No: what I suspect constitutes the appeal of her writing is not its revelation of a nonpolitical mind, but rather its willingness to surrender to the reader a large and anguished part of the author’s own self. On a subject ripe for heavy-handed irony or sociology, Miss Didion supplies delicate, touching imagery: We might have been talking in different languages, Brother Theobald and I; it was as if I knew all the words, but lacked the grammar, and so kept questioning him on points that seemed to him ineluctably clear. An enjoyable read and obviously a good writer, but I don't feel any sense of passion or deep interest. Her writing captures the mood of the 1960's and '70's West Coast better than anyone else I have read. As critic Michiko Kakutani stated, "California belongs to Joan Didion."[1]. Large and rather vacuous generalizations come readily to mind—“the end of the 1960’s” being the most obvious. I hope so. Or maybe ‘like’ is the wrong word, as it’s a word that does not suit Didion at all. James Q. Wilson teaches at Pepperdine University and is the coauthor of, American Government: Institutions and Policies, Fun Stories from the Republican Campaign Trail, They’re Not Boarding up Cities for Fear of Trumpers. She does make everything she writes about as part of her character. Our summaries and analyses are written by experts, and your questions are answered by real teachers. Perhaps she is so widely admired because, though she treats of political subjects, she bases her judgments on nonpolitical grounds. I was curious to read "The White Album" because I live in Los Angeles. The Hoover Dam will continue to operate even when humans are gone. 223 pp. This Study Guide consists of approximately 39 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The White Album. 4.5 Everybody likes Didion. I was curious to read "The White Album" because I live in Los Angeles. (They won’t be, and thus it won’t be.). Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this The White Album study guide. But talent and accomplishment do not save other writers, or other reputations, from being parceled out into the neat boxes of ideology where they are stored, like munitions, waiting to be picked up by a partisan and hurled at an opponent. An artistic problem. The subjects of the essays range widely and represent a mixture of memoir, criticism, and journalism, focusing on the history and politics of Californiain the late 1960s and early 70s. I didn’t love these essays until about the midpoint, “The Women’s Movement”, a devastatingly good piece about the watering-down of feminism in mid-century America, about the heartbreaking shift of a vitally important revolutionary movement as it lost touch with its ideological base and became ever more a vehicle appropriated by a leisure class, its goals moving away from seeking the possibility for an individual to create their own unique destiny unfettered by traditional obstacles and bias, and moving toward something like a seeking of the possibility for the mere prolongation of adolescence, a fear of growing up- more a form of escapism than a new form of liberation. It’s towards the end of the essay “In Hollywood.”, The White Album by Joan Didion 3 stars (poll ballot), Killing the 'Dead Girl' Theme in Crime Fiction. It is not to be confused with, "'We tell ourselves stories in order to live,' Didion famously wrote in, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_White_Album_(book)&oldid=985981484, Articles to be expanded from November 2014, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 29 October 2020, at 02:51. This is my first Joan Didion book, and for me, it's a hit and miss. Didion’s sense of structure is stunning. I do like her curiosity in subjects such as biker exploitation films, water, dams, and flowers. Start by marking “The White Album” as Want to Read: Error rating book. They, too, missed out, but try to cope by inventing a more satisfactory world. The White Album. The second group has tried to destroy the freeway system by such absurd experiments as the Diamond Lane, a device for discouraging persons from driving on the freeways by reserving the fast inside lanes for vehicles carrying three or more persons. That long essay is Didion’s fifteen-section, associational consideration of why she could not tell herself the stories she needed to survive, why she could not find a “narrative” to connect the images confronting her when she lived in Hollywood and pondered such events as the Manson gang’s murders, a recording session by the Doors, visits to Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and a student strike at San Francisco State. Of the seven essays in the fourth part, titled “Sojourns,” the longest is “In the Islands” (1969-1977), in which, among other places in Hawaii, Didion presents Punchbowl, the military cemetery where the reports of the number of Americans killed weekly in Vietnam become real as she watches the graveside service for one of them. With a simple repetition of "it was," she links ideas in one long sentence leaving the reader breathless: "It was Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger and John Densmore who made The Doors sound the way they sounded, and maybe it was Manzarek and Krieger and Densmore who made seventeen out of twenty interviewees on American Bandstand prefer The Doors over all other bands, but it was Morrison who got up there in his black vinyl pants with no underwear and projected the idea, and it was Morrison they were waiting for now." Also, Didion discusses the early Women's Movement and how, facets of it in her mind too became a part of the American dream during those years, before finally turning her attentions to great American past times; that of traveling, the 'road trip' or going to the Mall, the dream of the holiday on a private beach in Honolulu as well as the dream of Celebrity and fame. The author observes the assault on norms that resulted in advancements for women, truths of racism in our culture, criminal justice realities, the terminal results of overdoses in the young, the radicalization of students toward authority, AND notes on Ronald and Nancy Reagan. October 1st 1990 I remember the Charles Manson times as being very scary in Los Angeles, and Didion captures those horrifying moments as it happened. Joan Didion is detached from politics and political programs; she is devoted to trying to perfect the “exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities” out of an unsparing analysis of herself and of others. "Last but one" is completely routine English, meaning penultimate, second-last ("last" in either sense, i.e. There are more than twice as many Pentecostal as Episcopal churches in Los Angeles. All intelligent males I know would most likely like her, if they could be bothered to read more female authors. She writes about the events around the famous Manson family incidents, where a number of people followed the cult leader Charles Manson, who directed them to kill people. I am not the society in microcosm. As a result, writing about the White Album is definitely going to force you to make choices about exactly which stories in the collection you focus on. The White Album was required reading for my American Experience class. Exceptional writing devoid of judgment by Joan Didion, capturing an era of societal disorder questioning the core principles of American values. As in her very first essay she reveals her opinion that the whole world is made up of stories, and that we must pick the appropriate facts to make sense out of the confusion of life, she sees everywhere about her different narrative stories which are sometimes completely contradictory with each other; the Marxist revolutionary rhetoric of the Black Panthers, the 50's 'Nuclear' sensibilities of the Jaycee club, the apocalyptic nihilism of Jim Morrison, to the religious fervor of James Pike, first Bishop of California. Was anyone else confused by this sentence, “The director had an Academy Award for his last picture but one.”? Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, Published Just type the quote in and it should give you the page number. The first of them, “James Pike, American” (1976), presents the late Episcopal bishop of California as a man of “mindless fervor” whose idea of reinventing the world was typical of the 1960’s in the United States. I didn't say a word about Trump, by the way. also, next time use google books. Yet the connections she makes in her essays are more evocative than elucidating, like mental snack food with dubious nutrition. At these words, one can barely restrain the urge to proclaim the depoliticization of art, the return to a literary sensibility, the resurrection of those walls that can protect human emotions from having to conform to doctrinal labels. . Joan Didion’s The White Album was first published in 1979 and can be considered a follow-up to her Slouching Towards Bethlehem published 11 years earlier. The book is composed of selected pieces of her essays and articles published at that time, and examines the themes of the American Dream, Celebrity, and the chaos of the Sixties in general. There was a distinctive process called Growing Up; no one supposed, save the Beatniks, that one could or should forever remain an adolescent. “The White Album” is Joan Didion’s wildly scattered and mostly failed attempt at understanding the ’60s, and, by understanding the ’60s, understanding herself. In the 1960’s, one rejected the adult world, denied that growing up was either desirable or necessary, clung to sincerity (renamed “authenticity”) and chose to be young, which is to say self-indulgent, forever. And in fact, the admiring reviewers of the Left and the Right have no intention of abandoning the use of political categories as the first principles of their literary positions. She can still find her own perfect pitch for long stretches, and she has an almost embarrassingly sharp ear and unblinking eye for the Californian inanity.
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