Tag: Joan Didion

• Didion on Burroughs

  1966 is calling. At a site called The Beat Patrol, I found a good review by Joan Didion, an author I really like, on William S. Burroughs, another author I really like. Originally published in 1966 in Bookweek, NOT the modern Book Week for children’s books), it begins: There sometimes seems a peculiar irrelevance about…

  Bill Ectric

  July 25, 2015

  cut up writing, experimantal writing, Joan Didion, Naked Lunch, The Beat Patrol, The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs

• Awe-Inspired Paralysis

  From Maud Newton: Joan Didion suffered from an extreme case of awe-inspired paralysis. She told The Paris Review that, while Henry James was as formative as influence on her writing as Hemingway, she could no longer read him at all. He wrote perfect sentences, too, but very indirect, very complicated. Sentences with sinkholes. You could…

  Bill Ectric

  February 9, 2010

  Henry James, Joan Didion, Maud Newton, Proust, Rupert Thomson, Virginia Woolf, writing, Writing Secrets, Zan McQuade