Book Review: Where I Was From
Joan Didion’s “Where I Was From” is about California, and the most delicious parts are about California’s mythologies.
Those parts are really easy and fun to read; like reading a love letter that fell out of someones pocket or your girlfriends private journal. (I mean if she doesn’t want you to read it. If she wants you to read it thats pretty much the worst thing in the world).
WIWF (whoa that acronym is oogly), is a memoir also, but more, like I said, historical record of California’s myths, and if you live here you’ll be delighted at the fact that they are by and large unchanged.
What you read in this book is likely something you’ve always suspected but never had any proof to back it up.
Now you do:
Free Spirits?
Early Californians weren’t just brave free-spirits, exploring and doing their national duty to stretch our country’s borders west.
No, no.. As Charles Nordhoff complained in Our California Heritage (1874):
They didn’t come west for homes and security but for adventure and money. (Californians have a) Speculative spirit that invades even the farmhouse, tempting its citizens to go from one avocation to another, to do many things superficially, and to look for sudden fortunes by the chances of a shrewd venture, rather than be content to live by patient and continued labor.
Seemingly at odds with our core beliefs as independent mavericks, much of the early settlers lived and prospered due to federal subsidies and grants.
The federal government installed a railroad to help Californian farmers send their goods back east to sell— at the expense of $48,000 per mile.
Independent Farmers?
All of this to help farmers in the Sacramento Valley who were then paid to grow crops that nobody wanted or were impractical to grow in California if not for federal subsidies:
- 82,000 acres were planted in Alfalfa, a low-value crop requiring more water than is used in the households of all 30M Californians today
- 1.5 Million acres in cotton, the state’s second largest consumer of water; subsidized directly by the Fed
- 400k acres of rice, the cultivation of which involves submerging fields in 6 inches of water from April to August– months during which no rain falls in California. The 1.6 million acre feet of water this required was made available even in drought years for what amounted to a nominal subsidized price by the California State Water Project, a program of the Federal Department of Agriculture, which subsidized the crop itself. Ninety percent of this rice was glutinous medium grain Japonica, a type not popular in the US but favored in Japan and Korea, both of which banned the import of US rice.
California (even in the San Joaquin Valley area) terribly lacked water where it needed it, and had too much where it didn’t need it: the Sacramento River area where it meets the American River in Sacramento would flood the entire area annually.
The idea for making the SJV a fertile “America’s Breadbasket” revolved around the simple idea of “just adding water”.
Not so simple.
The diversions, pumping stations, holding plants and resevoirs required to do this fill an entire page in Where I Was From.
Oh right, and guess who paid for it.
Change
As you might imagine, every new settler in California bemoans the “Change” they see because of new settlers, and often don’t take into account that their very success rides on the shoulders of these new settlers.
This has been going on since the gold rush days, says Didion.
Every old (10 years or more) resident has claimed that every new resident is living off the fat of the land, government handouts, ruining everything.
This is probably something that will never change about California.
Sell Out
Didion puts a lot into how California is, and has always been, a state of sell-outs to corporate interests (remember the get-rich-quick theme from earlier).
From the very early days with the Railroads, and quasi-government agencies, to land developers, to military contractors to current day with prisons.
I can’t disagree with Didion here.
I don’t think many people in California feel a connection to the land they live on or own the way people in say, Georgia do. I might be romanticizing Georgia but I know for a fact there’s a lot more NIMBY out there than there is here.
Jobs? Tax Money? You’re in!
The propagation of the California prison industry is a problem and I believe that in 10 years we could make some charts and graphs and delineate our current state of overpoliced, crime-ridden, criminal classed citizenry back to selling out to the prisons: one necessitates the other.
Open Minded, Tolerant
I’ve never really bought the idea that Californians are tolerant and open minded of other’s beliefs and lifestyles.
Didion writes:
California had a higher rate of commitment for insanity than any other state in the nation, a disproportion most reasonably explained “by the zeal with which California state officials sought to locate, detain and treat not only those considered ‘mentally ill’ but also a wide variety of other deviants including as state physicians put it: ‘imbeciles, dotards, idiots, drunkards, simpletons, fools’ and ‘the aged, vagabond, and the helpless’”.
In 1870 the federal census classified 1 in every 489 Californians as insane.
By 1880 1 in 345.
After 1903 the rate had reached 1 in 260 and sterilization had gained currency, at least they won’t be able to reproduce.
Didion goes on:
What was arresting in this pattern of commitment was the extent to which it diverged from the California sense of itself as loose, less socially rigid than the rest of the country. When San Francisco’s records were analyzed from 1906 to 1929 it was found that the majority of those hospitalized, 59 percent, had not been committed because they were violent, presented a threat to others or themselves but simply because they were reported by a neighbor or relative to exhibit “odd or peculiar behavior”.
The apparently pressing need to commit so many and in many cases such marginally troubled Californians to indefinite custodial detention seems not at the time to have struck their fellow citizens as an excessive lust for social control.
I’ve been told by many Californian’s that i’m crazy for having conservative political beliefs. I wonder if this is the “excessive lust for social control” that Didion mentions.
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I’ve left a lot of good stuff out so that you’ll go read the book yourself. If you’re from California it’s required reading.
Also I read recently that Joan Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo died recently and this is very sad, but also brought up a weird connection for me:
I had borrowed this book originally (and didn’t finish it) on a vacation in Cancun with a friend.
Cancun is in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.
Let me know how you like it.
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Thanks for the review, Andy Fox. I didn’t read this book, but the cover shot appears to depict a DC-9(?) from SFO 28L or R, apparently climbing-out over Colma or Daly City (a lot of hot Catholic Filipino women). If this is correct, and I believe it is correct, it may be a book about surfing or pharmaceuticals. This is exactly what the wacky ironic title, implying one can change their orgin, is getting at.
OK, I did read the book. I was yearning to wallow in California’s olden times. Sonja’s post-coital departure to the downtown Zürich’s Farmer’s Market had left me pensive; “sentimentality, look what you’ve done to me!”, I roared down at Sonja from the terrace. I read all 15 chapters in less than 20 minutes, using Speed-Reading techniques.
A few impressions of this work. Firstly, Bingo’s character follows a path similar to Roger Moore’s character in John Ford’s 1955 “The Searchers”. Indeed, much of the book is given over to reworking “The Searchers”, albeit in print. The two most telling examples of this are from Chapter 12, but I’ve written about these elsewhere. Likewise, in Chapter 15, in the middle of page 223, a sort of climax is reached: the female protagonist and her favorite male prostitute are killed while driving south on I-5 at more than 100MPH, high on Ecstasy, using their hands to pleasure each other. They didn’t see a deer (symbolizing innocence) standing in the fog. There is nothing wrong with this, nor is any part of this inconsistent with reality. There is little lacking with Chapter 8’s slow-paced dialog and technical details during an illicit drug sale in a Los Banos “restroom”. Sample USGS topo maps show the location of the exchange, an authentic touch. But what does Didion mean to convey when an apparently disturbed Dick Cheney, described as an “ex-con biker dude”, shaves his goatee, flushes his steroids, waggles his shriveled penis, inserts a butt-plug, mounts a Harley Davidson, sets himself on fire, and drives directly through the plate glass window of a woman’s clothing store in downtown Modesto? By this time, I had tired of the entire project.