Loading summary
Transcript76 lines
- [00:00]
A
Ugh.
- [00:01]
B
You said you were over him, but his hoodie's still in your rotation. It's time. Grab your phone, snap a few pics, and sell it on Depop. Listed in minutes with no selling fees. And just like that, a guy 500 miles away just paid full price for your closure.
- [00:17]
A
And right on cue. Hey.
- [00:18]
B
Still got my hoodie? Nope. But I've got tonight's dinner paid for. Start selling on depop, where taste recognizes taste list. Now with no selling fees, payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.
- [00:30]
A
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today, I'm sitting down with Peter Savodnik. Peter is an editor at the Free Press. Joan Didion's Play it as It Lays, a novel published in 1970, changed Peter's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is old school. Peter Savodnik. Welcome to old school.
- [01:05]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Shiloh.
- [01:06]
A
You chose a book I'd never read, and frankly, that I loved. Joan Didion's Play it as It Lays. Tell me a little bit about who Joan Didion was. I know she was a journalist and a number of other things. A novelist, obviously, but so were you. So who was she, and what drew you to her work?
- [01:23]
B
So Didion was a great journalist and is best known for her journalism as one of the. The kind of founding voices of the new journalism of the 60s and 70s, I think. Play It As It Lays. Her novel is wonderful and a standout, but the journalism and her insightfulness and ability to translate very complicated ideas, sort of political textures into sort of a conversation that was accessible to a very wide audience is remarkable.
- [01:56]
A
She wrote novels, but she wrote nonfiction. She wrote essays. She was a journalist. She did some screenwriting in her life. So can you tell me what exactly is the new journalism piece? Because you're right, that's what she's known for. But I think a lot of folks, younger folks in particular, might not know what that was about.
- [02:13]
B
So the crux of new journalism is this idea that you employ novelistic devices, ideas, mannerisms, if you will, to try to flesh out a depth, a texture, a nuance that a more kind of narrowly defined journalism is incapable of bringing out. And so when you look at some of the best new journalism, I mean, I think, look, Norman Mailer's sprawling, the Executioner's Song is like a wonderful example of this. The White Album, which came out, I think, in 1979, is in a similar vein, it employs a kind of three dimensionality in the reporting, and it tries to. To place the reader to empathize deeply with the kind of her sources. There's a kind of cool reserve about Didion's reporting, but there is this kind of wonderful use of, again, like, the novelist's eye to try to insert the reader into the lives of these people and to make them feel what it is to be them. Not to sympathize with them necessarily, but to understand how you arrive at certain places, conclusions, decisions that would otherwise, I think, be very hard for the outsider to understand.
- [03:37]
A
You know, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe. People should read Tom Wolfe again. Another man who was a new journalist who wrote novels in addition to nonfiction, and Joan Didion. You know, one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading this book and thinking about Joan Didion, just the phenomenon of the Woman is, is that she was a celebrity. Writers aren't really celebrities anymore. Like, there's not, I mean, you know, maybe Stephen King or something like this, but she was a literary writer who was also a celebrity. To me, she struck me as the last or one of the last literary writers who is also a celebrity in popular culture. You see what I mean? That writer doesn't exist anymore, in a way.
- [04:15]
B
You know, I think, sadly, you're. You're right. The most prominent of the new journalists, like Didion, like. Like Mailer, like Wolf, for sure acquired a celebrity, and they understood that in a way that I think today's most prominent journalists do not. They're very sensitive to what the world is thinking and breathing and feeling. And so, yes, I agree with you. And I think, look, that's a reflection not just of the journalists, but of the society that they are writing for. We are just a much less literary and literate society than we used to be. And so people like Didion, I think, sadly, don't have the same resonance that they used to, even though I wish they did.
- [04:59]
A
I think that's right. But we're bringing them back on old school.
- [05:02]
B
We are very good. Yes.
- [05:03]
A
But I wanted to ask. So, like, Played As It Lays, it was written in 1970. It's a novel about the uproarious, kind of immoral, loose, empty, nihilistic. We'll get into all those words. Existential time in the 60s. I'm interested in hearing, when you first read Play It As It Lays, I asked you a book. Pick a book that changed your life. You picked this one. When did you first read it? What impression did it have? On you? And why has it stuck with you all these years?
- [05:33]
B
So I first encountered the novel in the summer of 1994, and my father had given me a copy because he knew I. I had journalistic ambitions. And Didion was very, very exciting to me because her use of detail, which I think is the most kind of wonderful part of her writing, her use of detail kind of expanded greatly for me my idea of what journalism could be. I didn't really know much about new journalism at the time. I'd read Vanities, Bonfire of the Vanities, Excuse me, novel. But I didn't really understand sort of the idea. And when I. When I read, you know, Play It As It Lays, it was just this sort of like, remarkable kind of experience where I thought, well, you could actually write about real people this way and you could. You could do things. You could introduce a. An element of nuance and incongruity and contradiction to your reporting that would. Otherwise, I guess, in my previous thinking, would have been impossible. Yeah.
- [06:38]
A
So it's like. It was almost like for you. If this is what journalistic writing can be, if it can be like this, then I can be a journalist because this writing is alive. Let's talk about Play It As It Lays. Can you summarize this book for somebody who's never read it? I mean, what is this book about? It's a very difficult book. It weighs on the heart a lot. But let's just start with what is this thing?
- [07:00]
B
It is a book about a young woman in her early mid-30s, I think she's 31 when we meet her, Maria Wyeth. She is a former model and former actress who was on the cusp of real success, but never really quite got there. Her marriage has just ended or is ending in real time. She has a daughter with an inexplicable illness who's in this. Something neurological, who's in a facility so she doesn't actually live with her mother. And Maria is in this sort of state of kind of slow motion self destruction, bouncing around Los Angeles, Hollywood, the desert, Vegas. And Didion uses time chronology a lot to kind of confuse things and to create this sort of almost like amalgam of feelings and impressions, which I think is meant obviously to kind of map Maria's own state of thinking and kind of her own sort of harried frenzy sort of state. It's bookended by this tragic death of her friend. And the great kind of question at the heart of the novel, which Didion brings out, I think brilliantly, is the question of Maria's complicity or involvement in that death.
- [08:28]
A
You know, the book is full of pretty interesting characters, as you put it, set in what's set in kind of two places. It's set in Hollywood, Los Angeles, and also in Las Vegas. So it's already. It's kind of set in this moment of vice in the 60s in these cities where there's a certain kind of moral freedom and there's a kind of existential exploration of the effect of living in that world of drugs and sex and film and sleeping late and filming all night and partying all night, and what a psychological, spiritual effect that has on. On the central character, Maria. She's got a daughter who doesn't live with her. She has a husband who is a film director who she's in the process of both seeing but also getting a divorce from. She's involved in some liaisons, some sexual trysts, some drug use. She. We'll talk about this in a moment. Has an abortion, as you say. She's present for the death of one of her friends and doesn't stop him from, spoiler alert, killing himself. The novel's structure and style is also innovative. If people read more experimental authors like Cormac McCarthy and others. It takes place in vignettes, but it's very experimental in its structure and its style. And I've been given to understand. One of the things I found most fascinating about Didion is that she would, when she was younger, type out Ernest Hemingway's books on a typewriter to get the rhythm of his sentence structure. So I know she typed out A Farewell to Arms because she was really interested in that, in the punchiness of Hemingway. So this woman is a young woman when she writes it. It's a novel about a young woman, and she's a master, master writer. But the title, Play It As It Lays. What does that title mean?
- [10:20]
B
Like, Let it be. You know, you kind of let things. You know, things will be as they are, and sort of. It's sort of like an instruction, a call to impassivity. I don't think she's actually saying that one should just sort of kind of float through life. I think she is saying, you know, one has to seize life. But that's not always apparent because Maria, at times, through, like most of the novel, is consumed by this kind of overpowering impassivity where she's, you know, at the mercy of other sort of external forces. But at key moments, she asserts herself. And I think that that's what makes her a hero. In Didion's, eyes.
- [11:07]
A
You know, the first thing that struck me is it's a novel of spiritual emptiness. And I say that in a kind of existential way that it has a resonance today. I mean, we live in a time of a certain kind of spiritual emptiness. It's not clear to me the causes of the spiritual emptiness in the 1960s are the same as the causes today. Some of the causes today, if you believe there's such a thing as a kind of spirit, emptiness might be technologically induced. Whereas the kind of emptiness that I see on display in the 60s in this novel, there's some other cause. But what's most interesting to me on this score is that it takes place in Los Angeles and in Las Vegas, the city of Vice, Sin City on the one hand, and kind of the city of vapidity, vanity and appearance on the other. So I know you've lived in Los Angeles a lot of your life, and, you know, I'm curious. You know, we've got the Oscars coming up this week. Hollywood is on the tips of everybody's tongues in popular culture. Do you think that the emptiness of Hollywood as it's portrayed in the 60s in this novel is in any way harmonious with or reflective of a kind of emptiness there today? Or would you say that Hollywood has kind of moved past this sort of thing?
- [12:16]
B
I think, if anything, Hollywood is emptier. The place has become even more kind of hollowed out spiritually and is even less deteriorating, detached from itself or its awareness of sort of any kind of larger good. And I think a lot of that has to do with the economics and the culture. Hollywood is no longer in possession of itself. It's now essentially a subsidiary of Silicon Valley. And Los Angeles has changed dramatically. Sunset and Hollywood, the kind of main arteries that kind of course through Hollywood are radically different places. They're dressed down. They're much less exciting in a way than they were even 20, 30, certainly 40 or 50 years ago. And so the people who are there, the people who kind of fill out this kind of mythical Hollywood, which is now much less geographically defined than it used to be, are, I think, in many ways even more vapid or more kind of casting about for a sense of identity. And in that respect, I think they reflect a kind of larger kind of social, cultural phenomenon across the United States, across the west, just to serve. Like there's a spiritual kind of wandering, you know, Didion, I think, is, I think, is the first writer really, to identify sort of the crisis that a lot of, like the crisis of celebrity In a way that I think had not really been identified or brought out as thoughtfully or artistically until she did in 1970.
- [13:50]
A
When you say the crisis of celebrity, what do you mean by that? That's an arresting term.
- [13:56]
B
So once upon a time, celebrity was this kind of mythical aspiration, this caricature of a life we all could kind of imagine. And it was especially powerful in America because in America, we don't have royalty, we don't have aristocrats, we don't have kings and queens, sort of conduits between the divine and the mundane. We have just a republic, which is. That's who we are. And so celebrity serves as a kind of magical connection between the plebs, the masses, and again, the divine. And so that's the power of the celebrity. And you see this in the kind of earliest iterations when you see the. The crowds of shrieking girls and Beatles concerts. There's this feeling of, I think in the kind of early. And with Elvis as well, this sort of like, I am in the presence of a God, a demigod. There's something preternatural about these people who are not really people when viewed as celebrities. And in the late 60s and 70s, celebrity was, in many ways, at its peak. It was all powerful. And for a variety of reasons, economic, technological, cultural, celebrity has been sapped of a great deal of its meaning.
- [15:28]
A
This is a fascinating take on this book. I agree with you that it's about that. One of the things that stood out to me when reading this was. I mean, you talk about how she kind of exposes the phoniness, if you'll permit me, that term of celebrity. I was thinking, in a way of Catcher in the Rye and Holden Caulfield and just the phoniness. You know, this, of course, a novel that was. That's similar in spirit in some ways, although very different in the sense that, of course, Joan Didion's novel is about a woman. She's an actress. She's, interestingly, she's not like a Taylor Swift level celebrity like she. The first movie she was in that was successful was a documentary that she didn't really know she was starring in. Her husband, like, walked around with a camera and filmed the world. And she was in the documentary, and the documentary was really successful. And then I think the second film she was in might have had some gratuitous sex scenes or might have had orgy in it. I'm not sure. And so. But that's contemporary, right? There's this kind of like, she's Kind of become sort of famous. A lot of that fame is predicated on her beauty and her body. And so. And she's sort of grappling with that, wrestling with that. And the whole novel is in a way showing what a vapid, vacant, worthless, purposeless life that is. But, you know, do you see that or people who really embody that spirit today?
- [16:47]
B
I think, well, among younger actors, sure. And the bigger problem with them, and because I'm 53, their names don't kind of immediately jump to the front of my mind. But among the younger actors, the problem with them is that it's far too easy for them to open their mouths and to be heard. The magic of celebrity, of course, is that they're kept behind kind of cordoned off walls and they live in special paparazzi, free places at the Beverly Hills Hotel or in gated communities on the west side of Los Angeles, or they're in spas, or they're on private planes or jets. They live in this kind of realm removed from everyone else. And so when they say something, it's in a very kind of carefully curated style. This was the way actually that celebrity happened. But now in the age of social media, it's not just social media, it's cable news. It's the whole kind of media, social media kind of complex that has made for this kind of constant coverage, constant conversation. We hear too much from these people. So I have no idea what someone like an A lister in the 1970s or 80s. I don't know what like Richard Gere was actually like or what he, like how he talked, even. Someone even a little more contemporaneous, like an Angelina Jolie. I don't even know, like, sort of like really who she is. There were staged interviews with the likes of Vogue or Vanity Fair who were in on the, on the gag, right? They were, they were, they were part of that. Like, you got the magazines, got access to the celebrities in exchange for this understanding that you're going to present us in a way that reflects on us how we want to be reflected. So that was this moment that's now over. And so as a result, I think we have celebrities reduced to human beings. And it turns out that there's the old, what is it the cliche, you should never meet your heroes? I think we've all met our heroes now and it turns out that they're disappointing.
- [18:54]
A
There's a really extraordinary scene, one of the peaks of the novel that is, I don't know, it might be unprecedented in all the literature of Which I'm aware, in which Maria, the main character, has an abortion.
- [19:10]
B
Yeah.
- [19:12]
A
This novel is written in 1970 and so it takes place three years before Roe v. Wade. I can't imagine what Didion must have felt writing that scene, you know, in her own head. I don't want to speculate, but essentially what happens for people who haven't read the novel is that Mariah ends up sleeping with someone. She's still kind of sleeping with her, her husband, who she's in the process of getting a divorce with, but other men too. She becomes pregnant. She already has one child who has some, it seems like some mental problems, who's institutionalized, who she goes to see on occasion. She tells her ex husband, or soon to be ex husband, that she's pregnant. He basically persuades her to go to a doctor somewhere in la, a doctor in quotation marks, and go to this, like, abandoned, I don't know, old house. And it's this horrifying scene where she, like, lays on a table and there's a pail on the floor and this guy scrapes the baby out of her. And I just want to be very clear that Didion was really experimenting with some heavy stuff and writing some heavy stuff in a woman's life. And so that scene takes place in this novel. Part of the, you know, the tragedy, the emptiness, the moral confusion of this woman's life is defined there. But I want to kind of get your perspective on Joan Didion as a feminist because I'm not quite sure where to put her on this spectrum. There are scenes in this book where the main character, Maria, who's running around living what appears to be a kind of progressive female life, longs for tradition. She sometimes wishes she. She was at home with a family. She wishes she was canning. She mentions canning in particular. It's almost like a trad wife. She mentions wanting to be married to a husband, have a daughter, raise her daughter. Didion's not a didactic writer in that she's not like beating you over the head with some moral message. And yet I feel like she has some intention here. So I wanted to get your perspective on that aspect of Didion, Maria as a woman going through abortion, struggling with both her career, longing for a family, the kind of moral, free spiritedness, as it were, that's going on. What is Didion saying about those things?
- [21:29]
B
Well, no, you're absolutely right. There's this wonderful tension or awful tension that courses through the novel inside of Maria about how to think of herself. Right. Because the novel really is like all great novels about the great existential crisis. Who are we and what am I? And this sort of idealized feminism that is very much in vogue, second wave feminism in the 60s is clearly unappealing to her. And so there's this awful, again, contradiction or sort of liminal quality to her existence, not knowing where she should be, where she belongs. And I think actually you're right to zero in on the abortion scene, because the abortion scene is horrific, but it's not horrific in a kind of, again, in a very Joan Didion way. It's not overly. It doesn't hit you over the head. It's interestingly, Encino, which is in the Valley. It's this very kind of, at the time, very boring kind of just suburb. It's not a bad neighborhood, it's perfectly fine, but it's utterly conventional. But it's been transformed into this kind of, you know, abortion factory. And it's noteworthy that all the men in her life, from her ex husband to the guy who picks her up to bring her to the abortion to the guy who performs the abortion, they all treat this with varying degrees of irritation. Let's just get this done and stop whining. And I think a lot of this, the subtext of this is, you know, Didion is the only, as far as I know, the only really prominent of the kind of. This new journalism that I. New journalists that I mentioned. And she's clearly responding to a lot of the chauvinism of, you know, that period, the Norma Mailer and the Hunter S. Thompson and the kind of, the sort of, you know, the, you know, conquer everything and everyone. And in a way, she anticipates very powerfully, I think, vividly, where feminism is leading, the darker underside of the libertinism. And there was a lot of criticism from the left about how that led to the objectification of women. Joan Didion back in the late 60s and early 70s was talking about just that, but in a very cool and novelistic way.
- [23:58]
A
Yeah, I have to say, you know, one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading this novel is, of course, old school. It's old school's for everybody. But we talk about the way, you know, reading good books makes better men and men should read. And for reasons people already know if they've listened to the show or read any of my writing. But I loved this novel and I was thinking to myself, why should a man be interested in that? I mean, you and me are sitting here talking about feminism, we're talking About a woman, you know, the perspective of a woman. I can't think of a novel off the top of my head which has made me feel, by power of my imagination, more like a woman. In other words, put me in a woman's shoes in a way that only good fiction can and only the imagination can. Dan played as it lays the way the men talk to Mariah, the way they look at her, the way she responds to them, the struggles that she has as she's trying to get these parts on screen, the people who she knows, the way she's treated, the way she thinks about herself, the way she thinks about her child. I can't think of a writer that I've read recently who puts me as a male into the shoes of a woman struggling, as you put it, with the chauvinism and just all the things going on, the abortion at this particular time, better than Didion does. There's nothing more beautiful that fiction can do than then put you in the shoes or let you see from the perspective of someone who is alien to you, whether they're different because they lived 2,000 years ago and you're reading Homer's Odyssey, or whether they're different because they're a different gender or different color, or whether they're different because they're a different profession. I mean, all the axes of different. But this novel really does make a man, I mean, I'm speaking from my own perspective, feel like what it must have felt like to be in Mariah's shoes in the 60s with all the things you just mentioned going on. And that's why men should read this book.
- [25:52]
B
I think I agree entirely. I also think it's not just the 60s. I think it's more now than ever. You know, we live in a moment in which, you know, the so called manosphere, which all, with all of its sort of manifold stupidities, has kind of captured the imagination of countless young men across this country. And that is in no small part because we don't speak honestly, I think, authentically about the questions that the Didion is grappling with anymore in kind of any serious way, instead of actually being able to talk seriously about sort of like what men, how men should comport themselves. The discourse has been taken over by these idiotic kind of caricatures of like sort of this is what a man is. And a man is in the manosphere today. I'm thinking, of course, of the Andrew Tates of the world. You know, it is, it is the most grotesque sort of caricatured version of the men in play it as it lays, who have, you know, who are incapable of seeing women as human beings. That's the real. That's their blindness. They cannot see them. And it's not an accident. It's not a coincidence that the man who dies and whom she feels this obvious kinship, this bond with is a gay man.
- [27:10]
A
Yeah.
- [27:11]
B
And so clearly. And, you know, and a gay man who's necessarily, at the time, you know, even in very liberal, libertine Hollywood, closeted. He has his wife, whom he doesn't sleep with and whom his mother, I think, pays in order to stay in the marriage with him. You know, it's not surprising that that's the man with whom. He's the man with whom, you know, Maria has the closest, the only authentic relationship. But, yes, I agree. Like, why should men today read this? Because men have no idea who they are. They have no idea who women are. And they have been subsumed in many respects by a kind of digital culture that transforms women in ways that Hugh Hefner could never have imagined into the worst kind of blandest kind of objects.
- [28:05]
A
And the emptiness from which Maria suffers, I think, is not exclusive to her. I mean, a man, as you put it in a kind of contemporary world of a certain sort of vapid emptiness could. I mean, it did with me, you know, resonate with her, really feel things that she feels. That scene you mentioned a moment ago with her friend. So for people who haven't read the novel yet, I mean, you know, we've talked about Joan Didian as a writer, the structure of the book, her just brilliant, brilliant writing. We talked about Las Vegas celebrity and the vapidity of the thing. We talked about her as a kind of interesting feminist in the way she takes a kind of different take on that, whether she's didactic or moral. Mariah, the woman who's the protagonist of the novel, has many friends, but one of these friends is a producer of films, and he's named bz. He's a gay man, but he's married to a woman named Helene. And his mother pays Helene to stay married to him as a gay man so that they can save face with a kind of traditional marriage. Toward the end of the novel, he and Maria, who are friends, are lying in a bed together. And I'm spoiling this for people, but the novel's been out, you know, for 56 years. So, you know, but they're laying in a bed together. He takes some pills and he overdoses. She's laying in the bed next to him, sees him spill the pills on the bed, sees him pick them up and take the pills, and doesn't try to stop him. In one of the most moving lines of the book. And so this is why. And the book really ends with Helene's husband, or Helene the man's wife, the gay man's wife walking in and seeing that he has overdosed and that Mariah is in bed next to him and didn't stop him from taking the pills, but knew what he was doing when he took those pills. It's almost as if she didn't care enough to stop. And we can talk about whether that's the case. But I want to read a line that will bring us into the theme of the nihilism of the novel. I've heard this novel called Nihilistic a lot. I know you've written some in the Free press about nihilism, contemporary American nihilism. The final lines of the book, she says this. I know what nothing means, and keep on playing. And then there's this line. So she says, I know what nothing means. Like toward the end of the book, I'm well acquainted with nothingness. This comes after she's let this man die. When she's letting this man die, he takes the pills and he simply says to her, very moving scene, hold on to me, hold on to me. And so she does. And I guess she holds him until he dies. And then some lines later, we get this. I know what nothing means. She also says, I know what nothing means. Keep on playing. In other words, keep on playing the game of life. But do you read this? This is a long windup. But do you read this novel as a nihilistic novel? Or how do you read these scenes that are very troubling?
- [30:55]
B
Yeah, no, I see it. So that scene that you described is by far the most awful or horrific or powerful in the novel. Because when she wakes up, she's not only aware that he's killing himself, but he's offered her the pills. And she says, no, I'm not. And that's critical. She's decided. She makes lots of bad decisions in the novel, but she makes one critical decision at the very end, which is, I'm going to live. I'm not going to die. And she wakes up, the lights are on, and Carter, her ex husband, and Helene, BZ's wife are there and they're screaming and it's horrific. And she's not sure for a moment if the hand she's holding is alive or dead. And then she realizes is it's dead, it's lifeless. I think it's easy to understand, given the tone and the timbre and the pacing and the way that Didion has this very parsimonious use of emotion or sort of language. It's easy to come away thinking, oh, this is a kind of a peon to nihilism. I think it's the opposite of that. I think that Maria is a refutation of nihilism. I think that she chooses in the end, and this is what makes the title ironic, she chooses not to play it as it lays. She chooses not to go along with what's happening around her. Right. To go along in the last scene is to go along with death. It's to go along with one's destruction. To say, well, sure, like everyone's dying, I'll die too. And instead she says, no, thank you. And knowing full well that that's going to come with some. It's going to be hard. Right. It would be easier to do what she's been doing, which is to succumb to this passivity and to. To just sleep deeply forever and not to have to confront what she knows is coming. I wouldn't call her heroic, exactly, but very compelling character.
- [32:49]
A
Yeah. I tend to agree with your interpretation that the novel is not. Its last word, is not nihilism. Because when she says, I know what nothing means and I'm going to keep on playing, she says, bz, the guy who killed himself would say, why? And then it ends with, well, why not? I say, in other words, the game of life, you should keep on playing. I'm not gonna commit suicide. I'm not gonna take the pills. And so there's this final rejection that chooses life over nothingness. Even though she says, I know nothingness. I know what it means. And so knowing what it means, I'm gonna choose some kind of vitality, perhaps some kind of rehabilitation. And again, I agree with you. I think the novel, for all of its nihilistic and existentialist undertones, points in the direction of seeking purpose, is that throughout the novel, she longs for her institutionalized daughter, Kate. She finds purpose in that little girl. And after she aborts the child, she has dreams and nightmares about that child and wishes, I think, she hadn't done it, and longs for that child to have lived. And so at every possible moment where she could choose life, even though she didn't choose life in the sense of she had the abortion, her regret is so overwhelming that it burdens her psychologically almost to the point of madness. And so I agree with you that Didion seems to be, in the novel, seems to be rejecting in 1970, a lot of the kind of spirit of the 60s. It was like the 60s run amok. And Didion is, in a way, calling it out in this novel.
- [34:24]
B
Yeah. And she's the rare, you know, Didion's fascinating because, you know, politically she kind of migrated from a soft, you know, kind of Republican politics to a very soft Democratic politics, which is to say she was just a thoughtful person whose politics were probably not central to her identity in any way. It's interesting and important that while she's writing this novel and all of her other work about people who are destroying themselves, you know, she was in a marriage that lasted, I think it was three or four decades until her husband passed away. In other words, she knew a certain degree of stability and knew how to. To make that kind of life possible in a way that her characters do not. Maria is not a hero exactly, but there is something heroic about her. And her decision to live and to face the consequences of her decisions is admirable. And there's something, I think, just very inspiring about that. And I think that's what makes, to me, that's what makes the novel so exciting. It's not a celebration of the dark. It's not a celebration of, you know, sort of, isn't it cool that we're all going to kill ourselves slowly? That's not. That's a mistaken, I think, sort of, you know, one dimensional interpretation of the novel. It is a celebration of the refutation of all that.
- [35:43]
A
Yeah, I agree. In the end, there's a glimmer of light. She wills life instead of death. This episode is brought to you by Of Roughnecks and Riches, the incredible new book from Dan Doyle. Picture this. It's November 2008. The economy is in free fall. You're lying awake at three in the morning, your family asleep beside you, and every dollar you have is riding on a deal that's fallen apart in Oklahoma. What do you do?
- [36:07]
B
You quit.
- [36:08]
A
Or you bet everything on yourself. Of Rough Necks and Riches is the true story of how Dan Doyle built a fracking startup from nothing during the worst financial crisis in a generation. It's raw, it's real. And Gregory Zuckerman of the Wall Street Journal calls it a rollicking ride that makes for a compelling read. If you love stories about grit, risk, and the American entrepreneurial spirit, this is one for you. This isn't a business book written from a corner office it's roughnecks, con men, busted deals, and a father fighting to keep his family afloat. Never give up. Never stop when going through hell. Keep going. Grab your copy right now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Simon and Schuster. Do it today before you forget. You won't put it down. Is there a passage in this novel? I want to give people a taste of the beauty of Didion's writing, which is just, you know, surpassing in its excellence. Is there a passage that you might share with us and we could just discuss very briefly here toward the end?
- [37:09]
B
I mean, I think. Look, I think the abortion scene that you mentioned is, to my mind, the most powerful. And I think it also illustrates the most evocatively her use of detail. So I would read this. It shouldn't last that long. The floor of the bedroom where it happened was covered with newspapers. She remembered reading somewhere that newspapers were antiseptic. It had to do with the chemicals and the ink. To deliver a baby in a farmhouse, you covered the floor with newspapers. There was something else to be done with newspapers, something unexpected, some emergency trick. Quilts could be made with newspapers. In time of disaster, you could baste newspapers to both sides of a cotton blanket and end up with a warm quilt. She knew a lot of things about disaster she could manage. Carter could never manage, but she could. She could not think about. She could not think where she had learned all these tricks. Probably in her mother's American Red Cross handbook. Gray with a red cross on the COVID there. That was a good thing to think about, at any rate. Not a bad thing, if she kept her father out of it. If she could concentrate for even one minute on a picture of herself as a 10 year old sitting on the front steps of the house in Silver Wells, reading the gray book with the red cross on the COVID Splints, shock. Rattlesnake bite. Rattlesnake bite was why her mother made her read it with the heat shimmering off the corrugated tin roof on the shed across the road. Her father was not in this picture. Keep him out of it. Say he had gone to Vegas. Benny Austin. If she could concentrate for one more minute on that shed, on Whether this minute, 20 years later, the heat still shimmered off its roof. And those were two minutes during which she was not entirely party to what was happening in this bedroom in Encino.
- [38:40]
A
Yeah, so tell me, that's a very moving. I mean, unbelievable. What about that passage encapsulates Didion for you? And what does that passage mean?
- [38:50]
B
So it captures the tension perfectly, right? So here she Is, you know, like in the epicenter of feminist, liberal kind of emancipation. She is in the heart of cool, and she is enjoying the services I put enjoying in quotation marks of someone, a man ahead of his time, who is aborting this fetus, allowing her to have the sex life that she's been promised, that she deserves. And all she can do to try to get herself through this moment is to think about this world that she longs for that no longer exists, this town that no longer exists, this family that no longer exists. And so she goes through with it. She wants that. She wants to be free, and she wants to be her own woman, her own person. And at the same time, she's utterly decimated by it. And so I think it's beautiful, and I think it captures. It anticipates all of the kind of tragedy and the complication of the abortion debate that defines in many ways the Roe v. Wade era that it was now over. But anyway, it's fascinating.
- [40:09]
A
No, I mean, it's beautiful. There's a sense in which, when you read this book, you feel like the 60s never ended. I felt like this novel, if there were cell phones in it and streaming services, it could be. I mean, it feels like it's today. I mean, the emotional. What I mean is the emotional economy, the inner life of Mariah feels like the inner life of a person walking down the street could well be plausibly walking down the street in 2026. That's. And I can't quite figure out why that is, that the emotional economy of that main character resonates so immediately, even all these years later.
- [40:47]
B
At the heart of the sort of. That vapidity that we've been talking about is narcissism, right? And the inability of the people in this novel to think beyond the contours of themselves. And that has only intensified. So what existed then was still a kind of prevailing culture that rejected that, that still had a certain connection to, I think, a healthier or maybe a more fully developed sort of sense of self and society and culture. And what has happened over the subsequent sort of five decades is that narcissism has simply become codified, institutionalized, and it's become now baked into the American experience. And so we are, in many respects, so far gone, we can't even see that. We can't identify that at the time it was very identifiable because it was still kind of, you know, it was kind of part of the vanguard. But now it's. It's the norm now. We. We live in A world in which, you know, we, we are defined by our relationship with our little kind of rectangular, you know, like glass, you know, thing that we keep in our pocket and, and how we appear on screens and, and, and we are, you know, we have, in many ways we have succumbed to a lot of the forces that Didion is talking about. I don't think that, that, you know, all is lost. I'm not hopeless. But I think that she was in many ways, you know, very prophetic.
- [42:18]
A
I wonder what you'd say to this, that a proper reconsideration of what the baby boomers meant to America that's going on now, a kind of reassessment, reconsideration, in some ways a revolt against what the baby boomers meant in the way that they still control the levers of politics and have done so for well over a generation, which is part of the reason they're still in seats of power. But not just the levers of politics, the levers of culture, music, film. I think that Joan Didion's play as It Lays is a valuable contribution to the assessment, reassessment and sort of now national consideration of what exactly the baby boomers meant to America. I think you can't not consider this novel in, in that conversation because didion prophetically, in 1970 is giving rise to or beginning that conversation which now 56 years later is taking place by Gen Z, the millennials and Gen X who in a way haven't been given their turn. It's taking place now more loudly than ever. This novel should be a part of that conversation, wouldn't you say?
- [43:23]
B
You know, Charlotte, like completely. And in fact, if they, if the 20 somethings and teenagers could, could, can muster the attention capacity, I mean, look, this is not a hard novel to get through. It's a hard novel to make sense of and to think about. But it comes, as you mentioned, in these small moments, kind of like these bursts of light. It has an almost epileptic quality to it. It's little tiny chapters and it's spread out over, I think it's 213 pages or something. It's short and it's meant to be like that. It's meant to be short and acerbic and punchy and irreverent. And if younger people could read it, I think, and could kind of find the sort of, again, the attention capacity to kind of think about it and to work through it, they would see that there are very smart, thoughtful people who have been talking about lots of things that they are talking about now for a long time. And that these questions are. They are right to be asking them the kind of questioning of sort of the legacy of the boomers. And that kind of codified narcissism is critical. So instead of sort of like delving deeper into the manosphere or Instagramming, they might think about what is it that actually makes for a genuine sort of independence or authenticity? What is it that's going to make them happy? And I think that, yeah, that is among other reasons why I love the novel.
- [44:57]
A
Yeah. What did Didion see prophetically in that way? I want to move to a lightning round with you, but I do want to tell people Didion is not most famous for her fiction. She's most famous for her nonfiction. So if you're interested in reading other pieces of Didion's work, she has a book called Slouching Toward Bethlehem. That's probably the book that made her the most famous. It's a book of nonfiction essays and then another book called the White Album, which, again, I think when considering Didion's corpus, played as it lays Slouching Toward Bethlehem, the White Album, and maybe some of her later writing, she had kind of a third act. Her husband died somewhat unexpectedly. Her daughter died at a fairly young age. And so she's a woman who went through a lot of tragedy. And so I'd recommend her nonfiction, which I'm eager to get into and I've read only bits and pieces of, because I'd not read Didion before the podcast and went searching for. For Slouching Toward Bethlehem and was just amazed with what I found.
- [45:51]
B
No, you're right. And the early nonfiction is what she's best known for. I actually think some of the later nonfiction, like Political Fictions, which is the book that is a collection of essays mostly on the 90s, is really astute, and her thinking about what politics has become in America is wonderful.
- [46:16]
A
The word of the day is nihilism, and this is a word that came up in my conversation with Peter, because Joan Didion's Played As It Lays is sometimes referred to as a novel with nihilistic themes. It's a word I see thrown around a lot in contemporary journalism today. The nihilism of the American right, the nihilism of the left, the nihilism of young men. I'm a scholar of probably the most profound philosopher on nihilism, a man named Friedrich Nietzsche. So if you're interested in nihilism, I recommend you read, read some Nietzsche. But one of the things that troubles me about the way people use and throw around, frankly, the term nihilism is that I think that they misunderstand it, at least in its deepest meaning. So a lot of people will say the nihilistic destruction of something, you know, like young men are so nihilistic. They're, they're destroyers. They, they, they, they hate. They want to kill or they want to, you know, punk rock nihilism, push down your amplifier and destroy your guitar. That's not nihilistic because it still has a purpose. The purpose is destruction. So it has a will to something, the will to destroy. It's not yet the will to nothing. It's the will to something, namely a purposeful destruction and finding meaning in that destruction. So it can't yet be nihilistic. Nihilistic is the cessation of the will, the embracing of nothing, simply just nothing. And so that's nihilism. And that's what Didion captures really well in this book, is that the woman isn't Mariah, the main character isn't seeking to destroy. She's not nihilistic because she wants to go and like, you know, rip down posters on walls and, I don't know, protest or whatever the case may be. She's sinking more and more quickly into simple nothingness. No will for anything at all. That's nihilism. My day kicks off with a refreshing Celsius energy drink, then straight to the gym, pre K pickup back home to meal prep. Time for my fire station shift.
- [48:26]
B
One more Celsius.
- [48:27]
A
Gotta keep the lights on when the three alarm hits.
- [48:30]
B
I'm ready.
- [48:31]
A
Celsius live fit.
- [48:33]
B
Go grab a cold refreshing Celsius at your local retailer or locate now@celsius.com.
- [48:42]
A
so you know, Peter, the Oscars are coming up this weekend. This is a book about Hollywood, about the life of the film star. Why should people read this book in preparation for. For the Oscars?
- [48:57]
B
I think it's good for them to know who the people who shape the culture. Many of the people who shape the culture in this very powerful way are entertainment. Sort of the world they come from and who they are, people they see on screens are often very, very intelligent. Thought, well, not thoughtful. Very intelligent puppets who are used to manipulate the emotions of their audiences. And that's okay, we all take part in this. But I think just when thinking about the Oscars and all the tear filled speeches and all the kind of political asides, it's good to know who these people are. And I think that few novels expose that as powerfully as play it as it lays. Yeah.
- [49:44]
A
That there's a life and a psychology behind the celebrity of the people on stage taking the awards, thanking their producer, which we saw when Will Smith went up and punched a man. Right. Remember, there's clearly something else that's going on in there than more than clapping and whatnot. So in the spirit of the Oscars, let me ask you this to open our lightning round. Who should win absolutely an Oscar this year, and who absolutely should not win an Oscar this year?
- [50:13]
B
So I don't have a strong opinion about the actors. I think Hamnet is great, so I would like to see that. Do I want Hamnet to do well? Maybe just because I think it's like the story behind Hamlet. It's great. And because I love Shakespeare. So, yeah, I want Hamnet to crush it.
- [50:34]
A
So no opinion on Timothee Chalamet? No.
- [50:38]
B
I mean, Timothy Chalamet is like. I find him annoying because he seems to me. I'm sure he's a wonderful human being. When you meet him in person, I have no idea. But, like, you know, he seems to me like a kind of like an outgrowth of, like, all the. The culture that we're talking about here. To his credit, he. He actually has a bit of the old celebrity in him because I don't know who he is. Some celebrities are not. They're celebrities in quotation marks. Shame. Because. Because I actually don't. I don't. I don't think I know much about how he actually thinks and who he is. I. I think then that says something. He's. He's either just very well managed or he's smart enough to know that. That his celebrity mystique endures only so long as he keeps his mouth shut.
- [51:17]
A
Yeah. I haven't paid attention to the recent stuff on him. I liked him in the Bob Dylan movie. I thought he was great. And one of the things I showed my class last year is he got up. I don't know if it was a People's Choice Awards. I don't remember which award show it was, but he got up there and said to everybody, look, I won this. I just want y' all to know I want to be the best, and I'm not going to stop until I am the best. And I thought that was pretty admirable. I mean, it was almost like a Michael Jordan. You know how Michael Jordan's a little crazy, like, I'm going to be the best, and if you don't like it, I will assassinate. And there are people like that. They're Rare, but they. Tom Brady, they come along. And at that moment, I was like, look, this guy comes from a generation where you're not supposed to do. And he's up there saying, look, y' all should know I want to be the best. And I know what you think that means about me. So I haven't followed any of the recent controversy. I don't know. But that Bob Dylan stuff, in that moment, I was like, you know, there's more to this kid than just, you know, confusion. I mean, well, he's confused. Obviously, there's more to this kid than just spiritual emptiness, although he's deeply confused. And fair enough. I think needs to read more and reflect more and more anyway.
- [52:13]
B
But.
- [52:13]
A
Okay, let's move on. What's the worst movie of the last 12 months?
- [52:18]
B
Yeah, I mean, I have two children who make me see terrible movies all the time. And so. Okay, I'll tell you, actually right now, the worst movie of the last 12 months. I've seen Zootopia 2. And there's a simple reason for that. Zootopia 1 was actually a pretty good. It was a very good movie. But they wokeified Zootopia 2. They felt the need to politicize it. And so suddenly it became a cartoon about settler colonialism, which I resent. And I. And I feel like if I want to be entertained, I don't want to be lectured to.
- [52:48]
A
Favorite California politician. You're an LA man. It's hard to pick. I mean, but if you had.
- [52:52]
B
They're all dead. I mean, there are no. I mean, they're all. Today's California politician is. Is a sort of like a caricature of like the very worst of our politicians, I guess. My favorite California politician. No one. No one who's even. I guess. Yeah, none of the above.
- [53:10]
A
What about a word that journalists should stop using?
- [53:14]
B
Narrative. Narrative is just like a fancy word for lie.
- [53:17]
A
You pick narrative. I would pick vibe. I feel like when vibe came on the scene, the Free Press, y' all are guilty of this. We're guilty of this.
- [53:24]
B
We are.
- [53:24]
A
You know, I don't know what a vibe you need to be. If a student said vibe, I would be. Give me specificity. What is your argument and what are the specific points of the phenomenon that you are trying to articulate rather than vibe. But anyway, narrative and vibe. And then lastly, a book that changed your mind.
- [53:43]
B
Well, you actually had this on the show a few weeks ago, and it's by far the most powerful book I've ever read. Easily. The Brothers Karamazov and the greatest novel, I think, ever written. And the reason how to change my mind. I came away with a darker view of humanity than I. I had been expecting to. I had, I think, up until that point, a feeling of the. I don't know, maybe I was a more redemptive idea of the world. And I know that there's a whole conversation in that. You've had it, but I just. Karamazov changed the way I think of human beings.
- [54:24]
A
It's a good choice. Peter Savodnik. Thank you for giving me Joan Didion. I intend to read all of her works in my lifetime. And thank you for being on Old School.
- [54:32]
B
Thank you, Charlotte.