Joan Didion: Life Changes in the Instant

Joan Didion: Photography by Annie Leibovitz

Joan Didion Receiving the 2007 National Book Foundation Award

The National Book Foundation commemorated the literary achievements of Joan Didion at its 2007 awards ceremony in New York City. Didion received the 2007 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for her “Outstanding achievements as a novelist and essayist.” Didion won the National Book Award in 2005 for her last book, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham presented the medal at the 58th National Book Award ceremony and dinner. Harold Augenbraum, Executive Director of the Foundation, said, ” Joan Didion is one of the keenest observers and finest prose stylists of our time.”

Joan Didion Speaks: The National Book Foundation Ceremony

Biographic Notes

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, California. She spent most of her childhood there, except for several years during World War II, when she traveled across the county with her mother and brother to be near her father. Her family had deep roots in the West; family tales of pioneer days informed her first novel, as well as her later memoir, Where I Was From.

Didion was a shy, bookish child, although she pushed herself to overcome her shyness through acting and public speaking. In her final year at The University of California, Berkeley, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue Magazine. The first prize was a job in the magazine’s New York office. Didion remained at Vogue for two years, progressing from research assistant to contributing writer. At the same time, she published articles in other magazines and wrote her first novel, Run River (1963).

In 1964, Didion married John Gregory Dunne, an aspiring novelist who was writing for Time Magazine. The couple moved to Los Angeles with the intention of staying for six months and ended up making their home there for the next 20 years. The pair adopted a baby girl who they named Quintana Roo, after the state on the eastern coast of Mexico.

The atmosphere of California in the 1960s provided Didion and Dunne with plentiful opportunities for writing in the personal style, becoming known as the New Journalism. The personal mode of writing was also associated with the writers Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson and Gay Talese. Didion’s essays on the 1960s counterculture were collected in her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). It was published to critical acclaim and is considered to be one of the signature works of that decade. Didion’s second novel, Play It As it Lays (1970), which was set among the aimless souls adrift at the edges of the film industry, captured a mood of alienation that had crept over the film colony by the time of the decade’s ending.

Working together for the first time, Didion and Dunne wrote the screenplay for the motion picture, Panic in Needle Park (1971). Set among homeless drug addicts in New York City, the film introduced film audiences to the actor Al Pacino. Their work on the film was much admired and they became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriting teams. Together, they wrote screenplays for the film adaptation of Play It As it Lays (1972); a remake of A Star is Born (1976), starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson; the film version of her husband’s novel True Confessions (1981); and Up Close and Personal (1996) with Robert Redford.

In late 2003, Didion’s daughter, Quintana, fell gravely ill. Soon after returning from a visit to their comatose child in the hospital, her husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a fatal heart attack. Joan Didion wrote a searing account of her journey through grief in her novel The Year of Magical Thinking. At the time she finished the book, her daughter appeared to be recovering from her illness, but by the time the book was published, Quintana had died.

Joan Didion with her Husband, John Gregory Dunne

The National Book Award in 2005

The Year of Magical Thinking was published to widespread acclaim and received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005. “There’s hardly anything I can say about this except thank you,” said Didion, praising her publisher for supporting her while she wrote her acclaimed best seller. The 70-year-old Didion, who had never won the National Book Award, had long been admired by many distinguished authors for her precise, incisive fiction and literary journalism. However, The Year of Magical Thinking brought her a substantially larger readership, with booksellers saying that her book was especially in demand from others who have lost a loved one or knew someone who had.

Joan Didion pressed on through her sorrow. She wrote a stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking, which appeared on Broadway this year, directed by David Hare and starring Vanessa Redgrave. Her first seven books of nonfiction have been collected in a single volume, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live.

In 2005, Didion appeared at the Chicago Humanities Festival and provided reflections about The Year of Magical Thinking, as well as some about some of the feelings that were evoked by the events described in her book. She described the almost immediate dramatic, life-altering effect that she experienced: “The notion that I could control things died hard…I do not believe in an afterlife; I wish I did.” In her account, Didion contemplated how the rituals of daily life were fundamentally altered when her life’s companion was taken from her.

Her initial struggle to begin writing about the thoughts and feelings of grief, sorrow and utter isolation aroused by this tragic experience began with four magnificantly dignified short lines:

“Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.”

Joan Didion: Life Changes in the Instant

Technorati: Joan Didion, author, playwright, books, National Book Foundation, National Book Foundation Award, National Book Award, The Year of Magical Thinking, Chicago, New York City, Manhattan, NYC, Los Angles, California, art, celebrities, personalities, images, pictures, photos, photographs, photography, Annie Leibovitz, photo-blog, gallery, photo-gallery, slideshow, video, WordPress video, culture, cultural issues, cultural, social, social issues, social life, society, world
Please Be Social:

My Articles for Monday, September 24, 2007

Cooking with Alice Waters: California Food Revolutionary

Alice Waters is one of the best-known American chefs since the 1970s. She has been credited with creating a culinary revolution in the U.S. In 1971, she founded Chez Panisse, the original “California Cuisine” restaurant in Berkeley, Cal. This article is about the experience of cooking lunch with Ms. Waters. Photographs and a video are included.

[tags: blogs, Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, California Cuisine, food, restaurants, celebrities]

Photo of the Day: What a Mess!

“Photo of the Day: What a Mess!” Know how your room or work area sometimes just turns into one big huge mess? Well here’s a neat picture of one just like that. Nevertheless, this is a very colorful and appealing photograph, presented for your viewing in high-resolution. Take a peek, and enjoy the mess!!

[tags: blogs, Photo of the Day, Photograph of the Day, What a Mess, photograph, art]

See the Rest of my Articles at Blue Dot

Technorati: Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, Berkeley, California, Caalifornia Cuisine, cuisine, food, restaurants, video, WordPress video, YouTube, Photo of the Day, Photograph of the Day, photo, photograph, photography, photographer, Joseph O. Holmes, What a Mess, mess, messy, New York City, NYC, Manhattan, Brooklyn, blog, blogger, blogging, photo-blog

Be Social:

Cooking with Alice Waters: California Food Revolutionary

Alice Waters: Founder of “California Cuisine”

Photography by: Annie Leibovitz

Alice Waters: The Founder of “California Cuisine”

Alice Waters was born on April 28,1944, in Chatham, New Jersey and has become one of the best-known and most influential American chefs since the 1970s. She has been credited with single-handedly creating a culinary revolution in the United States. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in French Cultural Studies, and trained at the Montessori School in London before spending a seminal year traveling in France.

She is the founder and co-owner of Chez Panisse, the original “California Cuisine” restaurant in Berkeley, California, as well as the informal Cafe Fanny in West Berkeley. Since opening Chez Panisse in 1971, Alice has maintained a tradition of serving a single fixed-price menu that changes daily. The set menu format remains at the heart of Alice’s philosophy of serving only the highest quality products, only when they are in season.

Ms. Waters is a champion of locally-grown and fresh ingredients. Over the course of three decades, Chez Panisse has developed a network of mostly local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures Chez Panisse a steady supply of pure and fresh ingredients. The upstairs café at Chez Panisse opened in 1980 with an open kitchen, a wood-burning pizza oven, and an à la carte menu. Café Fanny, a stand-up café that serves breakfast and lunch, was opened a few miles away in 1984.

She has promoted the use of organic and small farm products heavily in her restaurants, in her books, and in her Edible Schoolyard Program in the public schools. Her ideas for “edible education” have been introduced into the entire Berkeley school system, and with the current crisis in childhood obesity, have attracted the attention of the national media.

Chez Panisse: Berkeley, California

Lunch with Alice Waters

Lunch with Alice Waters, Food Revolutionary

Ms. Waters recently visited New York City and was invited by Kim Severson, a reporter for The New York Times, to come over and cook lunch at her Brooklyn apartment. Ms. Severson began her article with some degree of worry about what she might have gotten herself into:

“When Alice Waters is coming over to cook lunch, the first thing you do is look around your house and think, I live in a dump.

Then you take an inventory of the pantry. The bottles of Greek and Portuguese olive oil, once a point of pride, suddenly seem inadequate. And should you hide the box of Kellogg’s Raisin Bran and jettison those two cans of Diet Pepsi?

At the end of the afternoon, when the last peach was peeled and my kitchen was stacked with dirty pots, it didn’t really matter. Ms. Waters was either too polite or too distracted to mention what was in my cupboard. It turns out she travels with her own olive oil, anyway. And homemade vinegar. And salt-packed capers.

Ms. Waters had agreed to spend a hot September day shopping with me at the Union Square Greenmarket and schlepping back to my first-floor apartment in brownstone Brooklyn to make lunch.

The menu was dictated by two things: the market’s offerings and the recipes in her forthcoming book, “The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution” (Clarkson Potter, October).

The book is more to Ms. Waters than an instructional guide. It is her attempt, through recipes, to save the American food supply. She wrote it because she still believes a plate of delicious food can change everything.

“We’re trying to educate young people and show them how to use that lens of ingredients as a way to change their lives,” she said. “Otherwise, it would be just another cookbook.”

The book is Ms. Waters’s ninth since she started Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., 36 years ago. Unlike the others, the new book does not use the name of the restaurant. It reads more like an organic “Joy of Cooking,” designed to instruct novices on how to make a perfect vinaigrette but also intended to be as essential to experienced cooks as the final Harry Potter installment was to 12-year-olds.

“Food can be very transformational and it can be more than just about a dish,” she said. “That’s what happened to me when I first went to France. I fell in love. And if you fall in love, well, then everything is easy.”

(Currently, Ms. Waters is not in love, though she longs for “a good pal to be in the world with.”)

By all measures, Ms. Waters should be relaxing at this point in her life. She is 63. She has held court with princes and presidents. A year ago, with some prodding from her partners at the restaurant, she pulled back from the daily work at Chez Panisse. Now she is trying to become better at leveraging her role as the high priestess of the local, sustainable food revolution.

Although she is enthusiastically mocked in some circles for the impossible goals she articulates in a wispy cadence, chefs who once sniffed that her methods were more about shopping than cooking now agree that the heart of great food is selecting the best ingredients.”

Lunch with Alice Waters: Food Revolutionary

Interested readers can access Kim Severson’s entire New York Times article here.
Technorati: Alice Waters, Chez Panisse, Berkeley, California, California Cuisine, cuisine, restaurants, food, New York City, NYC, Manhattan, lunch with Alice Waters, Brooklyn, Union Square Greenmarket, photographs, photography, photographer, Annie Leibovitz, blog, blogger, blogging
Be Social:

My Article for Monday, September 17, 2007

Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days

Quoted: Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, and author of the recently published The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days. In this week’s issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education , he has published a brief essay about his book. It is, I think, an important essay, since Edmundson addresses questions that

[tags: blogs]

See the Rest of My Articles at Blue Dot

Technorati: Sigmund Freud, Freud, The Death of Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Germany, Austria, Hitler. Nazis, holocaust, culture, cultural issues, cultural, politics, political issues, political, politicians, Iraq, Iraq war, war, image, photo, photograph

Be Social:

Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia, and author of the recently published The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days.  In this week’s issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription), he has published a brief essay about his book, which has also been reviewed in The Guardian.   It is, I think, an important essay, since Edmundson addresses questions that are of great importance to us today.  Manifestly, the book began as an investigation about death and dying, an attempt to more fully understand what it might mean to die a good death, a good secular death.  But as Edmundson began to study Freud’s old age and his later works, he came to see that the hurdles and plights that Freud faced were in many ways still ours.  Both religious fundamentalism and political tyranny threatened Freud in his old age, and in very immediate ways.

But Freud did more than experience that tyranny, he also wrote about it in amazingly prescient books and essays.  Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology, Future of an Illusion, and a number of his other later writings analyzed how and why authority goes bad and becomes oppressive.  He concluded that the rise of Hitler was but part of the endless recurrence of the same dynamics, a sad hunger for Truth, the Center, the Leader, and the Law.  Anna Freud pointed out that by understanding the darkness of that need and caring to make it plain for all to see, Freud was one who had perhaps truly brought something into the world that was genuinely new.  Edmundson has made a major contribution by reminding us of Freud’s later studies.

Technorati: Sigmund Freud, Freud, The Death of Sigmund Freud, Mark Edmundson, death, dying, tyranny, culture, cultural issues, cultural, Hitler, Nazis, holocaust, social, social issues, society, Germany, Austria, politics, political issues, political, politicians, personalities, image, photo, photograph, blog, blogger, blogging, weblog, website, Anna Freud

Be Social: