Californian Sensibility

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

"The White Album" is fantastic, and well worth picking up a copy. It's easy to find in used book stores.
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "John Carvill" <JCarvill at algsoftware.com>
> Never been to anywhere on the West coast of the US, but loved Vineland
> passionately.
> 
> Just finished reading a long profile/interview of Joan Didion in The
> Observer, which touches on this. May be of general interest also but as
> I say it's quite long so won't post it all. 
> 
> Not read anything of Didion's. Might give 'Slouching..' a try soon
> though.
> 
> Wish they'd do something of this length and depth on Pynchon. Brief
> samples below.
> 
> 
> 'The years of writing magically'
> 
> 
> There is the sense in that piece [The White Album], and several others
> of hers from that time, of someone looking on with a kind of appalled
> fascination at the excesses of late Sixties counterculture. The title
> essay of Slouching Towards Bethlehem was actually written in 1967, and
> dissects the ascendant hippy scene in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury
> area with a mixture of wry observation and mounting unease. 'I didn't
> see a lot of peace and love on the Haight in the so-called summer of
> love,' she says now. 'It seemed like every kid I talked to there was
> desperately unhappy.'
> 
> Was her original point of view essentially generational, though? Might
> she have immersed herself in the hippy scene had she been younger? 'I
> was from a different generation,' she drawls. 'I grew up in a different
> time and my writing was formed by the values of that other time. Had I
> been of the generation I was writing about, I don't know if I would have
> been swept along.'
> 
> .
> .
> 
> 
> As a Californian now living in New York, I ask her where she feels she
> most belongs? 'Oh, California. For sure. I'm not really attuned to here.
> At one level, I feel perfectly comfortable in New York, but I really
> believe that is because it is one of those cities where people feel
> comfortable wherever they are from. The only times I felt a deep
> attachment to the city was in my twenties, and again after 9/11. But I
> would say for sure that I have a Californian sensibility.'
> 
> And how would she define that sensibility? 'Well. it's an outsider's
> sensibility. Definitely. On the edge of things. People don't feel at
> home in Los Angeles if they come from somewhere else. It takes a long
> time to get it. And people who come from there tend to have an outside
> point of view. That's certainly true in my case.'
> 
> 
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/biography/story/0,,1854009,00.ht
> ml
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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