Slouching Towards Bethlehem Essays (Picador Modern Classics)

It was her first collection of essays called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, because it's British, so it's got an S on the end, slashing towards Bethlehem.

This is a story about love and death in the Golden Land and begins with the country.

Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways.

Here's where they are trying to find a new lifestyle, trying to find it in the only places they know to look, the movies and the newspapers.

It was a spotty case and to make it work at all, the state was going to have to find a motive.

Set out to determine what might move a woman who believed in all the promises of the middle class, who had come out of the bleak wild of prairie fundamentalism to find what she imagined to be the good life.

she talks about a way in which people, and this is, she's writing pre internet. Okay. So she wrote this before the internet came out, but she's talking about a way in which people rebel against information.

there's people who as information becomes so available and we know about so much and we can find out about so much. There's a way to rebel against information by like tenaciously grabbing onto rumors and myths and conspiracies because it gives you a sense of knowing something that everyone else just can't see.

You know, in Joan Didion's book, she wrote two books about the 60s. One was called The White Album and one was called Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

This is writer Joan Didion and she has a book called slouching toward Bethlehem or maybe it was she has another book called the white album.

Well, it was, let me tell you, it was gold. I mean, that's the long and the short of it is you live for moments like that if you're doing a piece, good or bad.

It was gold.

There's a really good Joan Didion essay on keeping a notebook, particularly, and I jot down the page that it is in slouching towards Bethlehem.

So that we're still read slouching towards Bethlehem about, you know, San Francisco, Hey, Dash, Barry, and, you know, the height of counterculture hippies.

And it's still a view of that that goes against a lot of what was the mythology of Hey, Dash, Barry, right? It's still enlightening enough that like Olivia Rodrigo writes a song based on a phrase from that.