The White Album by joan didion

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

One of my favorite paragraphs of many in this book is the last on her essay on Georgia O’Keeffe:

“At twenty-four she left all those opinions behind and went for the first time to live in Texas, where there were no trees to paint and no one to tell her and no one to tell her how not to paint them. In Texas there was only the horizon she craved. In Texas she had her sister Claudia with her for a while, and in the late afternoons they would walk away from town and toward the horizon and watch the evening star come out. ‘ “That evening star fascinated me,” ‘ she wrote. ‘ “It was in some way very exciting to me. My sister had a gun, and as we walked she would throw bottles into the air and shoot as many as she could before they hit the ground. I had nothing but to walk into nowhere and the wide sunset space with the star. Ten watercolors were made from that star.” ‘ In a way one’s interest is compelled as much by the sister Claudia with the gun as by the painter Georgia with the star, but only the painter left us this shining record. Ten watercolors were made from that star.”

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Parhy

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

The thing is that Joan is just very cool, which is fun to read. And her writing has this immersive quality that really needs more descriptor than the word immersive but I can't think of it. And the thing is that sometimes she writes about things that I just don't know or care about and its weird to be immersed in that, and those are the misses. But the hits are very very good.

//////

hit or miss tbh (first read)

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Waspscreama

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

“Scrivere è dire io in molte forme, un atto in cui ci s’impone agli altri.
Un modo per dire ascoltatemi, vedetela a modo mio, cambiate idea.
È un atto aggressivo, ostile persino”.

Negli articoli raccolti in questo libro l’io di Didion, espresso mirabilmente nella sua scrittura, si sente tutto:
nella prosa sorvegliata e evocativa, nel riferimento costante alle proprie nevrosi, nello sguardo disilluso verso il mondo fuori, nel ritorno a un sé turbato ma in fondo calmo e intangibile, come l’occhio al centro del ciclone.
Scorrono le immagini di un’America degli anni Settanta, che ha tradito in diversi modi le molte speranze dei giovani cresciuti nel dopoguerra, ovvero “l’ultima generazione che si identificava con gli adulti”; ci sono squarci di una California che appare ben lontana dal paradiso esotico immaginato da chi ne fa soltanto un luogo di turistica evasione.

Che Didion parli di letteratura o di pittura, di bagnini o di centri commerciali, di Hollywood o di Bogotà, di orchidee o di Nancy Reagan, quello che si sente è lo sguardo asciutto di una donna allenata a osservare la realtà e a ricostruirla criticamente a partire dalla propria lucida percezione, ciò che l’ha resa icona e incarnazione del new jornalism americano.
Magari i suoi testi difettano di esplicazione, o ci sono troppi riferimenti al proprio personale e amaro disincanto, o l’atteggiamento sembra spesso troppo cool e distaccato, ma quello che non manca mai negli articoli di Didion è la capacità di concludere, di accendere sorpresa e meraviglia proprio nell’imbeccata finale.

Del resto, come lei stessa ammette:
“Vi trovate di fronte a una donna che ormai da qualche tempo si sente radicalmente distaccata dalla maggior parte delle idee che sembrano interessare agli altri. Vi trovate di fronte a una donna che lungo il percorso ha smarrito qualunque barlume di fiducia abbia mai avuto nel contratto sociale, nel principio di miglioramento, in tutto il grandioso sistema dell’impresa umana.”

Ecco, sappiatelo.

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RongCrow

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

1 star for the amazing night’s sleep I had when I fell asleep halfway through a page

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BlueKarou7

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Joan Didion ile tanışmam The Year of Magical Thinking ile olmuştu. Bir yası ve bir acıyı bu kadar salt ve yalın bir dil ile anlatması, kendisiyle yüzleşmesi beni büyülemişti. The White Album ise bambaşka bir konuda. 60’ların sonu ve 70lerin başını kapsayan Kaliforniya’nın tarihi ve siyaseti üzerine odaklanan denemelerden oluşuyor. Okurken çok tuhaf bir şekilde Kaliforniya’yı Joan Didion ile bütünleştiriyor insan. Çünkü kendisinin yazım tarzı, cümleleri çok farklı. Normalde hiç ilginizi çekmeyecek detayları lirik bir atmosferin içinde anlatıyor size. Şimdiye kadar hiç ilginizi çekmeyen su kemerleri bir anda öncelik sıralamanıza giriyor. Bazen de çok basit bir detayda, gözünüzün önünde duran noktalarını nasıl birleştiremediğinizi sorgulamanıza sebep oluyor. Bazı yazarlar vardır, hiç ilginiz olmayan konularda dahi sizi kitaba kilitleyip okuturlar. Joan Didion o yazarlardan birisi. Kaliforniya hiçbir şekilde bağ kurmadığım, ilgimi çekmeyen bölgelerden birisiyken, onunla keşfetmeye/öğrenmeye doyamadım. O yüzden bu ikiliyi artık zihnimde ayırmamın imkanı yok, ikisi de birbiriyle güzel.

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tarunann

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

Helter Skelter

Complemento/Continuazione di “Verso Betlemme”, l’album bianco è una raccolta di vari pezzi giornalistici che raccontano gli anni ’60 e ’70 degli USA (con una escursione in Colombia).

Georgia O’Keefee, Sky above clouds IV, Art Institute of Chicago

Il racconto di un’era si compone a mosaico, ogni pezzo è una mattonella. Senza la pretesa di avere una spiegazione o una teoria del tutto. Perché la realtà è multisfaccettata e complessa, e incasinata, un helter skelter, appunto, citando i Beatles. Ma senza tirarsi indietro, denunciando a suo modo l’insensatezza della guerra in Vietnam o criticando (da sinistra a me pare) il movimento femminista, studentesco e le pantere nere.

Huey Newton, co-fondatore delle Black Panthers

E poi troviamo tutto il personale di Joan Didion. Fino al referto del suo psicologo e nel gorgo delle sue emicranie micidiali. E accompagnata dal marito John e dalla figlia Quintana Roo, la cui triste fine ricordiamo con struggimento da “L’anno del pensiero magico” e “Blue nights”.

Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Waikiki Beach, Hawaii

I miei 3 favoriti: [3] Honolulu, Hawai, un fascinoso hotel degli anni ‘20 dove JD trascorre diversi periodi di vacanza in famiglia, la visita alla caserma protagonista in “Da qui all’eternità”, l’incredibile cimitero militare nel cratere di un vulcano e la sepoltura di un ragazzo caduto in Vietnam (Nelle Isole, capitolo IV Soggiorni) [2] tutta la durezza e tutta le bellezza di Georgia O’Keefe (omonimo paragrafo del capitolo III Donne) [1] The White Album (capitolo I), dove JD ci porta in presa diretta nella Los Angeles sconvolta dagli omicidi della Manson Family (da approfondire a parte i collegamenti tra Manson e l'album dei Beatles), dentro la rivolta studentesca e quella delle Black Panthers, alle prove dei Doors con Jim Morrison.

Da leggere ovviamente con in sottofondo The White Album dei Beatles.

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Ghost149

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

I found this collection captivating, maybe because it was written about my home state of California in the late 60’s early 70’s, a time when I was old enough to be impacted by cultural changes but too young to be keeping up with any analysis of them. Didion was a native Californian, born in Sacramento and living in Southern California during this period, and I loved getting her real time astute observations.

In The White Album, she reflects on her own mental state, but also California’s, with all of its different kinds of unrest. She touched on topics from the Black Panthers to The Doors, concluding, “Disorder was its own point.”

What she said about the Sharon Tate murders, which took place not far from her home, was particularly revealing: “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

This is a feeling I also remember, though I was young. There was lots of fear: fear of change, fear of violence, fear of the obvious loss of control.

So this was my favorite of the essays, but they were all good. She tackled the oddest of subjects!

The water shortage, in Holy Water
“'The West begins,’ Bernard DeVoto wrote, ‘where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches.’ This is maybe the best definition of the West I have ever read …”

Many Mansions, about the governor’s residence Ronald and Nancy Reagan built to replace the gorgeous older one Nancy called a “fire trap,” and what their style choices revealed about them.

Bureaucrats, where I learned of the inception of diamond lanes on California freeways.

An interesting take on The Women’s Movement
“They seized as a political technique a kind of shared testimony at first called a ‘rap session,’ then called ‘consciousness-raising,’ and in any case a therapeutically oriented American reinterpretation, according to the British feminist Juliet Mitchell, of a Chinese revolutionary practice known as ‘speaking bitterness.’”

Finally, I’ll share this quote from The Islands, which was about her trip to Honolulu with her husband and daughter in 1969 in an attempt to save her marriage:
“I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting: you are getting a woman who for some time now has felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people. You are getting a woman who somewhere along the line misplaced whatever slight faith she ever had in the social contract, in the meliorative principle, in the whole grand pattern of human endeavor.”

I think this explains what I love about reading Didion’s non-fiction. She tells stories through her own unique lens: an outsider, peering in, reporting what she observes while at the same time trying to understand why she feels adrift from it all.

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xGothimisalolix

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

March 26,2025

A fine example of juxtaposing public cultural events with personal experiences, a kind of journalism Didion practically invented (and Hunter Thompson took over the top). By putting her reflections on political and social events in the context of her interests and activities at the time, the social impacts of the events are made more particular in an intimate way. But is their significance made more meaningful or universal with such a method? I couldn't help wondering that with each essay Didion dished up in this collection targeting the 60's. Her range of topics for commentary is broad and kaleidoscopic, ranging among adaptations to migraine headaches, California water management, LA traffic management, biker movies, Charles Manson, Doris Lessing, and Georgia O'Keefe. She is gifted in stirring up a sense of significance between unrelated spheres of activity, in the same way we connect life events in memory with the coincidence of hearing a song from the Beatles or Dylan at the time. Yet the connections she makes in her essays are more evocative than elucidating, like mental snack food with dubious nutrition.

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The White Album

joan didion

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