Under Milk Wood

Dylan Thomas's final and finest work, Under Milk Wood made a huge impression on its first arrival into the world.  A "play for voices," its staging involved a large cast, originally drawn from the National Theatre of Wales, with Thomas as narrator. It was commissioned by the BBC, but by the time they made their recording (the one with Richard Burton as narrator, which I've linked on the sidebar), Thomas was already ill; he died in the fall of 1954.

It's set in a mythical Welsh town -- Thomas's original name for it was Llarregub (a name that looks like that of a Welsh down, but it actually "bugger all" backwards). People have argued about which actual town it was meant to represent, but that's beside the point -- it is at once any town and no town, a place that exists only so far as its voices describe it, and just as they describe it.

We begin at night, with the dreams of the residents, wake up and wander through their mornings, and eventually reach the point just before the next night -- twenty-four hours of internal and external thoughts, monologues, and dialogues. Besides the narrator, a few figures seem most prominent, particularly "Captain Cat," who opens the night sequence with a dialogue with his sailors who have drowned, his "dead dears," rings the morning "wake up bell," and climbs back into his bunk near the end. But there are others -- very many others -- who endear themselves to our ears -- Organ Morgan whose thoughts return ever to his organ and the works of Bach; Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard who sleeps with one dead husband's ghost on either side, nagging them both; Lily Smalls, a housemaid in a "small" house with outsized dreams; Sinbad Sailors the barman, who has named his pillow after the girl he can't marry; and Mr. Mog Edwards whose love for Myfawny Price is known only through his letters, which are surreptitiously steamed open by Willy Nilly the postman and his wife.

Throughout, Thomas's poetic language juggles the senses, turning nouns into verbs and adjectives, playing with sound and sense, and heaving the whole dollop of humanity that is Milk Wood into his catch-net of wild words. So have at a few -- pick a character, a phrase, a moment -- and give us your thoughts below:

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

Joan Didion was a remarkable writer and personality -- a chronicler of the counterculture who remained oddly apart from it, a sort of "participant observer" in a world so keenly observed and coolly described that more than fifty years after it appeared, Slouching Towards Bethlehem reads as though it was written just now.

Its 'chapters' were originally medium- to long-format essays that appeared in the pages of Vogue and other magazines. As Didion herself notes in her Preface, the essays don't all necessarily speak to the central theme, but that what she writes reflects what she feels. Now, in retrospect, they also seem a sort of time capsule of the moment; some subjects glitter like coins or gemstones, while others, like the small slips of paper and notes that are also often parts of such capsules, testify only to a minor moment or a single individual.

For our purposes, we'll want to start with "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" -- it's classic Didion, a tale of love and death and dentistry among Seventh-Day Adventists living in the San Bernardino Valley of California. Next, we'll pause at the title essay, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which explicitly addresses its theme as it takes us to the famed Haight & Ashbury district of San Francisco at the moment of the so-called "Summer of Love." Finally, we'll touch on some of the shorter thematic essays at the end of the volume: "One Keeping a Notebook," "On Self-Respect," "On Morality," and "On Going Home." 

In your responses, choose just one of these essays, and think of it not simply in terms of its subject, but its style. What sense do you get of its writer? Does the essay have a certain shape or feel? And how does Didion get the effects she does? Take a close look at her language, and include a short quote in your comments as well.