That usual thing has happened, that when you’ve been somewhere or discovered something, you start coming across it all the time… I was so lucky to visit California in January, before anything like the pandemic was really on the horizon, and I suppose I fell in love with LA 🙂 So now things about California are popping  up all the time, including this book which I took off Sue’s shelf at random:

Joan Didion writes fantastically well mainly about LA and California (in this book at least). They’re short investigative pieces on subjects ranging from Joan Baez to John Wayne, Howard Hughes to film noir… She’s clearly a genius at getting people to talk, to take her into their confidence, and then listens acutely and observes with razor-sharp perception. Her access is amazing – she must have been incredibly well-connected and trusted in all echelons, and could presumably talk her way into and out of any situation.

She’s also very funny. There’s a hilarious passage where she gives a record of a hearing in Monterey County Courthouse, as to whether Joan Baez’ newly founded ‘School For The Study Of Nonviolence’ constitutes “land use detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County”:

Mrs Gerald Petkuss, who lived across the road from the school, had put the problem another way. “We wonder what kind of people would go to a school like this?” she asked quite early in the controversy. “Why they aren’t out working and making money?” Mrs Petruss was a plump young matron with an air of bewildered determination, and she came to the rostrum in a strawberry-pink knit dress to say that she had been plagued “by people associated with Miss Baez’s school coming up to ask where it was although they knew perfectly well where it was – one gentleman I remember had a beard.”

Other times she just stands back and let’s us make up our own minds as to whether something is brilliant or crazy, true or fake…

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But while she doesn’t let her personal views get in the way of the story, the pieces are so good because we do sense her personality, her own evocative journey and the world seen though her eyes. This is a lovely passage – an introduction to the meeting with John Wayne: