Let me tell you what I mean

I was paradropped into Season 9 of The Blacklist, something the better half has been watching over the years. I find the premise and plot rather contrived, but have to keep that opinion to myself.  Anyway, after watching an excruciatingly tedious and hackneyed episode which contains just about every tired trope in formulaic US TV dramas last night (Dressler’s back story), I declared that I had had enough and was headed to the bedroom.  

“What are you going to do?”

“Get into bed with Joan Didion”

OK, that doesn’t sound like the right thing to say to a spouse.  

Let me tell you what I mean. There is a slim volume of Joan Didion’s essays that had been demanding my attention for the past fortnight.  I needed to have finished reading a book this calendar year.  This was a psychological need.

A writer friend, who believes me to be better read than I actually am, asked me last week what I was reading. I parried with a description of my visit to the neighbourhood bookshop and my conversation with the proprietor, someone to whom we have gone for the best part of 3 decades for our Tsundoku fix, but who opened up only now about the sheer awfulness of what our country has become when we exchanged notes on how the children were doing. The Didion volume was one of the many books that I had picked up to add to my co-library (a term I prefer to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's “anti-library").

Not that I have not been reading, and not that I have not been reading stuff of sheer excellence.  I have been engaged in going over the draft chapters of a superb book which will be brought out soon by ACM Books (of which I am an Editor-in-Chief).  The book is edited by Krzysztof Apt and Tony Hoare and is on the work of Edsger Dijkstra and how it has influenced developments in the science of computing.  This volume follows a book on Tony Hoare himself (edited by Cliff Jones and Jayadev Misra) that came out a few months ago.  Two other draft books which I have read through recently and which I expect will come out in the next few  months are similar volumes on the works of Tim Berners-Lee and of Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman. 

Any way back to Didion and Let me tell you what I mean. The writing is pure her, the voice is unique.  The selection of essays is excellent, even if the overly long foreword by Hilton Als reveals too much about what is to follow.  There are sharp observations on people in A Trip to Xanadu (on the Randolph Hurst mansion), Pretty Nancy (wife of Gov. Reagan), Everywoman.com (Martha Stewart) and on American society (in Getting Serenity, in Fathers, Sons and Screaming Eagles and in Alicia and the Underground Press).  There is insightful analysis and yet tender portraits in The Long Distance Runner (Tony Richardson) and Some Women (Robert Mapplethorpe and his photographs).

My personal favourites in the volume however are the essays dealing with writing. Her writing.   Starting with On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice, which should be required reading for all parents who want their children to go to the most prestigious colleges. Telling Stories is about about the college course that got her writing stories (or rather almost did not), and the fate of three short stories she wrote in one particular year.  Last Words on Hemingway and whether the unfinished works of a writer should be shared with the world is quintessential Joan Didion.    

And most of all Why I Write.   Why am I writing this?  Because of Why I Write.