#david rieff

[girlwithbooks]

[queerographies]

[Sulle donne][Susan Sontag]

"Sulle donne" di Susan Sontag raccoglie saggi cruciali degli anni '72-'75. Sontag, figura influente del Novecento, affronta temi attuali come uguaglianza, bellezza e sessualità, con un'acuta critica. Il libro offre una chiave per comprendere la modernità

Sulle donne: Sontag e la sfida per l’uguaglianza (Saggi seminali per comprendere la donna e la società) Titolo: Sulle donneScritto da: Susan SontagTitolo originale: On WomenTradotto da: Paolo DilonardoEdito da: EinaudiAnno: 2024Pagine: 216ISBN: 9788806260583 La sinossi di Sulle donne di Susan Sontag Uguaglianza, bellezza, invecchiamento, sessualità, fascismo. Ancora attualissimi, i saggi sulle…

[standwukraine]

Reading Slaughterhouse by David Rieff (1995) and there are some. Very familiar-sounding things in it.

[severeprincesheep]

You can add Susan Sontag to that list of people you despize.

(X)

"Susan Sontag bullied her lover, snapper to the stars Annie Leibovitz, mercilessly, telling her, “You’re so dumb, you’re so dumb,” a searingly honest book about Sontag’s life reveals.

“Sontag: Her Life and Work,” by Benjamin Moser, is being touted as one of the books of the season.

And in the tome, Rolling Stone and VF icon Leibovitz speaks of her love for the great writer, who struggled with her sexuality.

But for the first time, their love affair is laid bare, as Sontag’s son David Rieff admitted: “They were the worse couple I’ve ever seen in terms of unkindness, inability to be nice, held resentments.”

Rieff is no fan of Leibovitz, but still said: “I said to Susan more than once, ‘Look, either be nicer to her or leave her.'”

Despite that, the book says that Leibovitz paid for everything — first-class travel, apartments, private chefs and maids — although it states: “From early on, Susan gave the impression of wanting to get away from the relationship, and her discomfort burst into full public view.”

Author Richard Howard recalled a “constant litany of attacks on Annie — You’re so dumb, you’re so dumb” — that caused him to all but end a friendship of decades, the book reports.

On the day Sontag’s friend Michael Silverblatt was due to meet Leibovitz, Sontag, the book says, told him that “she felt obliged to explain that Annie would be the stupidest person I’d ever met.”

“Just as often, she would trash her to her face. Annie was sitting next to her when Susan said to be Marilu Eustachio: ‘This one doesn’t understand a thing.'”

Meanwhile, as Leibovitz stood by, she would gush to another photographer: “You’re the only interesting photographer in America.”

At one Christmas dinner, Sontag shrieked at her lover for ordering shellfish — telling her that her son was allergic, prompting the star snapper to run out to a takeout restaurant.

The book says that Sontag denied that Leibovitz was her lover in interviews — even lying to her sister Judith.

The pair split in 2000 when Leibovitz decided to have a baby on her own at age 51.

Even then, at a party to celebrate both Leibovitz and her baby daughter Sarah in 2001, Sontag became jealous of Condé Nast chief — and Leibovitz’s boss — Anna Wintour, fearing she was being ignored as she said, “What am I? chopped liver?,” according to Silverblatt.

“I think she wanted me to herself,” Leibovitz said.

But she still bought Sontag a beautiful apartment in Paris to write in, and tirelessly cared for Sontag during her final battle with cancer up until her death in December 2004 at age 71.

And despite everything, Leibovitz told the author that she loved Sontag enough to endure the sniping, adding: “I would have done anything.”

She added: “She was tough, but it all balanced out. The good far outweighs the bad things. We had so many good experiences together.”

The book also tells how Rieff and Leibovitz had issues even after Sontag’s death as her Carnegie Hall memorial was split between two camps as they held separate receptions.

Leibovitz made a book of photos of Sontag taken by all the great photographers – and, according to the book, Rieff refused to allow the book to be distributed inside.

Afterward, friend Paolo Dilonardo reportedly told mourners: “If you’re going to her thing, you can’t come to ours.”"

Heavily inspired by female author/poet (Susan sontag) and the sheer hatred and utter annoyance I have for most people... y'all truly suck dick

[drsonnet]

“For a long time the landscape of Sarajevo was as pitted with dreams as with shellfire.... It is not that the foreigners didn’t tell the story of Sarajevo. They did, but nothing happened.... ‘Another safari?’ an acquaintance asked me when I arrived in the city in the late winter. ‘What do you hope to see this time, more corpses, more destruction? We should charge you admission’.... A lot of dreams died there in the past year – dreams that the world has a conscience, that Europe is a civilized place, that there is justice in human affairs as well as sorrow. It should be no surprise that the old millenarian dream that knowledge and truth should set us free would die there as well. Reality, it turns out, is better apprehended in the Lion cemetery than in the Palais des Nations in Geneva or the United Nations in New York, much as we might wish it otherwise.” David Rieff, “On Your Knees with the Dying,” in Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War (The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1993), 22.

[login-required]

The Reproach of Hunger series (sketty)

Not sure how I first came up with the concept for this series.

"The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century", by David Rieff, is a book about food insecurity and its relationship with the Green Revolution, the promises of GMOs (and the industrial interests driving them), international aid and global supply chains. It was an easy read and some of the dynamics it highlighted were also relevant to the way the COVID-19 pandemic was handled -- with public vaccine development efforts hijacked by IP-pushers who made bank, and the global South getting screwed out of a vaccine supply that should have been cheap as chips for everyone.

The idea is simple: the prompt asks for a sculpture or installation titled "The reproach of hunger", combining some set of 'traditional' sculpture materials (typically some type of marble and perhaps alabaster, ebony or leaf-of-gold) plus spaghetti meatballs. A style descriptor like a year, period or author may be included. All the media and style references are presumably abundant enough in any training dataset, that the image generator can replicate the looks pretty well - except that the juxtaposition of soft, wet, hot, sticky food with hard, dry, cold, aseptic marble makes for an interesting clash.

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

什麼叫無言思考？你來試試看，你就做不到。😎

－ Susan Sontag (1933-2004 American) 她的兒子David Rieff 將其日記與筆記編成這本書 👇

"Reborn:Journals and Notebooks，1947-1963"

蘇珊·桑塔格／ 是一名美國作家、評論家和女權主義者。她被認為是近代西方最引人注目、最有爭議性的女作家及評論家之一。 蘇珊的寫作領域廣泛，以其才華、敏銳的洞察力和廣博的知識著稱。著作主要有《反對闡釋》，《激進意志的風格》，《論攝影》，《疾病及其隱喻》和小說《火山情人》。

🌾 ps. I've been reading her the other one book - "桑塔格／SONTAG - Her Life And Work " recently and haven't finished it yet. when I finish it, I will read "Rebon". 🙏 Merci and lucky I see your posted. 🙂

and I so love her honest being a writer. 💕👍 xoxo Lan~*

p. 85: "What is thinking without words? If you try it, you can't."

[svartikotturinn]

(Judges you in Hebrew)

[fuckyeahilike]

(X)

"Susan Sontag bullied her lover, snapper to the stars Annie Leibovitz, mercilessly, telling her, “You’re so dumb, you’re so dumb,” a searingly honest book about Sontag’s life reveals.

“Sontag: Her Life and Work,” by Benjamin Moser, is being touted as one of the books of the season.

And in the tome, Rolling Stone and VF icon Leibovitz speaks of her love for the great writer, who struggled with her sexuality.

But for the first time, their love affair is laid bare, as Sontag’s son David Rieff admitted: “They were the worse couple I’ve ever seen in terms of unkindness, inability to be nice, held resentments.”

Rieff is no fan of Leibovitz, but still said: “I said to Susan more than once, ‘Look, either be nicer to her or leave her.'”

Despite that, the book says that Leibovitz paid for everything — first-class travel, apartments, private chefs and maids — although it states: “From early on, Susan gave the impression of wanting to get away from the relationship, and her discomfort burst into full public view.”

Author Richard Howard recalled a “constant litany of attacks on Annie — You’re so dumb, you’re so dumb” — that caused him to all but end a friendship of decades, the book reports.

On the day Sontag’s friend Michael Silverblatt was due to met Leibovitz, Sontag, the book says, told him that “she felt obliged to explain that Annie would be the stupidest person I’d ever met.”

“Just as often, she would trash her to her face. Annie was sitting next to her when Susan said to be Marilu Eustachio: ‘This one doesn’t understand a thing.'”

Meanwhile, as Leibovitz stood by, she would gush to another photographer: “You’re the only interesting photographer in America.”

At one Christmas dinner, Sontag shrieked at her lover for ordering shellfish — telling her that her son was allergic, prompting the star snapper to run out to a takeout restaurant.

The book says that Sontag denied that Leibovitz was her lover in interviews — even lying to her sister Judith.

The pair split in 2000 when Leibovitz decided to have a baby on her own at age 51.

Even then, at a party to celebrate both Leibovitz and her baby daughter Sarah in 2001, Sontag became jealous of Condé Nast chief — and Leibovitz’s boss — Anna Wintour, fearing she was being ignored as she said, “What am I? chopped liver?,” according to Silverblatt.

“I think she wanted me to herself,” Leibovitz said.

But she still bought Sontag a beautiful apartment in Paris to write in, and tirelessly cared for Sontag during her final battle with cancer up until her death in December 2004 at age 71.

And despite everything, Leibovitz told the author that she loved Sontag enough to endure the sniping, adding: “I would have done anything.”

She added: “She was tough, but it all balanced out. The good far outweighs the bad things. We had so many good experiences together.”

The book also tells how Rieff and Leibovitz had issues even after Sontag’s death as her Carnegie Hall memorial was split between two camps as they held separate receptions.

Leibovitz made a book of photos of Sontag taken by all the great photographers – and, according to the book, Rieff refused to allow the book to be distributed inside.

Afterward, friend Paolo Dilonardo reportedly told mourners: “If you’re going to her thing, you can’t come to ours.”"

when susan sontag wrote “I must change my life so that I can live it, not wait for it”

[necht]

El discurso de Milei y sus claves. El análisis de David Rieff

[grandhotelabyss]

They’re mad at the queen for this one, because they aren’t even able to understand intellectually what she knows viscerally (and expresses artlessly)—that the 20th century was more alive in all its dangers than the 21st in all its commitment to safety. In the same forum, David Rieff compares it to the shift from the ribald 18th to the sentimental 19th centuries:

Culturally, though it's well within the adult lifetime of an elderly person (like self), the difference between the world Mailer knew & the way we live now is as wide as that of England in the late 18th century & the mid 19th century. The acceleration of history, indeed.

[...]

The roué v the puritan is  an element. Moral panics often follow libertine eras. The victory of the traumatic (therapeutic on steroids). Identitarianism replacing class struggle on the left. The proletarianization of the professoriate. A number of others. The perfect storm.

What does it have to do with gender? A few years back, a moralizing biographer, bristling with the characteristic aggression and urge to dominate of the psychotherapeutic sensibility, threw the book at Rieff’s mother. This is what I wrote, in part:

In her devotion to what Moser calls the idea of her own “exceptionality,” Sontag was faithful to modernism. The first artistic explosion against the Victorian bourgeoisie, the naturalism and neo-romanticism of the fin de siècle, was a male-oriented revolt against domestic woman and her literary corollary in the sentimental realist novel—against what George Moore pointedly called “literature at nurse.” But women could be said to have piloted the revolution’s second generation—Wilde and Conrad gave way to Woolf and Stein—and modernism’s female artists exemplify the genius resisting the tyrannical moralism of an overly regulated and schematized society. Sontag was heir to this tradition of the exceptional woman, was in this modern sense a feminist.

But feminism, as the legitimating ideology of momentous economic and social changes, went, in Sontag’s lifetime and still more in our own, a different way. This may be (now I am speculating and historicizing) among the reasons why Sontag never quite reliably affiliated with the movement, and distanced herself especially from the irrationalist variant associated with the likes of Adrienne Rich, whom Sontag all but directly called a fascist. As Sontag saw it, Rich’s supposed radicalism was just an updated variant of an old, bad form of emotional coercion that would not prove emancipatory to women, barred as they had already been by the grandees of the canon from their share in reason. (Moser, despite his otherwise thoroughgoing anti-radical liberalism, takes Rich’s side in their dispute on identity politics grounds and resorts to psychological and even verbal cliché to do so: “Sontag’s furious response suggested that Rich had touched a nerve.”)

After the anarcho-modernist interregnums, the artistic eruptions, of the 1920s and 1960s, after the ages of Woolf and Sontag, middle-class women were put back into their old Victorian role as guardians of virtue and rectitude, concepts updated (i.e., superficially de-Christianized) as “appropriate conduct” for the state/corporate neoliberal bureaucracy typified by the postmodern university. The angel in the house became the angel in HR. Women were not, as the feminism of Woolf’s time promised they would be, freed from the moral strictures and emotional limits of the domestic sphere with their entrance into culture and the professions; rather, culture and the professions became the new domestic sphere with female “emancipation.” Adrienne Rich’s “disloyalty to civilization,” because of its hierarchal coldness, was translated into universal over-socialization, a kind of communism on capitalism’s behalf, or capitalism with a human (i.e., female) face.

It is because Sontag could not possibly fill this updated Victorian role, not even when she took up 19th-century literature and politics at the end of her days—she understood that modern heroism had to be, as she said of Simone Weil, anti-bourgeois—that she must now be historicized into a pathological case by her biographer, who operates in a literary world ever-more-professionalized on these moralistic terms. And not without some beneficial consequences for the professional and, yes, moral life—who wants to be stabbed by Norman Mailer?—but with some loss, too, I think, for the artistic.

[grandeslistas]

Susan Sontag

Además de fotógrafa y escritora, Susan Sontag también ejerció la docencia y dirigió películas y obras teatrales. Tras su muerte en 2004, dejó atrás una vasta obra. En sus diarios, se puede ver la afición que tenía por las listas, además de su caracter autoexigente digno de cualquier capricorniana. En sus listas habla de temas tan diversos como el matrimonio, la crianza de su hijo, el lenguaje y el aseo. 

¿En qué creo de verdad?

En la vida privada

En el mantenimiento de la cultura

En la música, en Shakespeare, en los edificios antiguos

¿Qué disfruto?

La música

Estar enamorada

Dormir

Carne

Mis defectos

Siempre tarde

Mentir, hablar demasiado

Pereza

Sin  intención de rechazar

Títulos para cuentos:

“Días metropolitanos”

“Comportamiento privado”

“El ascenso”

“Diario de un pardo”

Normas + deberes por cumplir 24 años:

1. Tener mejor postura.

2. Escribir a madre 3 veces por semana.

3. Comer menos.

4. Escribir dos horas al día como mínimo.

5. Nunca quejarme en público de Brandeis o de dinero.

6. Enseñar a David a leer.

No:

1. Criticar públicamente a nadie en Harvard.

2. Aludir a tu edad (jactanciosa, burlona, respetuosamente o de cualquier otro modo)

3. Hablar de dinero.

4. Hablar sobre Brandeis.

Sí:

1. Ducharse cada dos noches.

2. Escribir a Madre cada dos días.

Lista sobre David:

1. Ser coherente.

2. No hablar de él a los demás (por ejemplo, contar cosas graciosas) en su presencia. (No cohibirlo.)

3. No elogiarlo por algo que yo no siempre reconocería como bueno.

4. No amonestarlo duramente por algo que se le ha permitido hacer.

5. Rutina diaria: comer, deberes, baño, dientes, habitación, cuento, dormir.

6. No permitirle que me monopolice cuando estoy con otras personas.

7. Siempre hablar bien de su pa. (Sin muecas, suspiros, impaciencia, etc.)

8. No desalentar sus fantasías pueriles.

9. Hacerlo consciente de que hay un mundo de mayores que no es de su incumbencia.

10. No suponer que lo que no me gusta hacer (bañarme, lavarme el cabello) a él tampoco le gustará.

Lista sin título:

1. No repetirme

2. No tratar de ser divertida

3. Sonreir menos, hablar menos. Por el contrario, y más importante, ser sincera cuando sonrío, y creer lo que digo + decir solo lo que creo

4. Coserme los botones (+ coserle un botón a mis labios)

5. Tratar de reparar las cosas que no funcionan

6. Bañarme todos los días, y lavarme el cabello cada diez días. Lo mismo para D

7. Pensar la razón por la que me muerdo las uñas en el cine

8. No burlarme de la gente, ser venenosa, criticar el aspecto de otras personas, etc. (todo esto es vulgar y frívolo)

9. Ser más frugal (porque la manera despreocupada en que gasto el dinero me hace más dependiente de obtenerlo)

El escritor debe ser cuatro personas:

1. El loco, el obsédé.

2. El tarado.

3. El estilista.

4. El crítico.

1 suministra el material; 2 permite que aflore; 3 es el gusto; 4 es la inteligencia.

Un gran escritor debe ser los cuatro -pero se puede ser incluso un buen escritor con 1) y 2) solamente; son muy importantes.

Experimentos + Ejercicios:

1. masticar

2. sentir las texturas, los objetos

3. atención a los hombros (bajarlos)

4. descruzar mis piernas

5. respirar más profundamente

6. no tocarme tanto la cara

7. bañarme todos los días (grandes mejoras en los últimos 6 meses)

8. atención a la arrogancia - irritabilidad - depresión de la noche del martes. Es Jacob [Taubes]. [Es] el sustituto de P[hilip] + del seminario. La enseñanza es para mí masturbación intelectual

Francés contra inglés:

1. las palabras de los métiers [por ej., los diversos tipos de herramientas para trabajar, etc.] no se incorporan a la lengua general

2. menos palabras (el inglés es una len[gua] siamesa) - todo está duplicado

3. el vocabulario es más abstracto, menos palabras concretas, es decir, es[pecialmente] menos verbos (menos verbos activos)

4. estilo declarativo

5. se emplea menos la metáfora

6. menos palabras para los estados emocionales inmediatos

En francés, una palabra sigue a otra de un modo más obvio que en inglés - hay menos opciones.

[arcticdementor]

One of the more astonishing elements of the kind of ‘demotic’ Critical Race Theory (CRT) preached by Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo is the way it constitutes a version of American exceptionalism in the sense that the US experience is the definitive, up to and including the white/non-white binary that may make sense in US history but is far from an absolute. Arab slavery, even slavery in Brazil go largely unmentioned, and certainly not addressed seriously in these accounts.

…

In the demotic CRT world, however, when necessary the absolutism of Harris’ claims are jettisoned in favor of a radical relativizing and essentializing of knowledge. Thus, the radical librarian Sofia Leung writes that what is wrong with libraries is that they are mostly filled with books, archives, paneers, etc. “written by white dudes about white ideas =, white things, or ideas, people, and things they stole from People of Color and then claimed as white property.

One thing to be said for Leong is that she has the courage of her fanaticism. “Libraries filled with mostly white collections,” she writes, “indicates that we don’t care to hear from People of Color themselves, we don’t consider People of Color to be scholars, we don’t think People of Color are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people.”

This view only coheres if you believe that a scholar writing on physics or geology, say, is not really writing about these subjects but writing out of and in the interests of their race. Libraries, in Leong’s view, are not sites of knowledge, but rather, as she puts it, “sites of whiteness.” She does further: “library collections continue to promote and proliferate white with their very existence and the fact that they are” - I am not making this up - “taking up space in our libraries.”

In this vision, all knowledge is racialized. For Leong libraries as presently constitute are a reifications of White Supremacy. The fact that some of the greatest libraries in the history of the world have been in the Islamic world and in China and Japan does not detain Leong, anymore than the history of private property outside the Euro-American world seems to have detained Harris. Leong even puts “knowledge,” ie the knowledge to be found in US libraries, in inverted commas. The “authoritative” is a bogus category in this view - a way of maintaining White Supremacy.

[jareckiworld]

Diane Arbus - Susan Sontag with her son, David Rieff  (N.Y.C., 1965)