Greetings! Earlier this summer, when I first planned What is California?, I drew up a wish list of guests who would make eminent sense for a new podcast about the Golden State.
At the top of the list: Gov. Jerry Brown. (Got him!)
No. 2? The high priestess of California letters—Joan Didion.
I’m… not optimistic.
But that’s OK! Enter David L. Ulin, the editor of Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s, the first volume of the Library of America’s three-part Didion collection. Ulin is also a former books editor for the Los Angeles Times and current editor with Air/Light and Alta Journal. He and I talked at length about Didion’s dark California in her nonfiction classics Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album and novels including Run River and Play It As It Lays. We also examined some of Ulin’s other favorite authors—past and present—whose compelling, influential work gets us a little closer to answering this project’s enduring question, “What is California?”
This was a terrific chat, and I’m so pleased to share it.
Meanwhile, thank you for your ongoing listenership and readership! Please continue to share and refer folks to the show, and if you feel like chipping in a few shekels to help keep the lights on and the cat fed at What is California? HQ, you can become a supporter at Patreon. I’d be terrifically grateful.
Enjoy the show, and remember: Keep your eye on the bear! 🐻
Episode Notes
David L. Ulin is the editor of the Library of America's Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s, the editor of Air/Light literary journal, and the former books editor for the Los Angeles Times.
I think [Joan Didion] is a corrective. Part of what drew me to her initially was that her inner weather and my inner weather are not that dissimilar. So there was that sense of recognition, but also the idea of her as a corrective of all that sunshine-y, California lotus-land myth. She is actively trying to destroy that mythology. And I think that as someone who resists that mythology because it reduces the state to the level of a cliche--it reduces the culture and the place to the level of a cliche--I liked that idea.
Notes and references from this episode:
Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, by David L. Ulin
Easy Rawlins series, by Walter Mosley
David Trinidad, Poetry Foundation
Eat the Mouth That Feeds You - by Carribean Fregoza
In the Watchful City, by S. Qiouyi Lu
If He Hollers Let Him Go, by Chester Himes
The Socialist Who Won a Democratic Primary and the Dirty Hollywood Politics That Sunk His Campaign, by Zelda Roland, KCET
Dreaming: Hard Luck And Good Times In America, by Carolyn See
Golden Days, by Carolyn See
The Nowhere City, by Alison Lurie
I Should Have Stayed Home, by Horace McCoy
The Flutter of an Eyelid, by Myron Brinig
Joan Didion: The 1960s and 70s (Library of America), edited by David L. Ulin
Labyrinth, by David L. Ulin
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