Book Read Free

Sontag

Page 69

by Benjamin Moser


  20.Leibovitz, Photograph.

  21.Sontag, On Photography, 12–13.

  22.Ibid., 35.

  23.Ibid., 4.

  24.Author’s interview with Karen Mullarkey.

  25.Author’s interviews with Sarah Lazin, Karen Mullarkey, and Roger Black.

  26.Author’s interviews with Karen Mullarkey and Roger Black.

  27.Leibovitz, At Work, 34.

  28.Author’s interview with Sarah Lazin.

  29.Annie Leibovitz, ed., Shooting Stars: The Rolling Stone Book of Portraits (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973), 70.

  30.Author’s interview with Andrew Eccles.

  31.Author’s interview with Karen Mullarkey.

  32.Rolling Stone, no. 254, Tenth Anniversary Issue, December 15, 1977, 62.

  33.See, for example, Senhor, July 1960.

  34.Bruno Feitler, O design de Bea Feitler (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2012).

  35.Author’s interview with Karen Mullarkey.

  36.Leibovitz, Shooting Stars, 70.

  37.Author’s interview with Roger Black.

  38.Author’s interview with Karen Mullarkey. See also Joe Hagan, Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).

  39.Author’s interview with Michael Shnayerson.

  40.Author’s interview with Sid Holt.

  CHAPTER 31: THIS “SUSAN SONTAG” THING

  1.Paula Span, “Susan Sontag, Hot at Last,” Washington Post, September 17, 1992.

  2.Ibid.

  3.Richmond Burton, “Notes on Life with Susan,” unpublished manuscript.

  4.Rebecca Mead, “Mister Pitch,” New York, August 5, 1996.

  5.Kachka, Hothouse, 257.

  6.Sontag to Judith Wechsler, June 13, 1990, Sontag Papers.

  7.Author’s interview with Mitchell Kaplan.

  8.Kachka, Hothouse, 257.

  9.Author’s interview with Peggy Miller.

  10.Kachka, Hothouse, 257.

  11.Ibid., 256.

  12.Span, “Susan Sontag, Hot at Last.”

  13.Sontag, Reborn, 298, “Week of Feb. 12, 1962.”

  14.Kachka, Hothouse, 258.

  15.Author’s interview with Sharon DeLano.

  16.Janny Scott, “From Annie Leibovitz: Life, and Death, Examined,” New York Times, October 6, 2006.

  17.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  18.Signorile, Queer, 81.

  19.Ibid., 75.

  20.http://www.msignorile.com/bio.htm.

  21.Signorile, Queer, 77.

  22.Ibid., 67.

  23.Ibid., 232.

  24.Ibid., 84.

  25.Sontag, Illness, 96.

  26.Ibid., 102.

  27.Ibid., 165.

  28.Ibid., 167.

  29.Ibid., 183.

  30.Seligman, Sontag & Kael, 36.

  31.Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Shaping the Reality of AIDS Through Language,” New York Times, January 16, 1989.

  32.Author’s interview with Michelangelo Signorile.

  33.Jay Prosser, “Metaphors Kill,” in Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, Scandal, 200.

  CHAPTER 32: TAKING HOSTAGES

  1.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  2.Gloria L. Cronin et al., A Political Companion to Saul Bellow (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013). Richmond Burton tells the same story.

  3.Author’s interview with Peter Perrone.

  4.Author’s interview with Jeff Seroy.

  5.Annie Leibovitz to Sontag, June 1989, Sontag Papers.

  6.Scott, “From Annie Leibovitz.”

  7.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  8.Scott, “From Annie Leibovitz.”

  9.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.

  10.Ibid.

  11.This portrait is derived from many sources, including the author’s interviews with Karla Eoff, Greg Chandler, Sharon DeLano, Rick Kantor, Christian Witkin, and Annie Leibovitz.

  12.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.

  13.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  14.Author’s interview with Rick Kantor.

  15.Author’s interview with Richmond Burton.

  16.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  17.Author’s interview with Joan Acocella.

  18.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  19.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.

  20.Author’s interview with Marilù Eustachio.

  21.Author’s interview with Gary Indiana.

  22.Author’s interview with Richmond Burton.

  23.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  24.Author’s interview with Christian Witkin.

  25.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.

  26.Author’s interview with Vincent Virga.

  27.Author’s interview with Greg Chandler.

  28.Scott, “From Annie Leibovitz.”

  29.Andrew Goldman, “How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz?” New York, August 16, 2009.

  30.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  31.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.

  32.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.

  33.Author’s interview with Steve Wasserman.

  34.Author’s interview with Martie Edelheit.

  35.Author’s interview with Kasia Gorska.

  36.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  CHAPTER 33: THE COLLECTIBLE WOMAN

  1.“Singleness,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 260.

  2.“A Poet’s Prose,” in ibid., 8.

  3.Sontag Papers.

  4.Span, “Susan Sontag, Hot at Last.”

  5.Sontag, Volcano Lover, 133, 163.

  6.Ibid., 128.

  7.Ibid., 135.

  8.Ibid., 406.

  9.Ibid., 72, 73.

  10.Ibid., 23.

  11.Ibid., 25.

  12.Ibid., 119.

  13.Ibid., 166.

  14.Ibid., 419, 299.

  15.“Mind as Passion,” in Sontag, Saturn, 195–96.

  16.Sontag, Volcano, 41–43.

  17.Ibid., 77–80.

  18.Ibid., 160.

  19.Ibid., 56.

  20.Ibid., 134.

  21.Ibid., 407.

  22.Ibid., 242.

  23.Span, “Susan Sontag, Hot at Last.”

  24.Terry Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” London Review of Books 27, no. 6 (March 17, 2005).

  25.Heller, “The Life of a Head Girl.”

  26.Author’s interview with Jamaica Kincaid.

  27.Author’s interview with Robert Boyers.

  28.Author’s interview with Annie Wright. The American biographer Julie Phillips, who lived in Amsterdam, reported hearing from a friend that Sontag, full of her experiences in Sarajevo, also declared that “people don’t really understand what a city at war is like.” “You could feel a ripple of shock and anger spread through the crowd, not only because De Swaan is Jewish [born 1942], but because many in the crowd had lived through the war.” Author’s interview with Julie Phillips.

  29.Paglia, Vamps, 355.

  30.Author’s interview with Camille Paglia.

  31.Paglia, Vamps, 357.

  32.Author’s interview with Camille Paglia.

  33.“More from Sontag’s ‘Nightmare,’” Page Six, New York Post, August 14, 1992.

  34.Camille Paglia interview with Christopher Lydon, 1993, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFgYcVbAaNs.

  35.Author’s interview with Camille Paglia.

  36.Rollyson and Paddock, Making of an Icon, 274.

  CHAPTER 34: A SERIOUS PERSON

  1.“Project for a Trip to China,” in Sontag, I, etcetera, 14.

  2.David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 31, 123.

  3.Author’s interview with John Burns.

  4.Author’s interview with Atka Reid.

  5.Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 216; Dževad Karahasan, Sarajevo, Exodus of a City (New York:
Kodansha America, 1994), 78–79.

  6.Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 25.

  7.Ibid., 9–10.

  8.Author’s interview with Miro Purivatra.

  9.Omer Hadžiselimović and Zvonimir Radeljković, “Literature Is What You Should Re-Read: An Interview with Susan Sontag,” Spirit of Bosnia 2, no. 2 (April 2007), http://www.spiritofbosnia.org/volume-2-no-2-2007-april/literature-is-what-you-should-re-read-an-interview-with-susan-sontag/.

  10.“‘There’ and ‘Here,’” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 323.

  11.Sontag to Peter Schneider, June 18, 1993, Sontag Papers.

  12.Author’s interview with Haris Pašović.

  13.Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 34.

  14.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 304.

  15.Cott, Susan Sontag, 97.

  16.Sontag Papers, n.d. [mid-1960s]. This is taken from early notes on “The Aesthetics of Silence,” which reveal that she was originally considering an “essay on boredom.”

  17.Author’s interview with Haris Pašović.

  18.Author’s interview with John Burns.

  19.Hadžiselimović and Radeljković, “Literature Is What You Should Re-Read.”

  20.John Burns, “To Sarajevo, Writer Brings Good Will and ‘Godot,’” New York Times, August 19, 1993.

  21.“Michel Leiris’ Manhood,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation, 64.

  22.Author’s interview with Una Sekerez Jones.

  23.Author’s interview with Ferida Duraković.

  24.Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 33.

  25.Sontag, On Photography, 17.

  26.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 299.

  27.Sontag, On Photography, 19.

  28.Sontag, Regarding, 12.

  29.Author’s interview with Janine di Giovanni.

  30.Author’s interview with Izudin Bajrović.

  31.John Pomfret, “‘Godot’ amid the Gunfire: In Bosnia, Sontag’s Take on Beckett,” Washington Post, August 19, 1993.

  32.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 319.

  33.Chan, “Against Postmodernism.”

  34.“On Being Translated,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 336.

  35.Author’s interview with Haris Pašović.

  CHAPTER 35: A CULTURAL EVENT

  1.Julia A. Walker, “Sontag on Theater,” in Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, Scandal, 133.

  2.For Sontag’s reflections on this collaboration (at the Teatro Stabile) see an unpublished interview with the British Pirandello Society, March 20, 1981, in the Sontag Papers. In it, Sontag expresses herself in uncharacteristically harsh terms about Asti. If Sontag, in private, could say cutting things about people, she very rarely did so in public. This almost surely explains why the interview was never published.

  3.Sontag, Reborn, 180, January 6, 1958.

  4.Author’s interview with Marilù Eustachio.

  5.Roger Copeland, “The Habits of Consciousness,” in Sontag, Conversations, 191.

  6.Edward Hirsch, “Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143,” Paris Review, no. 137 (Winter 1995).

  7.Sontag, Alice in Bed (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 113.

  8.Ibid., 116.

  9.Ibid.

  10.Walker, “Sontag on Theater,” in Ching and Wagner-Lawlor, Scandal, 142.

  11.Sontag, Alice, 63, 68.

  12.Frank Rich, “Stage: Milan Kundera’s ‘Jacques and His Master,’” New York Times, January 24, 1985.

  13.“Thirty Years Later,” in Sontag, Against Interpretation.

  14.Author’s interview with Miranda Spieler.

  15.“Approaching Artaud,” in Sontag, Saturn, 28.

  16.Ibid., 29.

  17.Ibid., 16, 15.

  18.Ibid., 22.

  19.Ibid., 39.

  20.Ibid., 36.

  21.Artaud, Selected Writings, xxxiii, xxiii.

  22.Ibid., xxxv.

  23.Author’s interview with Izudin Bajrović.

  24.Ruby Cohn, ed., Casebook on Waiting for Godot: The Impact of Beckett’s Modern Classic: Reviews, Reflections & Interpretations (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 17. This book also offers another suggestion for why Beckett might have appealed to Susan. In Murphy, we read: “Murphy felt himself split in two, a body and a mind. They had intercourse apparently, otherwise he could not have known that they had anything in common. But he felt his mind to be bodytight and did not understand through what channel the intercourse was effected nor how the two experiences came to overlap. He was satisfied that neither followed from the other. He neither thought a kick because he felt one nor felt a kick because he thought one.”

  25.Ibid., 11.

  26.Author’s interview with Admir Glamočak.

  27.Author’s interview with Izudin Bajrović.

  28.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 315.

  29.Author’s interview with Izudin Bajrović.

  30.Author’s interview with Ferida Duraković.

  31.Author’s interview with Senada Kreso.

  32.Author’s interview with Izudin Bajrović.

  33.Sontag Papers.

  34.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 303.

  35.Pjer Žalica, dir., Sarajevo—Godot, SaGA Production Sarajevo, 1993.

  36.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 309.

  37.Ibid., 310.

  38.Author’s interview with Izudin Bajrović.

  39.Sontag, On Photography, 105.

  40.Author’s interview with Velibor Topić.

  41.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 312.

  42.Ibid., 313.

  43.Author’s interview with Admir Glamočak.

  44.Author’s interview with Ademir Kenović.

  45.“Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 318.

  46.Kevin Myers, “I Wish I Had Kicked Susan Sontag,” Telegraph, January 2, 2005.

  47.Author’s interview with John Burns.

  48.Author’s interview with Izudin Bajrović.

  49.Author’s interview with Haris Pašović.

  50.Author’s interview with Goran Simić.

  51.Author’s interview with Pierre Bergé.

  52.Sontag Papers.

  53.Author’s interview with Miro Purivatra.

  54.Angela Lambert, “Taking Pictures with Annie Leibovitz: From Jagger to Trump, She Summed Up the Seventies and Eighties. Her Latest Subject Is Sarajevo,” Independent, March 3, 1994.

  55.Sontag, On Photography, 11.

  56.Bob Thompson, “A Complete Picture: Annie Leibovitz Is Ready for an Intimate View of Her Life,” Washington Post, October 19, 2006.

  57.Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, translated from the original French by the author (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 51.

  58.Author’s interview with Ademir Kenović.

  59.Author’s interview with Admir Glamočak.

  CHAPTER 36: THE SUSAN STORY

  1.This story is recounted in Atka Reid and Hana Schofield, Goodbye Sarajevo: A True Story of Courage, Love and Survival (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

  2.Affidavit of Hasan Gluhić, Sontag Papers.

  3.Author’s interview with John Burns.

  4.Author’s interview with Haris Pašović.

  5.Author’s interview with Miranda Spieler.

  6.Author’s interview with Ferida Duraković.

  7.Author’s interview with Kasia Gorska.

  8.Author’s interview with Ferida Duraković.

  9.“‘There’ and ‘Here,’” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 328.

  10.Ibid., 324.

  11.“Answers to a Questionnaire,” in ibid., 298.

  12.Author’s interview with Stephen Koch.

  13.Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

  14.Rushdie, Joseph Anton
, 363.

  15.Author’s interview with Richmond Burton.

  16.Hadžiselimović and Radeljković, “Literature Is What You Should Re-Read.”

  17.Author’s interview with Richmond Burton. Judith Cohen heard her make the same comparison.

  18.Author’s interview with Larry McMurtry.

  19.Author’s interview with Greg Chandler.

  20.Rieff, Swimming, 160.

  21.“Trip to Hanoi,” in Sontag, Styles, 216.

  22.Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 123.

  23.Author’s interview with Antony Peattie.

  24.Author’s interview with Howard Hodgkin.

  25.Rieff, Slaughterhouse, 52.

  26.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  27.Hadžiselimović and Radeljković, “Literature Is What You Should Re-Read.”

  28.Author’s interview with Haris Pašović.

  29.Author’s interview with David Rieff.

  30.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.

  31.Sontag to Paolo Dilonardo, e-mail, August 28, 2002, Sontag Papers.

  32.Author’s interview with Senada Kreso.

  33.Sontag Papers, 1994.

  34.“The World as India,” in Sontag, At the Same Time, 177.

  35.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.

  36.Author’s interview with Miranda Spieler.

  37.Author’s interview with Marilù Eustachio.

  38.Sontag, On Photography, 12.

  39.Author’s interview with Leon Wieseltier.

  40.Sontag, Benefactor, 260.

  CHAPTER 37: THE CALLAS WAY

  1.Sontag, In America, 24.

  2.Ibid., 15.

  3.Sontag Papers, n.d. [1980s].

  4.“Wagner’s Fluids,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 205.

  5.Sontag, In America, 369.

  6.Chan, “Against Postmodernism.”

  7.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Cott, Susan Sontag, 137.

  10.Sontag, In America, 346.

  11.Ibid., 363.

  12.Ibid., 85.

  13.Ibid., 41.

  14.Ibid., 347.

  15.Ibid., 159.

  16.Ibid., 228.

  17.Ibid., 268.

  18.Ibid., 44.

  19.Ibid., 304.

  20.Ibid., 355.

  21.Gary Indiana, I Can Give You Anything but Love (New York: Rizzoli, 2015), 118–19.

  22.Elżbieta Sawicka quoted in Carl Rollyson, Reading Susan Sontag: A Critical Introduction to Her Work (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), 176.

  23.Sontag, In America, 206.

  24.Ibid., 39, 208.

  25.Ibid., 127.

  26.Ibid., 290.

  27.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.

  28.Ibid.

 

‹ Prev