The Purdzilla Show

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be. The roles assigned to her are various, but variations on a single theme. She is the Madonna of the disaffected. She is the pawn of the protest movement. She is the unhappy analysand. She is the singer who would not train her voice, the rebel who drives the Jaguar too fast, the Rima who hides with the birds and the deer. Above all, she is the girl who "feels" things, who has hung on to the freshness and pain of adolescence, the girl ever wounded, ever young. Joan Didion (in her essay Where the Kissing Never Stops , in Slouching Towards Bethlehem )

Photo by Christian Joudrey on Unsplash Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Killimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner...A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. Joan Didion (in her essay Quiet Days in Malibu )