Reading Rainbow

Three nonfiction books I'm thumbing through now:

The White Album by Joan Didion

For first-timers, this one needs to be read with her other great work, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. These two books are ridiculously good. Didion is an intimidating writer when she writes fiction, and she's on another planet when she writes essays. She's the most honest, incisive, and erudite voice we have in nonfiction American letters, and these two essay collections were written at the high-water mark of her career.

I've read and reread both of these books, and am into The White Album now because it fits so readily into my current teaching curriculum and life's ponderings (the "Sojourns" portion of my blog are a direct rip-off of a section of her book). What amazes me about the book, still, is how easily Didion is able to cut through any crap and immediately land on the truth in all situations. Two of her essays, "On the Morning after the Sixties" and "The Women's Movement" so concisely deconstruct the subject matter that after three pages, as readers, we are simply accepting what Didion tells us. She effectively uses people's words against them, so whenever she quotes something it's a signal of impending doom. Like a literary ninja, she hacks away at pretense and reduces lofty ideas to nothing in a few paragraphs. All the while, she, as a narrator, is quiet and remarkably conservative. It's as though Didion viewed two decades in the American experience with an eyebrow raised, made a few notes in her notebook, then wrote two of the most brilliant books in our history.

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald

This book is uncomfortable to me. Elijah Wald, a blues musician, essentially studies the history of blues music in the Mississippi Delta and explains why the prevailing myths are wrong. Robert Johnson, he argues, was probably a different person than we all think he was. He wanted to be rich, and mainstream. He also was minimally influential in his time. The obsession with "authenticity," with the hardscrabble narrative and legends of blues musicians that the rock-and-roll generation devours greedily, is all a sham.

I like the prevailing myths, and I felt better when I believed that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to play blues, died at twenty-seven (the first in a series of musicians dying at that infamous age), and became the most influential bluesman in history. Still, I like Wald's book. It's honest, and I am enjoying his meticulous research and rare knowledge of music. This book is revisionist history, sure, but Wald loves music and the truth more than the romantic legends of white college students. Serious music fans should pick up this one.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker

I'm not actually reading this text: it's a book-on-CD from the Wilsonville Library. I listen to it on my commute. This book is fantastic, a shorter, less-angry No Logo (by Naomi Klein). Rob Walker, a columnist for the New York Times, studies marketing and consumption, and his book analyzes the shifts in advertising from the 2oth to the 21st Century. Like the other two, his book is refreshingly honest. (Walker admits to feeling miffed when Nike bought-out Converse, then wonders why he felt so tied to the Converse brand to begin with.)

Walker examines the paradoxes in modern life. For example,when surveyed, a number of people (about 77%) think that they are more critical of advertising than "most people." In other words, most people are more critical than most people. Another paradox: people want to be individual and special; people want to fit in with their peers. Walker, in his introduction, explains that we are all consumers, and that we all identify with brand names. His goal (and it's a noble one) is to get us to be honest with ourselves and make consumer choices that are ultimately ethical. This book is well written and well researched, and the hour commute rushes by when the CD is playing. There's a lot of psychology, sociology, and economics in this one. And yet, though I'm a humble English major, I'm getting a lot out of it.

--On a side note, whenever Walker discusses people that revere symbols and brands, or whenever he explores "revisionist" memory in consumers, I think of Oregon Duck football fans. Walker talks about "joining" brands as though they're cults, and consumers being dazzled by things that, while not necessarily better, are "novel" and appeal to consumers' sense of "individuality." I look around the Portland Metro Area, see countless Duck fans that never went to the University of Oregon, and realize that these are the people Walker is studying.