W.W.J.D.D? (What Would Joan Didion Do?)

Joan Didion via nndb.com

My borderline obsession with Joan Didion began spring quarter 2002 during Professor Hollowell's course on the American novel. Since then, her work, from the most obscure old Holiday essay to the most widely-known bestseller, has been a sort of aloof pseudo-muse. She is that rare combination of brilliant wordsmith and self-effacing dear friend - the kind who says what you're thinking first. She is the ultimate raconteur of the everyday human condition; perennially cool, minimalist without showing off; she tells it like it is but in the succinct, heartbreakingly poignant nugget you could never come up with on your own. And because of her timelessness, it seems only fitting to have a weekly post devoted to her enigmatic prose and the light it sheds.

It was with pleasure that I came across her piece, "On Self Respect", and found it as dead-on an assessment of one of life's most elusive sought-afters, despite having been written over forty years ago.

"Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with onself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards -- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others -- who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without."

From On Self-Respect by Joan Didion, 1961

Here's to a courageous week.

In Love With Color : In Love With Carle

Image by Eric Carle

"In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf."
- The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, 1969

Since the epic Eric Carle is in town this weekend for the LA Times Book Festival at UCLA, (the best campus in the country, much less Los Angeles :) it seems like the perfect time to wax poetic about his most well-known masterpiece, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The feast for the eyes celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and the messages of patience and transformation remain as poignant today as they did when we were 6-year-olds taking in Carle's tactile, richly colored pages for the first time. Here's a clip of the author/illustrator talking about how TVHC was born. Warning: you will want to pick him up by the suspenders and take him home!

Eric Carle Talks About the 40th Anniversary of TVHC

Coffee Spoons: Cosmic Boons

{Image erosie via ffffound}

For Words, Worth's inaugural post, it seems fitting to incorporate the impact even casual conversation can have on a new day's course.

"How's your morning going?" the barista asked pleasantly.

"Great, so far! We'll see once I get to the office," I answered.

"Positive!" he joked. "Is that the energy you want to be sending out into the universe?"

We laughed, but he brings up an excellent point. Words, thoughts verbalized, shape the flavor of our everyday; the way we experience our lives. Even when used carelessly, an offhanded remark, they have a cumulative effect. Like little fenced-in corners, they encourage either the boundlessness of spirit or the confines of fear in our minds. And T.S. Eliot sums it up with characteristic perfection...

"For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?"

- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock