Katie’s Reviews > Slouching Towards Bethlehem > Status Update

ON GOING HOME 🏡

I wonder if anyone has an uncomplicated relationship with visiting their parents?

ON MORALITY ⚖️

“I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of “morality” seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory minds of conversation.”

This reminds me of A Psalm for the Wild Built (“good! So do I!”)

I CAN’T GET THAT MONSTER OUT OF MY MIND 👹📽️

This is an oversimplification of the essay but I do think it’s funny Didion’s whole argument is that movie producers are simply not as clever/creative/intresting as they think they are therefore most movies won’t be good- “what we have, then, are a few interesting minds at work; and a great many less intresting ones.”

ON SELF-RESPECT 😤

Like Joan Didion I too did not make Phi Beta Kappa

ON KEEPING A NOTEBOOK 📓

This essay made me deeply anxious on how scattered all my thoughts are (notes app, google docs, random notebooks, goodreads progress pages). I feel like every time I try and consolidate things it just gets worse.

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM ☮️

the center cannot hold!!!!

MARRYING ABSURD 💍

“but Las Vegas seems to offer something other than “convenience”; it is merchandising “niceness,” the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it “right”

(Interesting to read about Las Vegas weddings with such an earnest tone, I feel like in modern day you mostly hear about them sort of as a bit?)

LIFE STYLES IN THE GOLDEN LAND 📽️🛩️🥪

Another one I had to google (Howard Hughes)

“It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, the the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.”

COMRADE LASKI, C.P.U.S.A. (M.-L.) 🔒

“…I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manager to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, where they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity of as hard to come by as faith in God or History.”

WHERE THE KISSING NEVER STOPS 💋

“Joan Baez was a personality before she was entitled a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in the sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.”

Okay go off Joan Didion 💅🏻