Hilton Als and Emma Cline on the Late Joan Didion
The New Yorker Radio Hour
00:00
The Lights Are on in the Bevatron
When i was an undergraduate at berkeley, i tried to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific and tangible. I would try to contemplate hegalian dialectic but find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window. A physical fact, i can no longer tell you whether milton put the sun or the earth at the centere of his universe in paradise lost. But i can still recall the exact rancidity of the butter in the city of san francisco's dining car. The way the tinted windows on the greyhound bus cast the oil refineries around carqina straits into a grat and
Play episode from 02:11
Transcript
