Word: joans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Carry It On, a gentle documentary about draft resistance, surprises with the subtle force of its argument and stuns through the sincerity of its two leading figures, Singer Joan Baez and her husband, the nonviolent activist David Harris. Shot in cinema verite format over a period of four months last summer, Carry It On revolves around Harris' arrest in July for noncooperation with the draft...
...like Joan Didion, you can count on her. Three pages into her new novel, the heroine says: "I am telling you how it was." That is the true Didion refrain. Whether in novels or essays, she is always trying to tell the way it is, always indicating the current physical and emotional temperature-it is usually over 100° outside and the climate of the soul is a parched desert...
...years she has had an enviable underground reputation, which Play it As It Lays will probably bring to the surface. Part of the attraction is consistency -Joan never flinches from repeating herself. Didion addicts feel they know all about her eccentricities: the preoccupation with striped sheets and the Hoover Dam, the way she regards hair brushing as a form of existential prayer...
...novel, and later in ultrapersonal magazine columns, the Didion girl-woman has taken shape. She is as sensitive as a Geiger counter, articulate in feeling but not in speech, an incurable romantic with vast moral expectations of herself and others-especially men. From her essays, faithful readers know that Joan Didion herself came to New York right after college, when "nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach." Her life was changed by a lengthy romance with a callous fellow who force-fed her on more cynical wisdom of the world. When she told him she never wanted...
Amidst the efflorescence of Women's Lib, Joan Didion might easily be confused with the new sisterhood of grievance collectors who blame men for everything. True, she thinks that men fail women. But she also feels that women are careless and callous, and that both sexes spend time and love and integrity as if they were unloading counterfeit money. Obsessed by waste and loss, she is a brooder who sifts her experience over and over again. The last lines of Play It As It Lays appear in a paraphrase throughout her work. They imply questioning-and possibly a survivor...