Joan Didion

“Play It as It Lays” by Joan Didion examines how a facade greatly influences one’s success in Hollywood during the 1970s. The protagonist of the story, Maria Wyeth, is an upcoming model/actress from Silver Wells, Nevada who tries her luck in the entertainment business due to pressure from her parents by moving to New York, and then Los Angeles where she meets many well established individuals within this “artificial society” such as BZ, a homosexual film producer and Carter, a film director as…

Why do writers write? If it 's not for the money why do writers write? Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” This quote expresses to me why writers write. Throughout this course, I have experienced the opportunity to express myself as a writer and having the flexibility to do what I want. Expressing myself in my own why defines who I am as a writer, and this course has given me this. Taking this course last year was…

The Scars of Colonialism Humanities 351 has taught me a lot about the world I live in today. As a student and citizen of this complex world, I never realized how much colonialism has affected our world and even our country as a whole. Colonialism seemed like such a distant concept to me before this course, but it is quite clear that the scars colonialism has left are still affecting the world today. Colonialism and the colonial impulse are technically “dead”, but it has greatly affected the…

details about my day. It was a deep wound and I know I had no one to blame other than myself. I tried to get over it by etching in my brain that it was for the best but I still think about how different my life would be if she was still in it. Joan Didion was in the same position when she said “…I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her... (492)” I thought that as soon as I fully got over our friendship that she’d pop right back into my life like nothing ever happened. Years…

I’ve never tried anything like it before. Two days into that class and I couldn’t stand it. Once I was sitting in a class with the piano on the desk, trying to read the notes and learn the song. I couldn’t hold on to that one tear. I felt like Joan Didion who wrote “Why I Write”. She mentioned that when she would sit down to write her book her mind would doze off and would start wondering about other things (171). I too tried to focus but, it was too intense and my mind simply would not…

Poems.” The 1960s in California emerged a new generation of contemporary American literary writers. The California writers focused on the literary style and “concerns of the beat generation, but also reflected their own time period.” (pg. 419) Joan Didion was a novelist-essayist and “Run River” was her first novel published in 1963 which “focused on these sense of loss and decline of a certain pride.” Gerald Haslam distinguished his California roots which showcased in his writings, he wrote…

What is “Good” Writing? What is writing? More importantly what is “good” writing? Writing is expressionism. Writing gives you the chance to use your creative mind and to express your opinion. Writing is a wonderful tool to express your opinions and show your unique ideas but not everybody’s writing is good. Good written papers are rare and difficult to create and they take many revisions and plenty of luck. What separates ordinary writing from good writing is that it, most importantly,…

During the past year, I have grieved for three separate losses. My grandfather passed away at age eighty-five, and seemed to have left peacefully and on his own terms, grateful to have lived for so long. My cousin Quentin, who I didn’t know very well, but now miss his presence when we play card games together at family reunions, died a few days after his eighteenth birthday from an overdose. While these deaths have affected my extended family greatly, I have been dealing with a loss that most of…

Writing was and still is not my strong subject, if compared to Science or Psychology. At some point I wanted to be a writer. Well to be exact a (fantasy- fiction writer) until I came to my senses, and decided maybe that is not my strong suit. As I was growing up possibly around middle school age; I thought I could write and was able to start. I guess in a way it is something you think you can do, or not. Most writes are able to know if they can write, for example-George Orwell knew he should be…

In this class (Linguistics for ESL Educators), I discovered that I am an EL student myself, I was exposed to English early on, and my experience and cultural and social surroundings played an important part in acquiring the English language, which would be referred as Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS) by Jims Cummins. As I entered school I learned what is known as academic English, Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALPS). As a teacher, I have understood that language is a…