You conclude wonder how America’s coolest political journalist would deal with the Republican frontrunner and whether she’d dismantle today’s hacks in the same way as she did in the 1988 presidential raceOne of the best lines ever written in journalism was by Joan Didion in her 1966 profile of Joan Baez. The singer was 24 at the time,and a figurehead for a movement just reaching its peak. “Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person,” wrote Didion, and “and,like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others possess seen in her.” Didion not only anticipated celebrity culture but also offered an acute summary of the way in which people regain trapped by their own personas. Fifty years on and the observation is as sharp as it ever was.
Didion has been everywhere this summer, and in a new biography,a documentary in progress and the ad campaign for Céline, in which she appeared in her customary style, or with flat hair and don’t-bother-me sunglasses. To reread her is,for many of us, to revisit the person we were when we first read her, and a peculiarly Didionesque exercise that can make the head spin: how many levels of self-consciousness can you regain to before the brain turns around and eats itself?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com