I found on my Kindle a sample I had downloaded long ago of Joan Didion’s first essay collection, Slouching Toward Bethlehem. The first essay in the collection, Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream, was fantastic. Here’s the opening paragraph:

THIS IS A STORY about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

I also loved this part of the next paragraph:

This is the California where it is easy to Dial-A-Devotion, but hard to buy a book. This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school.

It wasn’t long before I was purchasing the entire book. The title is from William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming, which you might recognize:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I was pleased to “get it” when Didion made a reference to “Julian English” in one of the essays in her book, as he was the protagonist of Appointment in Samarra, which I had been listening to on my Audible app. What a happy coincidence…although my use of that expression is questionable given Julian’s inevitable fate. Her reference to O’Hara’s novel isn’t that much of a surprise, given that he was as resistant to explicit meaning as she was in his fictional, and her creatively factual, slices of life.

Didion, like Tom Wolfe, was part of the New Journalism movement. Her writing was egocentric, sharply detailed, and stringent. Like O’Hara in his early novels, she avoided being too explicit in what meanings or conclusions the reader might draw from her work. However, that elliptical approach included abrupt endings to most of her essays in Slouching Toward Bethlehem. Their lack of conclusions thus violates the structural principles of The Lively Art of Writing which I learned in high school.

New Journalism, which usually found a home in magazines instead of newspapers, is said to have died by the early 1980s. Of course, these days all forms of journalism are struggling economically. Newspapers, magazines, and television news programs have been dying out for years. Some have survived in digital form.

The implosion of television and radio news audiences is one of several reasons why the Republicans finally succeeded in their decades-long quest to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helped support public television and radio stations.

I haven’t watched any television, including public television, in many years. However, I have long listened to NPR news when commuting to and from work, and listening to its three-minute hourly news segment is a bedtime ritual. I’ve donated to KWGS, the National Public Radio affiliate in Tulsa, for years, and my response to the GOP’s gutting of its federal funding was to double my monthly donation to $25 per month.

Currently I’m spending almost $150 per month for news. Here are my subscriptions and donations, ranked by monthly cost:

• Tulsa World, $39
• Apple One, $38 [bundle of news, music, and media services]
• KWGS NPR, $25
• Oklahoma Watch, $15
• Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, $11
• The Oklahoman, $6
• NonDoc, $5
• Tangle, $5
• New York Times, $4

After I retire, I’ll re-assess my various subscriptions. I could cancel the E-E and still access it with my subscription with The Oklahoman since they are both now owned by Gannett, I could cancel the New York Times and still access it via Apple News, and I figure the Tulsa World would offer me a better deal if I called their circulation department and threatened to cancel, a gambit I’ve used for years to keep the New York Times down to $1/week. However, I like investing in journalism, and even now I’m spending less than $5/day for news, and to me that’s quite a bargain.

Another post-retirement project might be to read more of Didion. I’d like to have more of my own writing display the scalpel-like precision of her slices while invoking a distinct mood and atmosphere. Her journalism is far from New anymore, but it, like the many news sources I continue to invest in, has value.