Search Results for: Joan Didion

Elmo Keep: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Elmo Keep is a writer who has written for The Hairpin, and other places.

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The Tetris Effect — Justin Wolfe, The Awl

There really isn’t a way to talk about this without spoiling the reveals. Just read it, whether you understand gaming or not, it doesn’t matter: If you don’t, you will come away curious, and if you do, you will have your mind blown it’s just so clever and moving and wonderful. The narrative structure of this piece is so satisfyingly interwoven and then resolved, it’s one of those stories that makes for a totally different experience on the second reading. This is the kind of enthralling, super-long writing that I love the Internet for making space for. 

Joan — Sara Davidson, ByLiner Original

This was a beautiful companion to Blue Nights, Didion’s most recent memoir. In that book, she is very adept as all memoirists are, at revealing only what she chooses to while weaving the illusion of revealing everything. Sara Davidson has known Didion for forty years and the portrait that she paints of her very affectionately is in a lot of ways more complete than the image that Didion presents of herself. A must for Joan Didion tragics like me, especially for the glimpses of her life with John Gregory Dunne written from an outsider’s perspective peppered throughout. 

Blindsight — Chris Colin, The Atavist

The Atavist have really pioneered what is the logical evolution of longform writing for the web, integrating everything about the medium into tablet-only experiences that truly immerse you in a world. In this story the writer finds ways to let us experience what is happening to the protagonist — a man who has suffered an horrific brain injury — so vividly that we can for a moment inhabit is mind, a place where memory and time have been shattered and distorted. You also get the sense throughout of how much the writer cared for his subject and the result is a humane and profound portrait of resilience. 

What Makes A Great Critic? — Maria Bustillos, The Awl

The Internet has been wonderful for writing for so many reasons, but also, terrible! For others! Particularly when it comes to cultural criticism (pop culture especially). In this piece Maria Bustillos does everyone a favour by pointing out that recaps are not reviews and takes a long, considered look at what makes criticism valuable when the writer really, really cares about the subject. This piece goes a long way to settling the “criticism vs review” debate and is a must read for all aspiring critics and an excellent brush-up for any working critic who might have let complacency slip in. 

The Quaid Conspiracy — Nancy Jo Sales, Vanity Fair

I loved this inversion of a celebrity profile, especially in Vanity Fair to read about people on the fringes of that machine. Not even the writer is certain what’s true and what isn’t in this caper — which is really what it reads like; being dragged along on a wildly tangential ride rife with drugs and paranoia. 

The By Far Funnest Read of the Year — American Marvel — Edith Zimmerman, GQ

This gets so much love because it is *fucking awesome*, that’s why. It’s also been widely derided by old people, which is again a tick in its favour in my view. This is the exact kind of celebrity profile you want to read: It’s a publicist’s nightmare, which again, is why it’s so great. Read it! Read them all!

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Share your own Top 5 Longreads of 2011, all through December. Just tag it #longreads on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook. 

Possibly the best living American essayist and probably the most influential, Didion has always maintained that she doesn’t know what she’s thinking until she writes it down. Yet over the past decade, she’s been writing down more about her own life than ever before. If you want to know about her upbringing, readWhere I Was From, about the delusions of her California pioneer ancestors. If you want to know how she feels about the sudden 2003 death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, you can readThe Year of Magical Thinking,her stark but openhearted account of emotional dislocation. And if you want to know how she feels about the drawn-out death of her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, two years later at the age of 39, you can order her new memoir, Blue Nights, on Amazon.

“I Was No Longer Afraid to Die. I Was Now Afraid Not to Die.” — Boris Kachka, New York magazine

See some #longreads by Joan Didion

Alex Pappademas: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Alex Pappademas is a staff writer for GQ

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Rules: Nothing not published this year, nothing from GQ, because I work there, and—in the spirit of the assignment—nothing I didn’t first read on my iPhone. (And I realize now, having done this whole thing, that everything on the main list is from a print-based publication, which should not be taken as some kind of a Statement. I still love you, Internet!)

Michael Kruse, Lonely, Stressed and Frustrated: Inside the Mind of the Pinellas Monkey (St. Petersburg Times, May 16, 2010)

Best celebrity profile I read this year, and it’s a write-around. About a monkey. “People who are alone tend to make self-destructive decisions. They might drink too much or not eat right. They start giving up. And the monkey here, he explains, isn’t all that different.”

Mark Harris, The Red Carpet Campaign (New York, 2/7/10)

Reported essay about awards-season swirl and how the pseudo-event sausage of the Academy Awards gets made. The gist: “A good Oscar narrative makes voters feel that, by writing a name on a ballot, they’re completing a satisfying plotline. Only a few of these stories are effective, and every campaign season, movies scramble to own them.” Sprawling yet surgical; managed to make me care, in February, about a subject I’m usually utterly post-give-a-shit about by Thanksgiving.

Rob Tanenbaum, The Playboy Interview: John Mayer (Playboy, March 2010)

Yeah, this is the one where Mayer rendered himself culturally leprous with a few spectacularly ill-advised comments about African-Americans and his weiner— but it’s also the best Q&A with a rock personality I read this year. Speaking as somebody who does this for a living: It’s hard to get something interesting out of a subject who’s reluctant or dumb, but it’s actually way harder to take a quote machine like Mayer— who’s historically used compulsive self-disclosure and meta-acknowledgements of what he knows about the interview process to completely run the table in these situations— somewhere he doesn’t want to go. And, uh, obviously, that’s what happened.

Chris Jones, Roger Ebert: The Essential Man (Esquire, February 2010)

I spent an embarrassing amount of time—like, months—working on a snakebit-from-the-beginning Ebert profile for GQ five years ago. It never ran, mostly because it sucked. Sucked on draft 1, sucked worse on draft 18. (Like Rog once said about certain reviews: “The bad ones take forever.”) So I was all ready to hate this Ebert story just for existing and appearing in a magazine and reminding me of how spectacularly I blew it in 2005—but I didn’t, because it’s so goddamn good it turned off the part of my brain that hates people for being better than me. That part where Ebert gets mad at Disney’s copyright police for taking down YouTube videos of him and Siskel, and because he can’t yell, he makes the font bigger and bigger? “He presses the button again and again and again, the words growing bigger and bigger and bigger until they become too big to fit the screen, now they’re just letters, but he keeps hitting the button, bigger and bigger still, now just shapes and angles, just geometry filling the white screen with black like the three squares. Roger Ebert is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and he’s still hitting the button, bang, bang, bang, and he’s shouting now. He’s standing outside on the street corner and he’s arching his back and he’s shouting at the top of his lungs.” Holy fucking shit.

Joe Hagan, The Return of Governor Moonbeam, And Other Hallucinations From The Golden State (New York, October 10, 2010)

Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman contest the California narrative as the state, fiscally gut-shot by the housing collapse, tumbles broke and stoned into the sea; Hagan weaves Jerry’s free-association and Schwarzenegger’s puny-humans ranting and Meg Whitman’s total carpetbagging bullshit in and out of a bunch of elegant set pieces—the Hyatt-ballroom rally, the pot dispensary, David Boies’ beach house. The obvious comparison to make when you’re talking about a story where a writer tries to comprehend weed-hazy apocalyptic California is Joan Didion, but the real bookend for this one—culturally, decade-wise, whatever—is the series of dispatches Hank Stuever filed from L.A. and Sacramento back in 2003, during the nutsoid recall election that led to Schwarzenegger taking office in the first place. (They’re collected in his book OFF RAMP as one essay, “Recallifornia”; the story about Gary Coleman is here. Read those and Joe’s story back to back, groove on the paradox of Californian perma-decline.)

Honorable mentions, aka “I could have done 15 of these”:

Jay Caspian Kang, The High Is Always The Pain and the Pain Is Always the High (The Morning News, 10/8/10), which I read after everybody else put it on their Top 5 lists, so I’m not counting it, because totally arbitrary rules are rules.

Sean Witzke, Emma Peel Sessions 39 – ‘Have you seen the Lady From Shanghai? Orson Welles… that one makes no sense’ (supervillain.wordpress.com, 7/5/10)

Molly Lambert, In Which We Eagerly Await Aaron Sorkin’s Friend Request (thisrecording.com, 10/7/10)

Michaelangelo Matos, eMusic Q&A: Rob Sheffield (17dots, 8/5/10)

Mary HK Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper, On ‘New Moon’: ‘Teenage Female Desire Manifest’ (The Awl, 11/20/10)

Oh, and it’s from 2009, but: Chris Stangl, Ghost Train: The Lost Pauline Kael Review of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) (The Exploding Kinetoscope, 7/7/09)

Matt O'Rourke: My Favorite Longreads from 2010

Matt O’Rourke is interactive group creative director for Crispin Porter+Bogusky in Boulder.

copymattt:

For those of you that like the internet for things other than cats and boobies, I give you 5 of my favorite Longreads from the past 12 months.

Hit-and-run vicitm was quiet, dependable, co-workers say

If you’re really lucky, Andrew Meacham will still be alive when you die.

The 2010 Rapha Gentleman’s Race Report

Heidi Swift on bikes, dirt, enduring love and lots of vomit. 

5 Year-Old Slugger

A simple story told beautifully by one of the best sports-writers on earth. 

Letter From Manhattan

Joan Didion’s original review of Woody Allen’s last great movie.

And God Created Controversy

On the surface this seems like one of the dumbest interviews ever documented. It is.

Letter from 'Manhattan'

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

Letter from ‘Manhattan’

Longreads Pick

From 1979: Joan Didion reviews Woody Allen. “These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus ethics. They share sodas, and wonder ‘what love is.’ They have ‘interesting’ occupations, none of which intrudes in any serious way on their dating. Many characters in these pictures ‘write,’ usually on tape recorders. In Manhattan, Woody Allen quits his job as a television writer and is later seen dictating an ‘idea’ for a short story, an idea which, I am afraid, is also the ‘idea’ for the picture itself: ‘People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe.’ “

Published: Aug 16, 1979
Length: 7 minutes (1,937 words)

Grief, Memory, and the Vortex Effect

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir about the death of her husband and her daughter’s sudden sickness, Didion describes being paralyzed by memories of her family triggered during mundane circumstances. She calls this experience “the vortex effect.”

Matt Zoller Seitz’s Salon essay, “All The Things That Remind Me Of Her,” shows the vortex experience in full effect. Seitz describes losing his wife to a heart attack, and then later, the seemingly benign things that would trigger memories of her:

A song, a poem, a scene from a film triggers memories. You’re startled, moved, shaken. And you’re faced with two options: 1) engage with the work and the memories it calls up, or 2) retreat, postpone, avoid.

Option 2 is very attractive. You’re buying Tums and hand soap at the drugstore and a song comes on, a song you associate with somebody you loved — a shared reference point, an in-joke, an anthem, a confession — and suddenly you’re a mess, a wreck, useless, so you leave the store without buying anything. You’re watching a movie in a multiplex or in somebody’s living room and here comes a character that reminds you of somebody you miss — a parent, a sibling, a lover, a friend — and you excuse yourself for a while and go into another room or take a walk around the block, and when you’ve regained control, you go back. (“Hey, where were you?” “Nowhere. Just taking a break.”)

Retreat, postpone, avoid.

Read the story

Photo: Paul Cross