There's a Bob Dylan lyric in Highlands that always makes me smile:
"She said, "you don't read women authors, do you?"" For whatever reason, I typically don't with one very significant exception: Joan Didion. I bought
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, a non-fiction collection, with Orwell's. She's fantastic.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem's essays/articles are on par with Mencken's,
if less vitriolic and venomously entertaining!
On Self-Respect and
On Morality are
worth finding and devouring.
Here's an excerpt from
On Morality,
written in 1965. That's significant, as you'll see. Crusading moral certitude isn't new. We were hatched in that fire; it's part of the
American DNA and what makes us particularly susceptible to
propaganda and makes this technologically amplified conflict between our
moralistic ideological religions so dangerous. Didion's Lionel Trilling quote deserves its own space and I literally squealed
when I saw she used the word, "agitprop!" And the last paragraph? Ooof! We need a
test for those infected with the Extremist Virus. Joan Didion has
it:
