Word: didions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...White Album is Didion's latest collection of these images--20 essays written from 1968 to 1978. It is a brilliant albeit occasionally disjointed collage of impressions, written with her customary journalistic eye for detail and infused with emotion. The essays discuss the '60's, portray Didion and others, and sketch California life with and deadly accuracy...
...book resembles what Didion tells us about herself. In the revealing and brilliant title essay, she describes a list of articles she packs when traveling. She meticulously follows the list, but always forgets her watch. She shamefacedly asks people for the time every half hour until she resorts to calling her husband at home. Her passion for asserting control, for putting things--and herself--in order is always foiled...
...same sensitivity and emotional impetuosity that defeat her make her writing so effective. The book's disjointedness is at times a very deliberate reflection of Didion's own reactions to the years she describes. Her first essay, "The White Album," breaks into 15 vignettes; she cuts from image to image, splicing and assembling them. She views the '60's themselves as a series of improvisations on a discarded, script, in a passage that reflects the tone of both the era and her book...
PERHAPS IT IS this hesitancy to generalize, to offer weighty and solemn judgements, that makes Didion's writing so evocative. Instead of pronouncements, she offers reportage. She focuses on an incident and notes every detail in uncluttered, harsh prose. Didion also has the reporter's curiosity about how things work. She investigates how orchids are tended, how freeways are monitored, how lifeguards live, how dams work, the philosophy and history of shopping malls. She is always honest in her examinations of a setting or person. She dams through accuracy, not forceful moral argument. In "Bureaucrats," for example, she perfectly captures...
...genuinely puzzled by the furor around them. Why don't students wat a Jaycee group on campus? Why can't the girl who takes a full page ad in Daily Variety to advertise her availability as a star realize her dream? Why do bikers gangbang women, trash stores? Didion answers...