California Archives - Bob on Books

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion. New York: Open Road Media, 2017 (Originally published in 1968)

Summary: A collection of essays, most originally published as Saturday Evening Post articles describing Didion’s first years back in California, during the height of the hippie movement.

I never read Joan Didion’s work while she was alive. Only in recent years have I developed a taste for essays, and as I read essayists, Didion’s name comes up repeatedly as a master of the craft. This work is her first non-fiction (she published a novel, Run, River, in 1963). This set of essays, most of which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, were mostly written between 1964-1967. These were her first years back in her home state of California after eight years of working for Vogue in New York City, to which she eventually returned.

The essays capture the ethos of California in the mid-1960s, the mix of sunny optimism, the agricultural belt of the Sacramento Valley, where she grew up, the nervous lassitude of Los Angeles when the Santa Ana winds rise, and the outlaw fighter John Wayne after he “licked the Big C” the outlaw cells that had threatened his life when she was on set covering the making of The Sons of Katie Elder, Wayne’s 165th film. In stark contrast, she profiles Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. She describes Baez as “a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.”

Her title essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, recounts her time in 1967 in Haight-Asbury during the “summer of love” where youth from all over the country flocked to San Francisco signaling an unraveling in the social fabric of the country, an inchoate longing. She describes the people she met, the flophouses like The Warehouse they lived, the prodigious use of drugs, and the do-gooders like Arthur Lisch with utopian visions who ended up caring for kids when they crashed, and the Zen alternatives to trips. Already, the demise of Haight was apparent to some.

“Personals,” the second section collects articles with a more interior focus: her notebook keeping, thoughts on morality and self-respect (“Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home”). She reminds us of 1960’s monster movies and what is like to go home when it is no longer home.

The final part, “Seven Places of the Mind” take us from Hawaii to Alcatraz to Newport and to her eight years in New York. The essay on Newport, “The Seacoast of Despair” gave voice to my own experience of the lavish mansions of a bygone age, sterile and sad. In New York, she describes the point at which she stopped believing in “new faces” and felt herself becoming increasingly estranged from the whole scene, rescued by her husband who took a six-month leave that turned into a long-term residence in California.

There is so much of interest here. Didion masterfully crafts sentences and tells non-fiction stories. She is a keen observer of herself, the places where she visits or lives, and the times through which she was living. Whether profiling the famous or the unknown, like Comrade Laski of the Communist Party of the United States of America, she opens our eyes to both their individuality and the ways they serve larger than life roles as types.

Some of us are at a point of reflecting back over our lives, and summing up what they’ve meant. These essays were a lens to consider at least a part of that life. I’m intrigued enough to read more of her insights on the times we have both traversed and how she made sense of them. It strikes me that we had so many dreams of changing the world and indeed, the world has changed, but not as we expected. I wonder if Didion was as surprised and unsettled as I find myself in looking at the the world sixty years later. Or did she indeed foresee the center that cannot hold and the beast slouching toward Bethlehem?

Earthquake Storms: The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault by John Dvorak
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How do you include history, biography and science into a single book? John Dvorak does this in Earthquake Storms. The book traces is focused on earthquakes in California, and particularly the growing understanding of what is happening with the San Andreas fault.

Along the way, we have profiles of early seismologists like Dwight Whitney, who was California’s first state geologist until he was fired because he bore the bad news of there being few new sources of gold. However, his survey of the Cajalco mine uncovered evidence of fault geology, evidence he did not recognize. Later he discovers displaced blocks of granite that had moved hundreds of miles from similar material. Along with John Muir, they discover a “scarp” formed by an 1882 earthquake in Yosemite. They could not explain the mechanics.

We learn of Harry Reid and his lover Alice Eastwood, along with rivals Grove Karl Gilbert and Andrew Lawson who studied what happened along the faults after the 1906 San Francisco quake and noted the rightward slip of the land on each side of the fault. Earthquakes were not a result of upheavals but rather side slippage. But what was going on remained unclear. All this contributed to controversy around the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, which is near one of the faults. So far, it has survived quakes, with additional reinforcement since.

One of the most colorful characters we are introduced to is Charles Richter, who developed the Richter scale. Dvorak tells us of the development of the instruments that enable us to determine the intensity of quakes along with the quirky personality of its inventor.

Most significant in the account is the growing understanding of plate tectonics, which finally makes sense of the side slippage observed along the San Andreas fault as the Pacific plate moves northwestward against the continental place of North America. The stresses that develop as these plates move past each other build up until released in earthquakes.

It is only at the end of the book that Dvorak explores one of the implications of this growing understanding of plate tectonics and the various faults that run through California. If history is any guide, earthquakes tend to occur not simply periodically but in clusters that are a kind of chain reaction as forces build up and are relieved at one point, only adding to the stresses at another along the San Andreas fault and others running through California.

It was a bit surprising that this theory of “earthquake storms” (hence the title) was only raised at the end of the book. Perhaps Dvorak felt the need to develop the narrative of seismological understanding of California before he could introduce this. Perhaps this is still a relatively new theory that he did not want to explore beyond the data. But it did seem to take quite awhile to get to the title theme.

Still, what Dvorak gives us is a fascinating narrative that also should challenge everyone who lives along these faults to be prepared. Earthquakes, and perhaps even a devastating series of earthquakes are inevitable, with significant probabilities in many areas in the next 30 years. It doesn’t seem wise to assume that it won’t happen in one’s lifetime!

This review is based on a complimentary e-galley version of this book provided by the publisher through Netgalley. I have not been in any other way compensated for the review of this book.

View all my reviews