5. Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11 by Joan Didion

I wanted to read more Joan Didion, and this is all they had at my local library last week. It's more of a book-lette, however. A slim 60-ish pages, set out with generous margins. I've read longer articles in the New Yorker.

So, America has hardened and become more conservative and insular since September 11, 2001. "Fixed ideas"- the politicization and co-opting of nationalism, the suppression of dissent- are common place and suffocating. Well, I think I knew that. That it's so obvious now perhaps speaks to the foresight of this book, which was published in early 2003.

But I was really reading this book just to see how JD writes. She writes well. That's the answer. I was transfixed by this really short, inconsequential description of her activities on a book tour:

"You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive time radio, you do an "event", a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service and leave a 5AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city"

It's hard for me to pinpoint what I like so much about that. Is it the monotonous run-on sentences that evoke the tour itself? No, I think it's the intimacy that exists within the phrase "a 5AM call with the desk". We don't need further description of the desk. We know the desk. We know "the desk". We are there. On tour. Serious writers. Bored by hotels.

I had to Google the essay she reads an extract from on tour, the one about "the shining and perishable dream itself." The essay is "Goodbye to All That" from 1967 and it's perfect. Short enough that you can read it here.

Please read it.