The White Album

It's often been heard that context is important. That current readers can't really understand the experiences of bygone times. The White Album proves that wrong in a strange way. When we looked up that list of terms, that was to provide context to the different essays in the album, but that context really doesn't seem as necessary as one would think. The context helps in a case specific way, but my reading of this collection may be wrong in this thinking, but to me this was all too familiar. I ended up reading these as more of a current reader than when it was published and that colored my perspective. Sure style's change and trends die, but fundamentally the world stays the same. The black panthers, Charles Manson and the people writing about them. It's just specifics of things we still have today. In a way that kin of makes these essays timeless. Except for the style, but whose complaining.

As for her writing, I take away more from the author than from the reading. We discussed several times about how knowledge of the author can color the reader's perspective of the work and with Joan Didion that seems very true. Unlike the rest of the readings, I personally got more out of researching her and her methods than I did the essays. I found it interesting becuase her perspective is very different from my own.

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” - Joan Didion


I don't write like that, at least at face value. I write because I love stories, and I want to share them. I've never really attempted anything using her method, because before I never saw the benefit of that. Having read The White Album, now I think I may, and experimenting with this methodology will be interesting.


“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” -  Joan Didion