Citizen Reader

I have!

And I think I've read the whole thing before (The White Album, I'm talking about), but periodically I seem to forget that I've read it. Then I pick it up and I read the first essay, and then I start skipping around, and while reading it, I feel all unsettled and psychically itchy and uncomfortable and it seems to me that the earlier times I've read it, I've read it the exact same way, and maybe that's why I never remember that I have actually read the whole book, several times.

Wow. And those right there are a couple of sentences that would probably make Joan Didion cry. The very opposite of good writing.

Anyway. Please let me know if you've started The White Album and how you're finding it. I started it again and came across this, which of course I remembered, because it is very memorable (when commenting on her own physical and mental state at the time):

"By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968." (p. 15.)

And it strikes me that we are reading this essay fifty years on from 1968, and that is in-fucking-credible to me, how long this woman has been living and thinking and writing. (Also I couldn't agree more. An attack of vertigo and nausea seems to me an entirely appropriate response to 2018. The more things change, eh?)