Didion’s Argument

I’m fairly certain there is no argument here. Joan Didion is not trying to persuade the masses that coping mechanisms are a way of clouding growth and life understanding. She plays fifteen memories, disconnected, and numbered like the tracks of an album. I enjoyed getting little blips of her view of the world, set in [...]

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Wet Black Bough

If I had to place it, I’d say Joan Dideon’s purpose is something of a modernist one. I was tipped off to this by her quotes of Pound and (indirectly) Eliot, and they might be 0ver-influencing my reading but I think it fits. She presents her life as this series of obsessions, events, spectacles and [...]

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White Album

Joan Didion seems to think that life is not shaped so much by what happens nor by how we perceive it. Rather, there is no shape, and life will go on running along its aimless path, without some underlying consistency or reason, no matter what we think about it. Looking for some sense of order, [...]

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Didion

For me, Didion’s argument is presented on pages 18 and 45. “Everything was to teach us something”. I believe that Didion feels that important things happen in our lives and although we don’t always know 100% why they happen, we always learn something from them. Most of the writing happens during the tail end of [...]

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Didion’s Argument

I feel like Didion, as a writer, is constantly searching for a story. But Didion, as a human being, is trying to tell us in “The White Album” that these stories don’t always exist. She writes about the 60s, about the colorful characters like Jim Morrison and the radical events like the student strike [...]

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Didion’s “The White Album”

The 1960s were significantly romanticized years in the lives of American youth. When I think of the decade, I think of hippies, flowers, drugs, Woodstock, rock music, flower children, love-ins, and many other things in that horrible musical Hair.
Didion’s essay speaks to a different cultural feeling during the decade. Los Angeles during the 60s was [...]

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More thoughts on Didion

As I see it, the main argument of “The White Album” is that despite our inability to form a satisfying narrative thread to give meaning to the unsettling aspects of our lives, we are nonetheless compelled to constantly attempt to do so.  Didion admits that much of the detachment and unease she felt during these [...]

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The White Album

The White Album is about life. Human life as we typically see it has a script: a beginning, middle, and end, a purpose, a meaning. We have accomplishments and goals, and they fit together within a sequence of events to make a story. Or so we like to tell ourselves. It seems to me that The [...]

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Best new music (sort of)

I put off writing this post as long as possible, mostly because I could think of nothing to write it about.  This is not to say that I am uninterested in music – while not a music snob (any music snob would certainly be appalled at a fair proportion of the songs on my iPod), [...]

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Didion’s argument

While I think the essay could stand on its own without an central argument, because of its vivid and oddly dispassionate images, I did get a general sense after reading it. Like Drew and Anna before me, I agree that both the first and last lines provide the best evidence of a point of [...]

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The best summer

 

When I was sixteen, I spent the summer at a creative writing program in Oxford. They put us up at Pembroke College, one of the poorer and less famous components of Oxford. We spent a few hours a day in class, and were free to wander for the rest of the day as long as we [...]

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Why the Midwest doesn’t completely suck

I procrastinated this post for as long as possible, hoping that I could figure out how to get the photograph off my cell phone so you could see it. In fact, I procrastinated so long that I completely forgot about it in my haze of midterms and job applications. I like to think of myself [...]

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What Didion’s argument might be…

           I would say that Didion’s argument is pretty well summed up in the last sentence of “The White Album”: “Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on ‘Midnight Confessions’ and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same [...]

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art

 
At one point last year I was so fed up with my freshman dorm that I was taking any excuse to not be there. One of my favorite diversions was taking the el downtown on a Thursday afternoon to the Art Institute for Free Night. At first I just went to the Impressionist room and [...]

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My dogs.

I’ve never been very into pictures. I don’t take them, and I don’t like being in them. When pressed I can think of a few iconic pictures, but none of them are particularly significant to me. I’ve always heard that people are more likely to save pictures than anything else in a fire, but I [...]

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Everything Is Illuminated

Last summer I visited the DeYoung museum in San Francisco with my girlfriend while she was visiting me in California. I’ve been to the museum several times before, but this time we saw a traveling black and white photography exhibit by a Japanese photographer names Hiroshi Sugimoto. If you’re a big U2 fan, you’ll know [...]

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Just Dance

This video is both NSFW and NSFR (Not safe for Republicans).
If you’re even mildly liberal, you know who Bill O’Reilly is. I think that I am completely unbiased when I say that he is a concentrated instance of everything that is wrong with America. Brutish, low-brow, illogical, rabble-rousing, hate-spewing… there aren’t [...]

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Painting: The Ambassadors

I’ll never forget the first time I saw “The Ambassadors,” or “Double Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve” (different name, same painting), by Hans Holbein the Younger. I was in a high school art history class. The daily routine included about 30 minutes of discussion based on paintings that the teacher was [...]

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Annie Leibovitz

My place in the art world is a humble one with not too long a past. Coming from a small town, I’ve certainly had my “oo”s and “ahs” at Chicago’s art institute. As an anthropology major, I’ve definitely gazed at the Aztec’s flayed skin God with disturbingly astute interest. As a coffee shop employee, I [...]

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Photograph

To me, this photograph is amazing. Not in the cultural sense, or for any historical purposes, though it does have a lot of rich ideas of the times assigned to it and it very much describes an atmosphere at a certain point in history. This photo is amazing because it offers a view of the [...]

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.4

May 13, 2004 – Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals between the Los Angeles Lakers and the defending champions San Antonio Spurs. The series, tied 2-2, and the Lakers were not only fighting a stacked Spurs team but also an unruly SBC Center. The game went back and forth with no victor in sight. [...]

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Obama the Badass

After reading Simon’s post, I feel kind of bad that I’m not posting about some impactful work of photojournalism (though this one also won a Pulitzer–a few days ago, actually). And, with all the art I’ve seen and genuinely appreciated (I spent a lot of my childhood in art museums with my parents), I’m [...]

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I’m not sure about this. . . .

As a general rule, I do not take pictures with my cell phone.  I do consider a camera an essential feature when choosing a phone, but that’s only for emergencies.  I love photography and have a thing for cameras, so I usually carry my camera, which takes far better pictures than my cell phone, with [...]

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When a photograph is more than a photograph

I don’t know if this is my “favorite” photograph as so much as it is one of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and heart-breaking images I have ever seen. Just as intriguing is the background behind the photograph and the man who took it.
Kevin Carter was a photojournalist who took a trip in 1993 to Southern [...]

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I kind of think Animal Collective’s “Merryweather Post Pavilion” is awesome. And by kind of I mean totally.

My so far favorite album of the year is Animal Collective’s “Merryweather Post Pavilion.” I know, I know. I couldn’t have picked more of a hipster cliché. But I legitimately like it, and I also legitimately like Animal Collective. Now, I am not going to try to convince anyone else that this album is the [...]

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The complexities of “Scarlet Takes a Tumble.”

And now an attempt to explain the viral popularity of “Scarlet Takes a Tumble.” This may be a challenge because I in fact hate this video.
To start, I guess it is kind of funny. I mean, Scarlet is taking her ridiculous singing pretty seriously prior to her tumble, which, of course, [...]

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