Rumpus Exclusive: “Brave Is a Decision”
I’d crossed a line and owned a new secret life. There was no going back.
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Posts Tagged: susan sontag
Variants of Unknown Significance
My gynecologist won’t stop bothering me about getting a genetic test done.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #212: Mark Bibbins
“I had thought of the title as a placeholder, but it ended up hanging around.”
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Dream Big: Hillary, Made Up by Marianne Kunkel
Hillary, Made Up is a complex feminist undertaking that undermines traditional notions of interpretation.
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The Genius and the Nobody: Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions
Make it new, the modernists said. But how to rebuild the living body?
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Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.
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Drawing Close to the Void: Talking with Patty Yumi Cottrell
Patty Yumi Cottrell discusses her debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, how she accesses “the enraptured state” to write, and dreaming as an art form.
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Periphery: Exploring Bombs, Boundaries, and Family History
Have you ever seen a feathery shadow at the edge of your eye? Was it a figure? Did it cross into your vision, like a hummingbird there and gone?
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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.
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The Aura of Baby Einstein, the Child, the Toy
If there is no distinction between show and commercial, ethics and entertainment, what kind of distinctions, if any, exists between her imaginary play, her consumer life, and our reality?
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Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai
Vastness does not always mean an abyss.
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You Can’t Be a Snob with Bad Teeth: Talking with David Sedaris
David Sedaris discusses his new collection of diary entries, Theft By Finding, his love for book signings, and his inevitable return to IHOP.
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Oscars Flub as Grand Finale for Camp
On the Hollywood stage—amidst gasps, jaw drops, and pearl clutches—we witnessed one final, beautifully coded failure and an over-the-top dethroning of the serious.
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On Suffering and Sympathy
What is the distance between sympathy and action? How do we travel from one to the other?
...moreThe Ordinary Extraordinary
In an interview with Mark Greif for Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke frames Against Everything as an essay collection that faces outward, more political and less personal, despite its origins in rarified academia. Greif cites the influence and inspiration of traditions of thought exemplified by Susan Sontag and Stanley Cavell, the latter whose […]
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Lucy Dacus’s Journals
What I write in my journals is a personal record of the events in my life, and my reactions to them.
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Blanchfield
Poet and writer Brian Blanchfield talks about his essay collection Proxies, touring in support of a prose collection versus a poetry collection, and frottage.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney
If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.
...moreSontag Syndrome
Over at Hazlitt, Alana Massey walks us through the anxiety that so often accompanies reading great thinkers, laying bare her own insecurities at the altar of famed writer and critic, Susan Sontag. When she finally does sit down to read the writer she had so carefully side-stepped, her worst fears are confirmed, and she is […]
...moreA Caricature of Incorrectness
For the New York Times, Benjamin Moser and Charles McGrath explore the works of authors who they believe have been unfairly stigmatized. While Moser analyzes why Susan Sontag’s work has become branded as “rubbish” and “archetypal,” McGrath confronts Kipling’s reputation as a “caricature” of “incorrectness.”
...moreSaving Our Minds
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reviews Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays, and suggests works by Nietzsche and Susan Sontag to read alongside Camus’s eye- and mind-opening work: If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow […]
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #10: Remember AIDS?
AIDS isn’t over, but far too many think it is. Not everyone is haunted by remembering the dying, the friends gone gaunt, the lesions appearing, the artists dropping out of sight, the funerals, the lie-filled obituaries, the terrified waits for results of blood tests taken by nurses wearing masks and triple gloves.
...morePhotography and the European Refugee Crisis
At JSTOR Daily, Jon Greenaway revisits Susan Sontag’s writing on photography (specifically in On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others) through the lens of Europe’s current refugee crisis.
...moreCritical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying
Writers, Sontag believed, if they are any good at all, are obliged to try to understand the forces that shape us. They seek to give us a more truthful sense of things, a more nuanced sense of the world we inhabit…They write to help us understand what, for many, eludes understanding. Steve Wasserman remembers Susan […]
...moreTreatment as Metaphor
In our daily efforts to stay healthy, to invent solutions for staving off death, have we already put ourselves in treatment for diseases yet to come? Conner Habib writes about his cancer diagnosis over at The Stranger, challenging Susan Sontag’s argument against seeing illness as a metaphor by revealing the ways in which we can’t […]
...moreThe Fifty-Year-Old Startup
In a conversation with Joe Fassler at Salon, Robert Silvers, “co-editor or editor for every issue” of the New York Review of Books, recalls how the publication came to be born.
...moreAll Are Bad
We’ve all read at least one: from “Against YA” to “Against Happiness,” essays that promise to dismiss entire abstract concepts using only rhetoric make for great click-bait. In The New Yorker, Ivan Kreilkamp explains why we keep overstating the case: “Against [X]” is a symptom of a liberal culture’s longing to escape its own strictures; […]
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FUNNY WOMEN #120: Notes on “Camping”
It’s been 50 years since Susan Sontag published “Notes on ‘Camp.'” Now, we imagine what she might have said about Camping.
...moreThe Partisan Review, Digitized
The Partisan Review, printed from 1934 to 2004, marked 69 years of cultural history in the US, with notable contributors such as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. Its whole archive […]
...more“A miracle is just an accident, with fancy trappings”
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.
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