We Were Connoisseurs of Synonyms, Or: Why I Use Twitter
Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 01:30PM It is easy to make light of this kind of "writing," and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words [...], a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs.
(Joan Didion, "Telling Stories," 1978)
joan didion, writing 
Book Haul
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 12:42PM Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behavior
Ford Madox Ford - Conrad
Henry James - Selected Short Stories
Louis Bromfield - The Farm (with a postcard from 1961 tucked inside)
Joyce Carol Oates - Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction
Christopher Pike - Weekend, Remember Me, Bury Me Deep, Master Murder
Joan Didion - Play It As It Lays, Salvador, A Book Of Common Prayer
I stood amongst the seemingly endless rows of books, a full basket of them at my feet, and sent J a text: "I'm either in heaven or in hell right now."
Just half an hour before, I'd received a message from a friend about the Friends of the Library book sale happening in the next neighborhood over. I raced through the end of my work day and zipped over to the building, a sizable warehouse next to our local hardware store. Room after room of used books, aisles dotted with local browsers. The two women browsing the African American section for biographies, the 20-something boys in skinny jeans discovering Korean pop amongst the foreign records, the teenaged girl considering an Alexander Dumas, the old bearded man in a skull cap clutching a fabric tote and squinting at high shelves. Hunters like me, I thought.
"Can I help you find anything?"
"No, thank you." I reshelved a fiction anthology I'd been flipping through. "But I wish you were here longer than this weekend."
"Oh, we're here every Wednesday!"
My heart skipped a beat. One thing I miss about living in New York is spending hours disappearing into stacks of used books, trying to find that one elusive title that speaks to you. Read me. Own me. I'm cheap. I missed that hunt. I wasn't sure anything I was looking for would be here, but then like a gift there they were: the Christopher Pike books I've been craving as candy comfort. The Didion novel — a 1978 Pocket edition no less — I had wanted to revisit to inspire something I'm trying to write.
The Didion book appeared suddenly like a gold nugget in the bottom of a pan of gravel. I'd already found a trade paperback Play It As It Lays and a hardcover Salvador — books I'd lost to the move or to lending — and wondered to myself why you never see mass market copies of any of her books. And then, just as I was about to leave, there amongst the John Updikes and James Micheners, ragged by thumbs and bent at the spine, she appeared before me. Take me, I'm yours.
One hour and twenty dollars later, I was walking buoyantly to my car with a bag full of books. What was lost had been found. The snows had dusted the streets; my car door cracked with ice as I opened it and called J to tell him I was heading home. "I'm so happy," I said to him, my words collecting in a jolly frost, cheeks flushed from the hunt.
© Zan McQuade. All rights reserved.
books, joan didion 