On Didion

 Lili Anolik-

In the fall of 2015, I spoke to Eve for a piece I was doing on Didion in Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. Eve, who loves and hates with a child’s purity and holds nothing back, was reticent, cagey. At least on certain topics. She'd talk to me, on the record, for example, about her memories of Didion’s amphetamine use: “Joan and I connected. The drugs she was on, I was on. She looks like she’d take downers, but really she’s a Hells Angel girl, white trash. I thought [she] was more in control than [the rest of us] were, but I reread The White Album. She didn’t sound in control, did she?” She wouldn’t talk to me, though, about Didion’s work, even after I’d switched off my recorder. She’d say that Didion’s books were “great”—every time, that word and no other—and then shut the conversation down. 

Bret Easton Ellis-

I knew Joan through her daughter, Quintana, who went to Bennington with me. And, let me tell you, sitting around with Joan Didion is no picnic. It’s the most awkward thing in life. Eve, though, was delightful, so warm and accessible. It’s funny to be talking about this now because I just reread Slow Days, Fast Company. The first time I read it I was in high school. I liked it when I was fifteen, sixteen, but it certainly wasn’t speaking to me in the way that Play It as It Lays was speaking to me, in the way that punk was speaking to me. But reading Slow Days, Fast Company again in my fifties was a revelation, and kind of breathtaking. It’s got this friendly, wandering, expansive, open-to-anything vibe that’s the polar opposite of Play It as It Lays, which is very locked and rigid. Eve is doing something so difficult—comedy is hard, harder than drama. And she sustains that comic mood and tone. But because her mood and tone is comic, she runs the risk of having her work seem lighter, airier, fruitier than it actually is.

On Apocalypse and language

 Verecundus’s other surviving work is a commentary on Scripture, and one might naturally assume that he was thinking of the final book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse of John. The Greek apocalypsis literally means an “unhiding” or “unveiling”—hence the book’s English title, Revelation. Since what was “unveiled” to John was the end of the world, “apocalypse” has acquired a secondary sense that has long trumped its primary one. We now use it to mean a cataclysmic destruction, one that wipes out most or all life.

Perhaps surprisingly, Revelation has little to say about fire. Verecundus’s description looks instead to a verse from the Second Epistle of Peter: “The day of the Lord will come…and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.” 

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Two of these episodes were identified with mythical stories, now best known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. One is the great flood of which Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha were the sole survivors, reconstituting humanity from stones. The other is the fiery cataclysm caused when the youthful Phaethon tried to drive the chariot of his father, the Sun. Veering too close to the Earth he scorches its surface, drying up rivers and turning the Ethiopians black. Eventually Jupiter, the supreme god, has to step in and destroy him with a thunderbolt.

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Still, Empson was right about the nature of the English language itself. Any piece of it seems susceptible to “alternative reactions,’ or as Joseph Conrad once wrote, “No English word has clean edges.” They all, the novelist thought, carried so many connotations as to be little more than “instruments for exciting blurred emotions.”