it to say that Rodriguez has been one of the most important intellectual interlocutors for me, both in his criminality as well as for exposing his neurotic trauma in an almost primal sense, for probing the wound relentlessly. His stylistics speaks to how far we have truly mastered the English language and made it our own, and his work is worth reading for the writing alone, although at times it can become baroque, too precious, too enamoured with itself, especially Brown. (A fond memory: Seeing Teresa de Lauretis doing a close reading of Rodriguez's essay "Late Victorians"— the soaring metaphors, the literary allusions, the deep meanings of Rodriguez's turns of phrase: delicious!)

Desire and identification drive much readerly relationships, and the autobiomythographies of Rodriguez are the most compelling of all, for they trigger both revulsion and desire/identification simultaneously. This combination has taught me quite a lot about not only Chicano gayness but also intellectual iconoclasm, its power and its limitations, as well as figuring ambivalence into reading and interpretation.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Andrew Holleran

I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay. I am what Gus called those people we used to see in the discos, bars, baths, all the time—remember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested?—I am a doomed queen. […] But let me assure you, my novel is not about fags. It is about a few characters who just happen to be gay (I know that’s a cliché, but it’s true). After all, most fags are as boring as straight people—they start businesses with lovers and end up in Hollywood, Florida, with dogs and double-knit slacks and I have no desire to write about them. What can one say about success? Nothing! But the failures—that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff? That fascinates me. […] It was those whom Christ befriended, not the assholes in the ad agencies uptown who go to St. Kitts in February! Those people bore me to DEATH! […] THAT is what I want to write about— why life is SAD. And what people do for Love (everything)—whether they’re gay or not.

— Andrew Holleran

Because by and large LGBT people are born within the heterosexual family, we must consequently re-learn what it means to be ourselves within the social and cultural norms of gayness, once we achieve an acceptable escape velocity from heteronormativity. This is a rather old-fashioned perspective, for nowadays many in the LGBT community are wrapped up in homonormativity, a resurgent parallel structure of propriety that, contrary to popular opinion, is not really new as much as newly fashionable. Bourgeois gay teens proclaim their sexualities and take their cute boyfriends to prom, baby dykes are senior class presidents, and everyone is supposedly OK with gay.

While the class and geographical dimensions of this normalization of lesbian and gay identity are relatively limited, the perception is that this acceptance is the new norm. After all, we had Will and Grace, didn’t we? IKEA produces commercials for us, don’t they? Political candidates are willing to mention us without a sneer, aren’t they (even if they still do nothing tangible for us)? Nowadays, in short, many LGBT people seem to want to be the asshole who goes to St. Kitts in February.

In any event, for many of us still, our experience actually hews to the older model, of learning gayness from peers and lovers, from crafting personae from the raw material of our foundational standpoints of alterity and anomie with like-minded fellow travelers away from the family, in the cauldron of the gay ghetto. For the two generations of gay men and lesbians after Stonewall, moving beyond the social and cultural practices of the bars and closed societies into the light meant also producing different kinds of cultural production, literature, and arts that reflected new meanings of gayness, new codes of behavior and experience that assimilated the political principles of Gay Liberation but also spoke to a deeper, quotidian senses of what gayness meant.

Andrew Holleran was one of a group of gay writers who began in the seventies to delineate a literary universe for the post-Stonewall gay man. While gay literature predates the riots that form the Procrustean bed of the contemporary LGBT moment, typically that literature was not written for lesbians or gay men specifically, but oriented towards the heterosexual reader as audience, for convincing potential straight allies that we deserved pity, not punishment (the lesbian pulp fiction of Ann Bannon is a notable exception in this regard). Holleran and other lesbian and gay writers of the seventies began to break with this receptive strategy, and to write from a position inside the gay world, to offer lesbian and gay readers literature written from the perspective of gayness not as illness or alterity, but as epistemological centre.

I first read Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance, his classic of gay ghetto love and life, in college, when I began devouring gay writing in an effort to learn not only what it may mean to be gay, but also to consider the artistic reflection of experiences I was now integrally a part of that were grounded in gay difference, not a mimesis of heterosexual norms. I knew many doomed queens then, and in some ways I too was one as well. The melodramatic antics of our young undergraduates were taken, in part, from the literary construction of a gay subject that focused on questions of satellite cultural norms and values (tragic love, sex, cruising, drama, camp), as well as the learning of gay descriptive vernacular that was reflected in the real, live gay people around me. While Kramer’s politics were sharper, Mordden was funnier, and White more seriously literary, Holleran seduced with the beauty of his language, his hypnotic and dreamy passages describing what heretofore had either been mundane or horrifying. Holleran’s writing gave beauty to the sites of our lives: the gay bar, the cruising strip, the one-night stand, the lonely hours alone in apartments in the city.

As Holleran aged beyond the Manhattan/Fire Island scene, his work continued to resonate. Ground Zero is perhaps the most beautiful literary memorial to the lives of the men lost to HIV disease, and The Beauty of Men and In September, the Light Changes both wryly capture the bittersweet yet empowering nature of aging in a gay culture that still largely considers 40 to be social and sexual death. Characteristic of his oeuvre is the focus on language, on description, on the dreamwork of gayness; on creating, through words, the materiality of a gay sensibility that may not exactly match individual experience, but works towards giving the gay world a schematic infrastructure of meaning and emotive power that is portable, malleable, and relevant.

I may not be a regular traveler to Fire Island (in fact, I have never been), but the detailing of the norms of a particular gay urban world in Holleran’s writing has given me an aesthetic sensibility that is useful beyond simple transparency of experience. A modus of description that figures my own life and experiences within a communal aesthetic standpoint: a collective that while fractious and contested, is also mine. This aesthetic and literary project was, in the seventies, revolutionary. No one thought it would sell, for one. As one of Holleran’s characters observes, “Those things may be amusing to us, but who, after all, wants to read about sissies?” In the end, it turned out that the gay literary universe begun by Holleran and others was able to rise above such marginal utilitarianism, and not only by the simple fact that, of course, it is sissies that want to read about sissies, but also by giving the gay world the cultural clothing it needed to begin to see itself as whole, specific, original, and not simply derivative— a distinct standpoint in conversation with heteronormativity yet unique.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Joan Didion

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of the narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here of a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971. During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another […] This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did […] In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.

— Joan Didion

Some people, perhaps many people, would hardly consider Joan Didion revolutionary. She is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. Her writings, especially those about American society in the sixties, struck many readers at the time and afterward as overly self-involved, politically reactionary, and strangely disconnected from the flows of the zeitgeist. Yet, it is precisely this disconnection, this anomie from the passions of people, politics, and society, that distinguish her writing for me, as if in her dissonance she attains a sharper understanding of what is happening, a critical eye that cuts through hyperbole like a laser.

I cannot remember when I first read her work, perhaps it was her famous essay on Haight Ashbury hippies or the stylistic paradigm copied by younger, popular authors of the late eighties and early nineties, like Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, that brought me back to the source. But the essay I remember most, the essay I re-read often and quote from, is “The White Album,” reproduced in the anthology of the same name. For me, this is pure Didion, the pinnacle of her descriptive methodology that flows through her most recent, affecting work, The Year of Magical Thinking.

In fact, reading and re-reading this latter work, I was struck by how the text resonated even more strongly with a familiarity of her other, older works, and how The Year of Magical Thinking was the logical place her work would lead: scrupulous, disinfected, painfully introspective. Didion spares no one, including herself, in her quest for understanding, for comprehension, for critical perspective. This bracing rigour has always drawn me to her work.

Of course, the particular resonances of her life that match mine are compelling. A native Californian, her interpretive standpoints are grounded in loss and the cataloguing of change, not necessarily via sentimentality, but through a desire to make sense, and in this manner, connect. Critical reception of her work has often focused on her disconnection, her idiosyncratic self-appraisal, her bikinis and Hawaii and neuroses, but often such criticism misses this larger point of disconnected connection. Just because one is outside does not mean one cannot see in, and use that position to offer a useful descriptive.

Didion’s perspective is shaped by the foundational influences of her generation, the “Silent” one, and refracted through leaving home in pursuit of a metropolitan career in New York, and thus seeing California and herself from a different standpoint. Her return to the state in the sixties, becoming a leading mainstream journalistic chronicler for its tempestuous transformations of the era, gave her writing a perhaps unnaturally powerful resonance, one naturally resented by those who read the events of the time in another light.

Yet, Didion’s moonscape-style of description is apropos to a certain western, Californian interpretive stance: living on the edge of what is possible, physically and emotionally and spiritually and materially. She is one of several leading authorial voices that have attempted to delineate a Californian perspective on the world, and her sparse prose and wry emotional observations, as sharp as a scalpel, are in some ways akin to what André Breton once said of the work of Frida Kahlo: a ribbon around a bomb.

What my identification with her dissonance, her dislocation, her clinical introspection of the wound, potentially says about my own standpoint is revealing. We search for narrative, and upon finding none, attempt to make sense of the resulting chaos, partially out of an implicit, trained desire for narrative, but more importantly stemming from an unhealthy attraction to the distinctions between expectation and reality, between empiricism and dreamwork, between utopia and dystopia, the lines of which are closer to the surface in a place like California, but are present everywhere in the American unconscious.

Didion taught me a new way of making sense of being Californian, where I am from, and flowing from that standpoint a rigorous stylistic technique for viewing the world— that the ribbon is as important as the bomb.