"It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make the lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up."
Nobody, just nobody, writes like Joan Didion. Her new piece in the New York Review of Books is a minor miracle of good writing - the work of a pen dipped in boiling acid that still manages to turn out the most glorious prose. If you ever need to define 'scathing' for someone, this is the article to point them to. Go read. Go read now.
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3 comments:
More than her prose (which is of course great) i admire her courage. It simply feels beyond-human. First she writes a book like a year of magical thinking, as weird a combination of madness and fortitude as ever there was one, and now she is back to current affairs as if everything is already past!!
I was just thinking - is this the same Joan Didion who lost her husband and daughter in the same year?! Wow!
gg
ggop / alok: True. Though I can't help feeling that the focus on current-affairs may actually be a good coping strategy. Of course, as I've said elsewhere, the fact that she found the courage to write Year of Magical Thinking is incredible in itself.
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