Word: womanized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...White Album is full of the bizarre details, the eye for blinding weirdness, that made Slouching Towards Bethlehem one of the purest leftover artifacts of the '60s. Didion again collects clippings of American death trips: the brothers who bludgeoned Ramon Novarro, for example; and the 26-year-old woman who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit; the child's fingers had to be pried loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway...
...White Album is mellower than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion ranges more widely. A libertarian with a trace of Goldwater in her, an individualistic Westerner, Didion writes witheringly of bureaucrats who would tie up the Santa Monica Freeway (an eccentric passion of the woman in the yellow Corvette) by installing the restrictive "Diamond Lane." Didion, a sometime screenwriter, gives a wonderful insider's analysis of Hollywood as "the last extant stable society." She dismisses the women's movement with some hauteur: "To those of us who remain committed mainly to the ex ploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities...
...woman Didion seems most to admire is the painter Georgia O'Keeffe...
Style is character, the author pronounces in italics. She then describes O'Keeffe in terms that sound like her ambitions for her own character: "She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees...
...tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back...