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From Stephen Elliott
Happy Birthday, Susan Sontag. You would have been 80 today.
Here is an entry from her collection of journals and notebooks, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh. Also, check out Rumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton and Maria Popova’s fantastic collaborative illustration, Susan Sontag on Art.
...moreRumpus contributor Wendy MacNaughton has teamed up with Maria Popova (of Brain Pickings) to illustrate selected excerpts from Susan Sontag’s diaries.
The artwork is available on Etsy as an 11×14 print on heavy cotton rag paper with razored edges in a limited edition of 300, signed and numbered, bearing a hand-stamped inscription on the back.
...moreAt Tablet, Adam Kirsch explores the recently released second volume of Susan Sontag’s journal entries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, which Kirsch argues “contain a human drama more fascinating than anything in her essays or her fiction.”
“…The utter sincerity of the diaries, the sense that Sontag is always able to speak honestly to and about herself, is what makes them such compelling documents.”
(Via The Book Bench)
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The photograph circulating of a young stunning Sigrid Nunez with long dark hair and a shining smile, sitting next to Susan Sontag, gives you the physical reminder of what caught David Reiff (Sontag’s son)’s attention.
In the 1970s, writer Sigrid Nunez moved in with her boyfriend and his mother. She hovered over the couple, critiqued their sex life, had an endless parade of house guests, and chided Nunez for not being more of a people-person. His mother was the already world-famous writer Susan Sontag.
...more“Then the book was finished, or at least a completed manuscript was turned in—as I was to learn, for Susan, the book is never finished. We spent a week holed up in her apartment combing through the galleys and then another with the page proofs, tweaking and massaging the text.
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I’m returning from doing readings upstate, once more along the Hudson. Worrying about my coffee spilling onto the brown leather shoes of the man next to me reading Susan Sontag’s Regarding The Pain of Others. Sontag, the public intellectual. What does that mean?
As a reader, I love this. As a writer, I am terrified.
Via the always excellent Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy, Farrar, Straus and Giroux is creating a new web site, FSG Work In Progress, that presents conversations with authors while their books are still being written.
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Two hallowed New York intellectuals are The Rumpus’s next set of Literary Fashionables. Susan Sontag and George Plimpton both circled the upper tiers of Manhattan’s literary society. And while exhibiting seemingly opposing aesthetics, both Sontag and Plimpton promulgated revolutionary ideas and modes of approach to writing that would impact literary stylists for years to come.
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This week in New York, Harper’s presents “Love: A Rebuke” with Colson Whitehead, Heidi Julavits and Sam Lipsyte, Simon Critchley in bed with Cabinet’s Brian Dillon chatting about hypochondria, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Gignatic present the Greatest 3-Minute Rock ‘n Roll Story Ever, Adam Haslett reads from his debut novel, The Magnetic Fields perform, Zachary German and Tao Lin celebrate the release of German’s new book, and BOMB Magazine hosts its Winter Issue Launch Party.
In a new book of essays, Terry Castle rips through literary and cultural allusions at breakneck speed, citing obscure folk musicians and cult novelists in the same breath.Here’s some weekend reading: Sigrid Nunez has written a beautiful memoir of Susan Sontag in the latest issue of Tin House. (The text is not available online, but I highly recommend you pick up this issue of Tin House: it’s a really good one.) Nunez was involved with Sontag’s son David, and all three lived together for many years, and much of the memoir is about that time, but Nunez and Sontag remained friends for years after their household split up.
...moreNow I realize it is a dazzling, sunny afternoon in San Francisco. People are no doubt reading books at Zeitgeist as I advised them to this morning. Children and dogs are cavorting in the parks. In fact, right now, I’m at a cafe that is holding a children’s musical recital.
...morePhilip Lopate has written the first book in the Writers on Writers series, from Princeton University Press, on Susan Sontag. In Notes on Sontag he tries to take on some of the controversy surrounding Sontag, while admitting to having mixed feelings about Sontag himself.
...more“For Susan Sontag, prose was a vehicle for expressing what she thought; it was itself a form of thinking, and perhaps more exactingly, of feeling as well.” …read more
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