This essay follows Joan Baez, a celebrity and recent founder of The School for Non-Violence. A singer and activist, Baez has followers with vague dreams of non-violent activism but is inexperienced and lacks any real grounding in her topic. She is neither an academic, nor a thought leader, nor a cultural leader—Baez is a singer and celebrity, but she has started an institution.

The essay appears in a book called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is a line from a W.B. Yeats poem in which the first stanza ends, "The best lack all conviction / while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

This line expresses Baez well, as she is full of an intense desire to make her school viable but attracts followers without much substance. Baez herself seems to lack substance—who is she to start a peace school, anyway? Today, she has stuck with her message and has established herself as a person with gravitas, but at the time of the essay, the "kissing never stops" refers to the peace and free love atmosphere of the group—a little over-the-top.

Baez was the person who began the American chapter of Amnesty International, and Didion (who was as green as Baez when she wrote the essay) went on to become a celebrated essayist who made a good living as a social commentator and a respected writer on cultural topics. Didion does not really approve of Baez or her institution and takes a fairly cynical tack, but Baez has proven herself over the decades.

Joan Baez continues to teach peace and practice it, both personally and professionally. Didion has continued to write. Which is "the best" and which "the worst" is still debatable. The essay still holds up, however, as observation-fueled narrative of a time and place in American life.

"Where the Kissing Never Stops" is an essay from Joan Didion's landmark 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The essay originally appeared under a different title, "Just Folks at a School for Non-Violence," in The New York Times Magazine in 1966.

This essay is about the folk singer Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in the Carmel Valley. Didion is fiercely critical of her subject, characterizing her, and her attempts at activism, as superficial. In Didion's view, Baez is overly earnest, too emotionally open, and generally ineffective. To quote the author:

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be.

Why is the author so hard on Baez, we might ask? Didion sees Baez as representative of a larger problem she sees in her home state of California. Indeed, this essay collection is mostly about this very topic: Didion's experiences in California in the 1960s and her critique of the culture there. (In another essay in the collection, Didion writes about a preschool-aged child in San Francisco whose parents give her LSD.)

In Didion's view, California is a place where the sun-dappled outward image hides a darker side. And Baez's institute is a perfect example. As Didion writes:

 [It's] a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences.

Californians (like Baez, in this case) appear to be happy and free, but in many cases, they're lost, disconnected from reality. "Where the Kissing Never Stops" focuses on Joan Baez and her institute, but it's best understood within the larger critique that Didion is making in the collection.

Analyze "Where the Kissing Never Stops" by Joan Didion.

This essay, which appears in Joan Didion's collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, is partly a character study of the singer Joan Baez, "an interesting girl, who might have interested Henry James, at about the time he did Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians," and partly a satire of Baez's Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. These objects blend together well, since the Institute clearly reflects Baez's character in its good intentions, its vagueness, and its lack of practicality.

Much of the essay's effect is achieved through dialogue Didion reports from Baez and other members of the Institute. The members are only members in the loosest possible sense. There are no entry requirements, apart from the stipulation that the applicant must be over eighteen years old. The first fifteen who apply for each session are automatically admitted. The group is therefore self-selected. At one point, they discuss a visit from the poet, Allen Ginsberg. Didion dryly reports:

Ginsberg had suggested that the V.D.C. send women carrying babies and flowers to the Oakland Army Terminal.
"Babies and flowers," a pretty little girl breathes. "But that's so beautiful, that's the whole point."

Didion also offers brief, memorable character sketches of Baez and the most important figures in her life and at the Institute. Describing Ira Sandperl, she says he has "the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptibly but fatally askew rainbow." Her satire is fairly mild and is even tinged with admiration for the "beautiful" children at the Institute. The essay ends with an image of Didion, Sandperl, and some of the young people telling stories, discussing Gandhi and the bourgeois prejudices of some of their fellow activists. None of them wants to leave and they end up staying a little longer, ostensibly to share some potato salad, but really because they want to remain "just a little while longer where it is warm." The essay therefore succeeds in conveying the attraction of Baez's community for idealistic young people as well as its absurdities.