Home Again …
Home after a week in San Jose for work — it was a good week — I actually got a lot done, and spent two days talking to folks from the other theaters about translation and localization issues, which was nerdy, but interesting. It’s nice to be engaged in my job again — I officially made the transition back to editing a couple of weeks ago, so I’m back to what I do best — strategizing how to document these products, thinking about the pedagogical project that an admin or user guide represents, and then just doing a lot of copyediting, which I like more than one would think. So it was a week of being plugged back in to a project at work, going out to dinner with old friends, and madly shopping for inexpensive housewares because I’m hosting Thanksgiving this year (yay!).
So I’m home on the couch with the dogs who are exhausted after an equally social week in the kennel. They love their kennel — the man who runs it is wonderfu, and there are lots of other dogs to play with in the great big play yard — so we’re having a quiet night at home before the arrival of Jacques, a six-month old French Brittany who belongs to a friend who is going out of town for a couple of days — so it’s going to be very exciting around her for a couple of days. I have some fun freelance projects that I have to work on this weekend, there’s some work stuff I have to finish up, I’ll have three dogs including a puppy (jealousy issues?) and I have to start figuring out how to transform my unfinished basement into a lovely dining room for Thanskgiving (fabric and a staple gun can do wonders).
Oh, and to answer Rus in the comments — I’ve been meaning to blog about Didion’s new book, as well as her influence on us all, I just haven’t had time to pull my thoughts together. She’s the bedrock, the one we all gauge ourselves by, and even here, she’s gone ahead and lit the way … it’s a remarkable book, and funnier than most reviewers have let on. Even that deep in the weeds, she can see the humor in it … no wonder she was married to a black Irishman for so long …
3 thoughts on “Home Again …”
i’ve been reading all the reviews on didion’s latest as well. it amazes me how in the earlier books she toed the line (slouching towards bethlemhem, the white album) and now she has this cult status and can, so it seems, virtually publish anything she writes…..and she’s still going, writing profound, novel-length narratives and blowing us all away. the thing is…i haven’t bought the bullet yet and paid for the hardcover copy because i’m holding out for paperback. to quench my thirst, i started re-reading the white album this week. hah!
I’m not sure what you mean by “toed the line” — as one of the “new journalists” she was always pretty transgressive in both her subject matter and her form — “nice” women journalists weren’t writing about hippies and people who burned up their husbands in cars, nor were they borrowing narrative technique from fiction (along with Capote, Wolfe, Thompson and even Mailer). And then there are her sentences — we should all hope for such prose. I guess I’m just trying to say that she earned her publishing status the old fashioned way — she worked and worked and worked for it. (Clearly I’m going to have to blog about Didion).
I guess by “toed the line” I meant precisely the kinds of things you listed above…she wasn’t a “nice” woman journalist because she toed the line. Maybe it’s that phrase that’s awkward. I mean she is brave and always has been. And yes, her writing style is, well, incredible, honorable – and so much more! So I agree…she did work for her publishing status and of course deserves the awards (National Book Award?).
I’d love to read a blog about Didion… 🙂
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