The Revolution Will Be Accessorized

Aaron Hicklin

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061877759
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Ensayos literarios

Since it first went to press in 1996, BlackBook has established itself as an arbiter of style, and a forum for new and dynamic writing. The Revolution Will Be Accessorized gathers many of the magazine's strongest pieces, and the result is a star-studded collection that addresses the intersection of pop culture, the arts, politics, and fashion, with provocative contributions from many of today's best writers, including:

• Augusten Burroughs on Christmas with his mother
  
  

• Jonathan Ames on his boyhood sneaker fetish
  
  

• Meghan Daum on L.A. bourgeois
  
  

Also included are pieces by Neal Pollack, Sam Lipsyte, Joan Didion, Naomi Klein, William T. Vollmann, DBC Pierre, Emma Forrest, and Douglas Coupland, among others. Raw, edgy, and always insightful, The Revolution Will Be Accessorized is a window on to what's happening outside the mainstream.

Joan Didion vs. Meghan Daum

More than forty years after coming to national attention with her first novel, Run River, Joan Didion’s spare, unblinkered prose continues to shock and awe new generations of readers. Though her essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album remain her most celebrated works, her nuanced political analyses for the New York Review of Books continue to provide a cold blast of reality in these politically dishonest times.

Like Didion’s essays in the 1960s, Meghan Daum’s candescent essay collection, My Misspent Youth, explores the way we live now through the prism of personal experience: The title essay—a rage against the betrayal of dreams—acutely captures the sense of disillusion that has long been a Didion staple. Now living in Los Angeles, Daum is also the author of The Quality of Life Report. The two writers met in Didion’s New York apartment for a conversation on identity, geography, and Vogue.

BlackBook : Both of you have written essays about falling out of love with New York—Joan in “Goodbye to All That,” and Meghan in “My Misspent Youth.” Were you writing about New York or yourselves?

Joan Didion: I think certainly in Meghan’s case, but in my case too, falling out of love with New York is a situation of not having enough money [laughs]. I think that’s why people fall out of love with New York at a certain point. If you have enough money, it gets better and better.

Meghan Daum: One of Joan’s most memorable lines, for me, in “Goodbye to All That” was that New York was a city for the very rich and the very young.

JD: Well, we moved from here to Los Angeles in 1964, and it was totally amazing to me, the sense of luxury. We rented a house on the ocean, we had forty acres of oceanfront, we had three bedrooms and three bathrooms and rose gardens and artichoke gardens, and all of this was taken care of, and we were paying four hundred dollars a month. We were going to go out there for six months, and then we kept staying on, but it was so much easier to live on less.

MD: That’s astonishing to me. Was there something about the economics of that city at the time? It seems remarkable.

JD: It was remarkable, but to get from Beverly Hills to our house you had to get on the San Diego freeway, go past all the refineries, and then all the way out to the ocean. So it was a hard house to rent, because it was so far from town. They were asking eight hundred dollars a month and I said we couldn’t possibly afford eight hundred dollars a month, but maybe we could afford four hundred dollars, and they took us.

BlackBook : Your feelings about New York—the sense of feeling very, very young here. Is it more of an idea than a reality? Was it something you started seeing through?

MD: I had a real anger that I couldn’t make it work—I think a lot of my work comes out of an anger, and that’s where the urgency to write the piece comes from.

JD: Who were you working for?

MD: I worked at Allure, which is part of Condé Nast, and I guess we’re all naive about our notions of New York, or anywhere when we’re growing up, and I had this set of cultural icons that I associated with New York. But after being there for a while and seeing that I was doing everything I could, and actually making pretty decent money and still not able to make it, I was furious, and angry—particularly during the nineties and the whole boom that occurred—that I had been left out of it, but more that New York was a prohibitively expensive place for the people who had made it what it was: the creative people and the intellectuals and the artists.

JD: For me there was some kind of cognitive dissonance between the way I lived and the place I was working. I was working for Vogue, and people there really did not have a clear understanding of what it was to be making forty-five or fifty dollars a week, which is what I started at. I can remember asking if someone could get me a discount on a Polo coat, because I needed a winter coat, and she said, “Oh sweetie, a Polo coat is all wrong for you, put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands, she does wonderful things for small people.” Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands! So I kept feeling poorer even than I was.

MD: I was mistaken for a messenger one time, walking into Three Hundred Fifty Madison, because I was so bedraggled and poorly dressed. They stopped me at the desk and told me to take the freight elevator, and I said, “I’m an assistant.”

I’m really curious to talk to you about this, because that was 1992, and it was the closest I felt I could come to a literary, glamorous job. I knew nothing about fashion. I had no interest in it—I pronounced Versace as Versayce—but it’s interesting how the fashion world is intrinsically linked to being a writer for women.

JD: Yeah, in a certain way it was a way in. Vogue, at least, had a features department, so we had all these semiliterary projects going on.

MD: I wondered about that. Was that your very first job?

JD: I got the Prix de Paris, so I got a job out of college, but I wasn’t immediately put in the features department—basically, all I did for a about a year was read back issues, and then I started working in the promotional department, and in order to get into the features department I actually had to quit, and then they said they would move me to the features department.

MD: This was in the fifties?

JD: I went there in the fall of 1956 and I stayed there until late 1963.

MD: I’m really curious about what allowed for it to be a time in which a women’s magazine or fashion magazine had more intellectual merit.

JD: Well, Harper’s Bazaar was one of the big fiction outlets, and Mademoiselle was, too.

MD: Right, Sylvia Plath wrote for Mademoiselle.

JD: Yes, and Margarita Smith, who was Carson McCullers’s sister, was the fiction editor.

MD: So when did the change happen? When did the publications lose their intellectual credibility, so to speak?

JD: Well, I think there are still things in these magazines, but it’s harder to find them because of the layout—the deliberate mingling of advertising with editorial makes it very difficult to present material in a way that you take seriously. At that time, you’d pick up a copy of Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, and there were X pages of advertising—many, many pages—but they were all discreet: You had an advertising section, then an introductory page, and then you went into the well and didn’t see advertising again until you got to the end of the book.

It was much more like a family than you would have thought it would be. The personnel director of Condé Nast would stop me in the hall to ask me if I’d called my mother, and if I said, “Not since last Tuesday,” she’d say, “Come into my office right now and call her.” And they had a nurse, Miss K, who every morning would line up little paper cups of phenobarbitol for you if you came in nervous.

MD: Oh, I wish they hadn’t done away with that.

JD: You could take naps in Miss K’s office.

MD: It’s so interesting because it ties in to this idea I had a long time ago that Seven Sisters Colleges embodied a sensibility that was a direct parallel to the culture of Condé Nast and that somehow, over time, both cultures had been perverted by various cultural forces.

JD: Yeah, the people in charge of Condé Nast saw themselves in loco parentis, really. They had all these young children who came to work for them, and they took care of them in a sense.

BlackBook : What would you attribute to the change in that culture?

MD: Maybe cocaine [both laugh].

JD: At the time I began working at Vogue, there was a very clear understanding that it was not a magazine for very many people. It had two hundred fifty thousand to three hundred fifty thousand subscribers, and then a large pass-along readership, but it was specifically designed as a magazine for not very many people. Once the Newhouses had bought it and settled in, that was no longer the way that the magazine was conceived. It had to build circulation all the time. If you’re building circulation all the time you’re going to have a different sort of magazine.

BlackBook : Isn’t that where we are now, with big conglomerates owning the titles, focu...