## Metadata * Author: [[Joan Didion]] * ASIN: B01MCX9QDF * ISBN: 0008257175 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MCX9QDF ## Highlights “I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South.” — location: [44](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=44) ^ref-64695 --- “The future always looks good in the golden land,” Didion wrote in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” “because no one remembers the past.” In the South no one can forget it. — location: [47](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=47) ^ref-15378 --- (“I never been anyplace,” says a Biloxi woman, “I wanted to go.”) — location: [63](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=63) ^ref-25389 --- these motels have the appearance of stage sets. They are American markers artificially planted in the brooding wildness of the Deep South, which in these notes resembles a foreign country as exotic as El Salvador, Vietnam, Granada, or the other tropics “of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy” to which she gravitated in her nonfiction and fiction. — location: [84](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=84) ^ref-5970 --- “everything seems to go to seed.” — location: [90](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=90) ^ref-14457 --- a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. — location: [94](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=94) ^ref-14334 --- How could the hidebound South, with its perpetual disintegration and defiant decadence, at the same time represent the future? Didion admits the idea seems oxymoronic, but she is onto something. Part of the answer, she suspects, lies in the bluntness with which Southerners confront race, class, and heritage—“distinctions which the frontier ethic teaches western children to deny, and to leave deliberately unmentioned.” In the South such distinctions are visible, rigid, and the subject of frank conversation. — location: [97](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=97) ^ref-48332 --- Everybody in the South knows where they stand. There is no shame in discussing it. It is suspicious, in fact, to avoid the subject. — location: [107](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=107) ^ref-57009 --- An unquestioned premise among those who live in American cities with international airports has been, for more than half a century now, that Enlightenment values would in time become conventional wisdom. — location: [115](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=115) ^ref-9780 --- Some fought for this future to come sooner. Others waited patiently. But nobody seemed to believe that it would never arrive. — location: [116](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=116) ^ref-9351 --- revolt. As Didion herself noted nearly fifty years ago, their solidarity is only reinforced by outside disapproval, particularly disapproval by the northern press. — location: [122](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=122) ^ref-2233 --- A writer from the Gulf South once wrote that the past is not even past. — location: [126](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=126) ^ref-34798 --- They suggest that California’s dreamers of the golden dream were just that—dreamers—while the “dense obsessiveness” of the South, and all the vindictiveness that comes with it, was the true American condition, the condition to which we will always inevitably return. — location: [127](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=127) ^ref-26056 --- I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. I did not much want to talk about this. — location: [214](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=214) ^ref-50752 --- In New Orleans they have mastered the art of the motionless. — location: [226](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=226) ^ref-45111 --- We should obtain a copy of The Great Days of the Garden District. — location: [260](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=260) ^ref-2192 --- Interstate America: — location: [474](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=474) ^ref-45686 --- blue-eyed soul, — location: [512](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=512) ^ref-42128 --- “There is and must be,” he said, a “continued turning to the South by industry. The climate is certainly one reason. Another is that the South wants industry, and is willing to give a tax advantage to get it. Another, of course, is that there is a relatively low level of unionism in the South. — location: [525](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=525) ^ref-30556 --- It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody? — location: [557](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=557) ^ref-61510 --- Most southerners are political realists: they understand and accept the realities of working politics in a way we never did in California. Graft as a way of life is accepted, even on the surface. “You get somebody makes eight hundred dollars a month as state finance director, he’s only got four years to make his stake.” — location: [700](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=700) ^ref-58199 --- To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States. — location: [791](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=791) ^ref-18549 --- Eating apricots and plums on the rocks at Stinson Beach. — location: [1097](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=1097) ^ref-24249 --- C. Vann Woodward: “Every self-conscious group of any size fabricates myths about its past: about its origins, its mission, its righteousness, its benevolence, its general superiority.” — location: [1130](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=1130) ^ref-48409 --- Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places. — location: [1138](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B01MCX9QDF&location=1138) ^ref-54092 ---