Monday, October 15, 2001

Remora
Renata Adler and Joan Didion - can I name four things I like about them? I like the way in which these two women stay resolutely out of the loop. I like the unblinking gaze they cast upon the loop. I like the way dates are important to them, documents are important to them, rhetorical impasses are important to them. The way they proceed by looking, rather than feeling. A hard thing to do, because it can addict you to the disconnect, to an automatic blankness of response, as if blankness were somehow more objective. However, in a political culture that has debased outrage and routinized indignation (indignation is the default mode on MSNBC, the cheap standard, news talk shows look more and more like bad marriages, we watch a man bellow and wonder how high his voice can get, how much face he can put in another person's face, and we know, hey, this is an act), we go to the slow take for the sake of, well, beauty. A balance, a classicicm. So it is nice that Renata Adler is interviewed extensively here -- even if, to appreciate the interview, you have to have an sense of the stakes, which are admittedly pretty rarified stakes (I'll have mine well done, please). Briefly, the New York Times has made it its business, over the past year, to cut Adler down. The beef if that Adler won't get with the program about Watergate. She insists that John Sirica, far from being a Watergate hero, was a rather stupid man with a shady past. Now, sometimes I disagree with Adler violently. I think her defense of Westmoreland, who sued 60 minutes, was wrongheaded. But she is a fascinating writer. There are writers who dig carefully, have an archeologist's concern for levels, damage, evidence. You don't get sloppy with your artifacts, you are intensely concerned with where and when they appear, you are intensely concerned with context.

Joan Didion is a greater writer, which makes it all the more unfortunate that she was interviewed by one Tom Christie for the LA Weekly. This indigestible melange is how he segues into the interview.


"THERE'S SOMETHING UNSETTLING ABOUT JOAN DIDION. Perhaps it's the body of work, and the fact that she's one of few living writers whose name can be shaped unapologetically into an adjective: Didionesque. Or perhaps it's the clean, calm, almost soporific style with which she eviscerates the likes of Bob Woodward and Michael Isikoff and Cokie Roberts in her new book, Political Fictions (Knopf), a collection of eight lengthy essays on the American political process."

A calm, almost soporfic style, that also slices and dices? She writes like a sleepy surgeon, or is it a drugged Ronco announcer? Or perhaps a fishmonger with insomnia? This is writing that throws out the words and lets the sense come creeping after it. The encounter between this cerebrally dormant style and Didion is like the encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an ironing board, as Lautreamont once said. Or maybe it isn't -- what the heck, just ink it in. The motto, I guess, of the LA Weekly.

In other news -- Alan has gotten a fan letter for his rebuttal of my Friday post -- but hey, I got a fan letter too. So score is one to one.

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