What is a notebook for

Question 1

Author

Answer 1

Joan Didion

Question 2

“But what exactly was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it?”

Answer 2

Didion says she keeps a notebook to remember

• What does it mean to be a writer
• Why would you write
• Why would you write about yourself?
• Documenting one’s inner monologue, and a way to remember, not public
• Essay begins in observation and memory of observation
• Why details were important to take note of
• What did she want to remember
• How can one perceive self through own note taking

Question 3

Joan Didion

Answer 3

• Very famous purveyor of literary journalism
• Taking moments in time and examining them through the lens of the self
• Subjective
• What did I experience? How did it effect me?
• Condition of the self
• Work animates the condition of the sled in all its fractured, splintering phases
• Concerned with what it means to maintain selfhood in times of disorder
• Essay from collection called Slouching Towards Bethlehem
• Writes about various aspects of American life in times of discord
• 60s marked decisive cultural shift
• How people in Western society understand themselves in the world
• Many cultural shift were violent, disruptive and tumultuous
• Rise of people seeing themselves in ways that were different to mainstream culture - ColonialIsm, socialism, Cold War, rise of youth culture, civil rights, new political order, feminism, Vietnam War
• Didion suggests its not enough to ask “What happened?” If you neglect “how did it feel?” - How do you hold a sense of self in the context of what is happening around you

Question 4

The self as Panoply

Answer 4

• There is always a gap between the ‘I’ and the narrated self
• Projected self when you write something down
• The self that exists in the real world
• Essay scrutinises the self
• Self construction privately
• Who do you regard yourself as being?
• The rapt self fascination fate of the current age
• We live in an age of sentimental self-scrutiny (sentimentalised)
• Encouraged to see ourselves as multiple selves at once
• Romanticise ourselves
• Often overlapping temporal zones — in present, online, with different groups/people - We document our selves in various ways, as a way of putting our thought into the world - Podcasts, vlogs, blogs, and other forms of online self-expression — modern journaling - Part of how we see ourselves in society at a particular moment in time
• The mythologized self as a figure that can be remade
• Idealise and project
• As a discontinuous set of selves (think of Taylor Swift’s eras)
• 60s it was a revolutionary idea to separate the parts of ‘self’ in this manner
• Regarded as a neurosis, undesirable thing
• Didion asked if we inhabit all parts of ourself
• Relate to them in different ways
• We spend more time than ever before looking at ourselves
• Aestheticising ourselves
• Producing ourselves as subjects in the world through externalised things

Question 5

Why be interested?

Answer 5

• “I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced tat the distinction, for my purposes, matters”
• Encouraged by flow of modern world to not scrutinise ourselves in close detail - Only in shallow and superficial way
• Didion models slowing down and recording and noticing ‘who I am’ and what changes over time, what can I observe in relation to what I notice and value
• Through process of keeping a notebook
• Relatability
• To remember is to separate
• Empower to choose which aspects of yourself to embody

Question 6

The World Observed

Answer 6

• For Didion, writing becomes a way to touch base with who you are in

relation to what you notice

• The world is full of details just waiting to be picked up
• The actual factuality is incoherent
• In most of her writing
• How can this be supplemented
• The lie can become a truth in some sense — more authentic to the

feeling of the moment

• Writes as if she is writing for herself
• Not as it was, but how it felt

Question 7

Being interested in yourself

Answer 7

“we are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves;

taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing”

• Modern self is divided self
• We are unaware of all the parts of us
• Self-interest has always been a complex thing
• Old people are fond of noting that we live in an age of

obsessive self-interest

• Not inherently shallow
• We are always pushed to be interested in ourselves
• Self-care
• The selfie
• How we cultivate particular interests or habits of self

improvement to become moe interesting

• Inner voice
• Narcissism is a negative thing
• Didion says she writes to counter the idea that it is vain to be interested

in yourself and your thoughts

• Is ill-mannered to pay attention to how things affect you
• Your own perspective
• The world around you
• More well-mannered to be interested in other people
• But the key to this essay is that of course what you notice says more

about you

• What you pick out or choose to take note of or pay attention to is

more important than the individual things

• To be self-reflexive to what end?
• How we relate to ourselves

Question 8

Our ego

Answer 8

• “But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.” - Didion, another famous essay
• “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
• It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions — with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating
• — but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” - “Remember what it was to me”

The questioning Self