Afternoon Bites: Animated Achewood, Sontag Biography, Meconis’s “Jacob de Zoet” Portraits, and More

The Quietus checked in with Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column. “Thankfully, feminist collectivism has always offered a powerful antidote to corporate-sponsored atomism in this vein. Indeed, the overarching theme that emerges from Women Make Noise: Girl Bands from Motown to Modern, a strenuous new collection of essays edited by British academic Julia Downes, is that countercultural movements are only ever truly momentous when all-girl units are leading the charge from the bottom up.” Alex Niven on Women Make Noise in the Los […]

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Susan Sontag’s “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980” Reviewed

As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 by Susan Sontag; David Rieff, editor Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 544 p On a Sunday afternoon a bit over a year ago, I was in the apartment of a good friend who, while reading his Wall Street Journal (his motives were pure: to better understand the financial markets and a view that ran contrary to that of his neighborhood), made a noise between a moan and gasp. He proceeded to […]

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Morning Bites: Defending NYPL, Bohemian Girl, Susan Sontag, Playground Ball, Etgar Keret, and More

Defending the New York Public Library at NYRB. Our own Tobias Carroll on Terese Svoboda’s Bohemian Girl at Los Angels Review of Books. Guy Cunningham at Bookslut on Susan Sontag. Etgar Keret talks to Brad Listi at the Other People podcast. There’s a collection of 1980s Taliban poetry that’s got some people upset. The 1966 New York Times article on hip advertising agencies that Pete Campbell from Mad Men hated so much. When Wilt met Elgin on the playground. Follow […]

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Morning Bites: Sontag’s Journals, James Bond’s Beer, Newsies Musical, Google Glasses, and More

Imprint on the early 1960s German design magazine Die Mappe (above) and HTML Giant on Fuck You, A Magazine of the Arts. Adam Kirsch at Tablet on Susan Sontag’s second volume of journals.  Also, there’s that time Sontag wore a bear suit. Edith Zimmerman talks to Eileen Myles at The Hairpin. James Bond drinking beer?  What is this world coming to??? Rex Reed likes the Newsies musical.  Anybody up for a field trip? Is anybody going to be caught dead wearing […]

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On Being Susan Sontag’s Assistant

So I get this phone call from Ellie, who’s got­ten a call from Jim, who says his friend, a writer, is look­ing for an assis­tant. Ellie asks, “Do you think you’d be inter­ested in work­ing for Susan Sontag?” I’d recently had a bad expe­ri­ence work­ing for a man whose idea of “assis­tant” was some­one to pick up his dry clean­ing, so my enthu­si­asm for this type of job wasn’t at its peak. But I had just moved to New York […]

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Sontag Goes to Israel

Promised Lands, Susan Sontag’s 1974 look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict just after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, is playing at Anthology until the 10th.  In anticipation, both L Magazine and The Village Voice have dedicated some space in their publications (or at the very least, their websites) to looking at the film. One thing that Voice writer Michael Atkinson said in particular sticks out to me: “today, the movie seems more remarkable as a Sontag artifact than as political […]

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