If you somehow read the same 1s and 0s that I do, it's possible you've noticed a Didion Pattern emerging. "Goodbye To All That" brought up at regular intervals when New York and migrations of young, dissatisfied generations of women are being discussed. Chock Full O' Nuts references and imagined trips to Hawaii not for the beaches, but for the solitude she wrote into its hotel rooms and airports. Emily Gould's Didion-related exotic dessert metaphor. And this interview with young Brooklynite blogger Meaghan O'Reardon, which contains the single, separated (oh how appropriate) line:

I love Joan Didion.

It's as simple as that. Invoking her name, admitting a love for and an allegiance to her prose. And I started to wonder: is it because of Joan Didion that we blog?*

I've admitted here before about how much her writing guides the hand that writes this blog. Just as a few years back, various writers at The Stranger talked about things they have stolen from Joan Didion. The blunt sentences. The "we"s and the breaks in the line.

Something like this.

But more than style, more than line breaks, what Joan Didion gives us — as writers in general and bloggers in particular — is the okay to write about ourselves. The essays she writes are both expressions of herself and the world around her. Let me restate the obvious: she writes about herself. The world she encounters and perceives and translates into words on the page is Joan's world. We bloggers do little more than the same in attempting to legitimize and document our own occasional solipsism.

(She must have the patience of a saint to put up with all us pretenders. If she even knows we exist.)

St. Joan says it's okay to perceive the world through the lens of self. It feels honest. What feels false, to some of us, is removing ourselves from the story, forgetting the fact that I was in a conference room on the 5th floor in a building several miles away when the towers fell watching the Spanish channel because it was the only station that would come in clear enough to see what was happening. That I was wearing flats and a pleated white skirt on the day of the blackout, and walked the last mile home through the park barefoot and tenderly. Or that I have no particular recollection associated with the precise moment the Berlin Wall was torn down. Only that it was there, and then it wasn't, and then they were selling pieces of it in our local supermarket. We come through the world and to the blank page brandishing a personal historical lens; this, says St. Joan, is fitting and right and okay.

The women (and, just as often, men) who channel Didion while they document the world around them are admitting that we're in this world and therefore the world is in us. It begins, of course, in what we remember. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Or is there? What good is it to anyone else how I see the world? Short answer: It isn't any good to anyone. You're writing into the void. Shorter answer: It's a matter of perception. Or we ignore this train of thought and realize that writing is writing is writing is writing. The point is that we are writing. We are all becoming writers.

Because, like she said, we were all telling our stories in order to live.

The litany of St. Joan. (See also the litany of St. Joni. Those lyrics that go it's coming on Christmas, they're cutting down trees, you know they're putting up reindeers and singing songs of joy and peace are straight out of someone's December archives, someone somewhere in a dimly lit room with a needle hitting the last groove on the record.) I don’t know how these women become saints. These skinny California-bleached girls with words in their mouths and on the tips of their pens about rocks and rivers and politicians and encounters with men in bars. I don't even know if it's fair to give them that power. All they may be doing is inspiring droves of women with knitted brows to hunch over an acoustic guitar and form their lips around the letter O with more pain than is deserved or experienced. Hunch over their writing desks and come up with a mimicked packing list. Or, sometimes, without any warning, in the middle of a rambling essay, a reference to rattlesnakes.

But, in the end, it's comforting for us to see art translated as perception, to see that a generation of published writers has come before us, a generation that had no shame in what self meant to the process of writing.

Thus, we recite her words like a litany. Scatter them over our prose like holy water. St. Joan, bless this prose, as rambling and self-involved as it may be, that readers might understand what I'm trying to give...

* Possibly more important: do we have her blessing?

(It's like we're all on some cosmic Didion wavelength. Just today, I came across a piece that manages to say much of what I've been trying to say with far more grace: V.L. Hartmann's Joan Didion Crosses the Street at The Morning News.)

UPDATE: What was in the water on Wednesday? Jezebel also makes a reference to Saint Joan, and delivers a great line: "As a keen student of hero-worship, Didion herself must find it fascinating." (via Jessica)

It killed me to have to miss this.

I was busy cleaning things. Preparing. Buying white wine and making sure vegetables, bread, crackers, and cheese would all fit on the two tiny tables we've begun to use in place of a coffee table. Hostessing! I bought antique aprons for this opportunity. Inviting other women into my house in order to show what I can do with some appropriately placed coasters sewn by my grandmother from her quilting scraps. And discussing Flaubert along the way.

Joan Didion, meanwhile, was in another borough, preaching, and I missed it. I made excuses: it'll turn up somewhere. Someone will go, write it down, and I won't feel so bad for missing it.

Want to hear a secret? I feel kind of bad for missing it.

(But I think those women appreciated my appropriately placed coasters.)

In the buildup to any trip, no matter how big or small, I start to think too much. There are decisions to be made. Suitcases to dig out. Toiletries to assemble. I get so many ideas in my head of what I need to be doing, and, rather than writing them down in a list and checking them off one by one, offering myself the option of that miracle they call "A Sense Of Completion," I let these thoughts swarm around in my head, gather speed and strength, and become monster thoughts. Beasts of burden. Daunting, ready to pull me into the deep.

I'm about to embark on three separate trips over the next three weeks, and in my head is a veritable Monterey Bay Aquarium of "to-do"s.

I'm trying to get them out of the way one at a time.

I start by looking to San Francisco, and to Didion. I'm packing again. So I find the list, the one in The White Album.

TO PACK AND WEAR:
2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
2 pair shoes
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with:
shampoo
toothbrush and paste
Basis soap
razor, deodorant
aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax
face cream, powder, baby oil

TO CARRY:
mohair throw
typewriter
2 legal pads and pens
files
house key

The list that she kept taped inside of her closet while she was reporting that let her pack without thinking. And I really need to stop thinking right now, because as soon as I start thinking, the thoughts begin their laps, round and round, muddying the waters.

What do I wear. What do I wear. Where's my passport. How am I getting to JFK. What do I wear.

Get these things out of the way, one at a time. And so I begin to assemble, for myself, 2 skirts, 2 jerseys or leotards...

The internet seems unbelievably sad today. I was all set to add a post on the topic of regret, but it didn't seem wise to stir the melancholic pot. Plus, in comparison to what some people are going through, my regrets are nothing. Dust in the wind. Instead: I'll blink at you in wonder.

• The Difficulty with Didion
  Physically frail and refined in her writing, Didion just doesn't fit in. If this were a playground, she'd be the aloof girl in the corner, disliked for being so damn cool. I've always secretly hoped that Joan Didion is Highlander. Is that weird? (See also: On Playing Laser Tag With Joan Didion)


• Book Notes: Kelly McMasters ("Welcome to Shirley")
  Hot on the heels of Didion... I'm still trying to figure out what she means when she says that my favorite Billy Bragg song "hurts the ears," but at least she's digging it. (Disclosure: Kelly and I have some friends in common. Though in this day and age, does that really need to be disclosed? If so, then hoo-boy.)


• On Translation - Linh Dinh
  The worst translators are parasites and conmen, the best ones are parasites and pimps. I tend to think of myself as an honest and totally selfless charity worker. My sentiments exactly. (via wood s lot)


• Jamie Lidell - Jim
  The first time we heard Jamie Lidell, we were standing in the rain at an art party in the ports of Riga, not quite sure yet what we were doing there. Someone pulled us inside the warehouse, where Jamie Lidell was on stage in a science fair spacesuit, making the people dance. And all we could do was smile. He will turn your clouds to sun. (full album stream via largehearted boy)


• Prague, maybe not the best market for this
  Rollerblades meet cobblestones.

I am reading Didion again. You can tell when I am reading Didion because contractions disappear. I begin to sound matter-of-fact, clinical.

I wanted to savor the last novel, The Last Thing He Wanted, to the very latest possible moment. I sometimes wonder if she will ever write another novel. But it was too difficult to resist, especially given the climate. Last night, after watching the results roll in from New Hampshire, I read Didion's introduction to Political Fictions, and smuggled The Last Thing He Wanted, itself set during the 1984 elections, into my bag on the way to work. Election years are like that. Suddenly our lives are filled with red-white-and-blue promises, analysis, jargon. And so, of course, my books must be too.

(Here is where I suppose I could truly elaborate on the title of this post: write about what to fill your civic-minded bookshelves with, political biographies, autobiographies, books on farming, foreign policy and tax law, Robert Penn Warren and The Worst Hard Time, or advice on how to discern the chaff from the wheat in newspapers and online. But I feel myself getting a headache at the smallest suggestion of it. The title is my attempt at cleverness, nothing more — a way to tie one paragraph to an-unrelated-other*... Apologies if I tricked you into reading. I can be deceiving like that.)

So. Elsewhere.

At The Magazineer, Heather Champ shares her guidelines for how to read the New Yorker (though she should try the fiction sometime, really). How-Tos (*now you see my intention) on the brain in The Guardian blogs as well, where there's an appreciation of life lessons learned from a 1957 How-To book on knitting.

Languor Management offers Mandelshtam's thoughts on writing children's literature in Lenin's time without anthropomorphizing animals: In the next story she submitted, the sheep and the rams were embarrassed to say "baa" and "maa." As the tale was told, the sheep silently grew wool for a useful purpose.

Voices are raised for a better translation of Simone de Beauvoir.

Stephany at Crooked House links to the Sorted Books Project. Earlier, Ed Park and readers shared their own. You might not me believe me when I tell you I wasn't considering this when I posted this week's Sunday Zen, which, read vertically...

Innocents abroad, lend me your character! Slouching towards Bethlehem - the last thing he wanted. If nobody speaks of remarkable things: the razor's edge.

...kind of charms me. Or scares me.

Does that make me a flip-flopper?