Sontag
Page 70
29.Sontag, In America, 196.
30.Michiko Kakutani, “‘In America’: Love as a Distraction That Gets in the Way of Art,” New York Times, February 29, 2000.
31.Sontag, In America, 342.
32.Ibid., 216.
33.Ibid., 303.
34.Ibid., 278.
35.Ibid., 183.
36.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.
37.Sontag, In America, 342.
38.Rieff, Swimming, 75, 77.
CHAPTER 38: THE SEA CREATURE
1.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
2.Author’s interview with Todd Gitlin.
3.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.
4.Liam Lacey, “Waiting for Sontag,” Globe and Mail, November 23, 2002.
5.In Sontag’s proposal for an unwritten book to be entitled Being Ill, March 15, 2001, Sontag Papers.
6.Ibid.
7.Author’s interview with Kasia Gorska.
8.Sontag, In America, 62.
9.Joan Acocella in Philoctetes Center, “Susan Sontag: Public Intellectual, Polymath, Provocatrice.”
10.Author’s interview with Lucinda Childs.
11.Sontag, In America, 41.
12.Lacey, “Waiting for Sontag.”
13.Rieff, Swimming, 31.
14.Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan.”
15.Lacey, “Waiting for Sontag.”
16.Author’s interview with John Burns.
17.Bob Fernandes, “Suburbana América,” Isto É, June 23, 1993.
18.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
19.Smokenders notebooks, Sontag Papers.
20.Sontag, “Why Are We in Kosovo?” The New York Times Magazine, May 2, 1999.
21.Ibid.
22.Leland Poague and Kathy A. Parsons, Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliography: 1948–1992 (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 47.
23.William J. Clinton, “Remarks at the State Dinner Honoring President Arpad Goncz of Hungary,” June 8, 1999, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=57698.
24.“A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 241; Annie Leibovitz, Women (New York: Random House, 1999).
25.“A Photograph Is Not an Opinion. Or Is It?” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 247.
26.Author’s interview with Peter Perrone.
27.Sontag, In America, 74.
28.Leibovitz, A Photographer’s Life.
29.Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, “Sin Susan Sontag, no habría ganado el Príncipe de Asturias,” El País, November 11, 2013.
30.Natividad Pulido, “Desde que conocí a Susan Sontag traté de complacerla, pero no siempre funcionaba,” ABC (Madrid), June 19, 2009.
31.Maxine Mesinger, “VF Dresses Demi in Paint,” Houston Chronicle, July 7, 1992; Tina Brown’s memoir, Vanity Fair Diaries, tells the story differently.
32.Author’s interview with Peter Perrone.
33.Author’s interview with Miranda Spieler.
34.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.
CHAPTER 39: THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD
1.Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock to Sontag, March 7, 1996, Sontag Papers.
2.Roger Straus to Starling Lawrence, August 28, 1996, Sontag Papers.
3.Janny Scott, “It’s a Lonely Way to Pay the Bills: For Unauthorized Biographers, the World Is Very Hostile,” New York Times, October 6, 1996.
4.Sontag to Jeannette Paulson Hereniko, February 20, 1997, Sontag Papers.
5.Elizabeth Manus, “Susan Sontag Gets Jumpy; Pat Conroy Gets Left Out,” New York Observer, January 17, 2000.
6.Heller, “The Life of a Head Girl.”
7.Author’s interview with Zoë Heller.
8.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
9.Rieff, My Life Among the Deathworks, 126.
10.Sontag to Luisa Valenzuela, e-mail, May 24, 2002, Sontag Papers.
11.Sontag to Alessandra Farkas, e-mail, February 3, 2003, Sontag Papers.
12.Author’s interview with Antonio Monda.
13.Sontag to Alessandra Farkas, e-mail, February 4, 2003, Sontag Papers.
14.Sontag to Joyce Wadler, October 8, 2003, Sontag Papers.
15.Author’s interview with Judith Cohen.
16.Author’s interview with Joan Acocella.
17.Joan Acocella in Philoctetes Center, “Susan Sontag: Public Intellectual, Polymath, Provocatrice.”
18.Acocella, “The Hunger Artist.”
19.Author’s interview with Joan Acocella.
20.George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 6–7, quoted in Jack Drescher, “What’s in Your Closet?” in The LGBT Casebook, eds. P. Levounis, J. Drescher, and M. E. Barber (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 2012), 3–16. Italics in original.
21.Author’s interview with Dr. Charles Silverstein.
22.Jack Drescher, “The Closet: Psychological Issues of Being In and Coming Out,” Psychiatric Times, October 1, 2004.
23.Drescher, “What’s in Your Closet?”
24.Drescher, “The Closet.”
25.Ibid.
26.Sontag to Lee Poague, March 9, 2001, Sontag Papers.
27.Doreen Carvajal, “So Whose Words Are They, Anyway? A New Sontag Novel Creates a Stir by Not Crediting Quotes from Other Books,” New York Times, May 27, 2000.
28.Sontag, In America, 349.
29.Sontag Papers, March 17, 1996.
30.Author’s interview with Edmund White.
31.Author’s interview with Linda Plochocki, Helena Modjeska Foundation.
32.Author’s interview with Laura Miller. For further examples, see Michael Calderone, “Regarding the Writing of Others,” New York Observer, May 9, 2007.
Sontag: “Ever since word-processing programs became commonplace tools for most writers—including me—there have been those who assert that there is now a brave new future for fiction.” Miller: “Shortly after personal computers and word-processing programs became commonplace tools for writers, a brave new future for fiction was trumpeted.” Sontag: “Hyperfiction is sometimes said to mimic real life, with its myriad opportunities and surprising outcomes. . . .” Miller: “Hypertext is sometimes said to mimic real life, with its myriad opportunities and surprising outcomes. . . .” Sontag: “People who read for nothing else will read for plot. Yet hyperfiction’s advocates maintain that we find plot ‘confining’ and chafe against its limitations.” Miller: “People who read for nothing else will read for plot, yet hyperfiction’s advocates maintain that we find it ‘confining’ and chafe against its ‘limitations.’”
There were also accusations of plagiarism around Alice in Bed. The tea party scene “shows strong parallels with an imaginary scene of a group of famous women in Caryl Churchill’s drama ‘Top Girls’” (Schreiber, Geist, 237). And Dana Heller asked Sontag about a similarity to another work, provoking the kind of outburst that was typical of Sontag when caught in a lie. “I have always wondered if Sontag had ever read the novel of the same name by Cathleen Schine—published in 1983, ten years earlier than Sontag’s play—which tells the darkly comic story of a literate young woman named Alice who is stricken with an undiagnosed malady that renders her immobile and bodily confined to bed, while her mind remains wickedly alive. And so I asked. It was the wrong question. And Susan Sontag exploded. ‘No, I have never read anything by the Schine person, but more to the point, the question is an absurd one since there is no relationship whatsoever between my play and any novel, which you would know if you were familiar with my play! Do you know my play? Have you seen my play?’ ‘I’ve read but not seen your play,’ I stammered. ‘Yes, and it isn’t likely that you will see my play in this . . . town . . . but if you’d read the play correctly you know that there is no connection between it and any novel except for the title—unless you think that Joan Didion’s Democracy was influenced by Henry Adams, who also happened to write a book called Democracy. Would you ask Joan Didion if her Democra
cy is a reference to Henry Adams’ Democracy?’ I felt as though my hair were on fire. I considered her question for a long, agonizing beat, a ‘creative moment’ in the evolution of modern stress. ‘I probably would,’ I was forced to admit. Here, Sontag visibly surrendered all hope for me and looked away. My students were dumbstruck. Yet they were also fully alert, captivated by the operatic quality of her blowup and the sorry spectacle of my feckless effort to stem the tide of her outrage. Was this a fight? Or was their teacher in flight? As Sontag composed herself for the next question, it appeared for a moment that I had successfully fled. But then suddenly she was on me again, newly committed to my upbraiding, only evenly and dispassionately this time. ‘I am stunned, utterly stunned that you would ask such a stupid question that no one who knew even the least bit about the life of Alice James would ask.’ There was something else on Sontag’s mind. Urgently, she asked me, ‘Do you know who Alice James is?’ ‘Yes.’ I said. The cross-examination continued. ‘Do you know why she was in bed?’ ‘Cancer,’ I said.” (Dana Heller, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” The Common Review, Winter 2006.)
33.Sontag, In America, 250.
34.James Miller in Philoctetes Center, “Susan Sontag: Public Intellectual, Polymath, Provocatrice.”
35.Author’s interview with Brenda Shaughnessy.
CHAPTER 40: IT’S WHAT A WRITER IS
1.Author’s interview with Brenda Shaughnessy.
2.Ibid.
3.Rieff, Swimming, 65.
4.Sontag, Reborn, 275, June 12, 1961.
5.“Singleness,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 261.
6.Ronald Suresh Roberts, No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer (Johannesburg: STE Publishers, 2005), 573.
7.Edward Said to Sontag, April 27, 2001, Sontag Papers.
8.Sontag to Edward Said, May 5, 2001, Sontag Papers.
9.“The Conscience of Words,” in Sontag, At the Same Time, 155.
10.Quoted in Roberts, No Cold Kitchen, 576.
11.Ibid., 575.
12.Author’s interview with Richmond Burton.
13.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.
14.Author’s interview with Klaus Biesenbach.
15.Sontag, Volcano Lover, 235, 126.
16.“Borland’s Babies,” in Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 229–30.
17.Sontag, In America, 85.
18.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
19.Author’s interview with Brenda Shaughnessy.
20.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.
21.Ibid.
22.Author’s interview with Brenda Shaughnessy.
CHAPTER 41: A SPECTATOR OF CALAMITIES
1.Author’s interview with Senada Kreso.
2.Sontag et al., “Tuesday, and After,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2001.
3.Harald Fricke, “Meinung und nichts als die Meinung,” Taz.de, September 15, 2001, http://www.taz.de/Archiv-Suche/!1151172&s=&SuchRahmen=Print/.
4.David Talbot, “The ‘Traitor’ Fires Back,” Salon, October 16, 2001, http://www.salon.com/2001/10/16/susans/.
5.Rod Dreher quoted in Seligman, Sontag & Kael, 97.
6.Sontag to David Rieff, e-mail, September 20, 2001, Sontag Papers.
7.Ibid.
8.Author’s interview with Glenn Greenwald.
9.Author’s interview with Brenda Shaughnessy.
10.Leibovitz, A Photographer’s Life.
11.Luisa Valenzuela, “Susan Sontag, amiga,” La Nación, January 14, 2008.
12.Leibovitz, A Photographer’s Life.
13.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.
14.Sontag to Luisa Valenzuela, e-mail, May 24, 2002, Sontag Papers.
15.Sontag, Against Interpretation, 47.
16.Sontag to Joan Macintosh, e-mail, May 24, 2002, Sontag Papers.
17.Sontag to Peter Perrone, e-mail, June 22, 2002, Sontag Papers.
18.Author’s interview with Christian Witkin.
19.Author’s interview with Oliver Strand.
20.Goldman, “How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz?”
21.Author’s interviews with Rick Kantor and Annie Leibovitz.
22.Dawn Setzer, “Library Buys Sontag Papers,” UCLA Newsroom, February 12, 2002, http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/020212sontag.
23.Author’s interview with Sharon DeLano.
24.Author’s interview with Karen Mulligan.
25.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.
CHAPTER 42: CAN’T UNDERSTAND, CAN’T IMAGINE
1.“Quotation of the Day,” New York Times, September 7, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/07/nyregion/quotation-of-the-day-766518.html.
2.Sontag, Regarding, 3, 5.
3.Ibid., 10.
4.Ibid., 21.
5.Ibid., 51.
6.Ibid., 38.
7.Ibid., 56.
8.Ibid., 57.
9.Ibid., 112.
10.Ibid., 104–5.
11.Ibid., 108.
12.Ibid., 126.
13.Author’s interview with Oliver Strand.
14.Enrique Krauze, “García Márquez’s Blind Spot,” New York Times, May 28, 2014.
15.“Gabo responde a Susan Sontag,” El Tiempo, April 29, 2003, http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-1033192.
16.“Susan Sontag contra Gabo,” La Nación, April 4, 2010, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1249538-susan-sontag-contra-gabo.
17.Letter to potential surrogate mothers, Sontag Papers.
18.Sharon DeLano to Sontag, e-mail, September 29, 2003.
19.Author’s interview with Dominique Bourgois.
20.“Literature Is Freedom,” in Sontag, At the Same Time, 193.
21.Ibid., 200.
22.Ibid., 207.
23.Sontag, Regarding, 36.
24.Nancy Kates, unpublished interview with Nadine Gordimer.
25.Author’s interview with Michael Silverblatt.
26.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
CHAPTER 43: THE ONLY THING THAT’S REAL
1.Author’s interview with Sharon DeLano.
2.Rieff, Swimming, 1–11.
3.Author’s interviews with Karla Eoff and Michael Silverblatt.
4.Rieff, Swimming, 85.
5.Katie Roiphe, The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End (New York: Dial Press, 2016), 32.
6.Rieff, Swimming, 144.
7.Ibid., 81.
8.Ibid., 98, 104.
9.Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” The New York Times Magazine, May 23, 2004.
10.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
11.Sontag, Illness, 8, 9.
12.Author’s interview with Sharon DeLano.
13.Hujar, Portraits in Life and Death, preface by Sontag.
14.Rieff, Swimming, 71.
15.Ibid., 45.
16.Author’s interviews with Annie Leibovitz, Rick Kantor, and Sharon DeLano.
17.Roiphe, Violet Hour, 39.
18.Ibid., 43.
19.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
20.Karla Eoff to Sontag’s care group, e-mail, mid-September 2004.
21.Karla Eoff to Sontag’s care group, e-mail.
22.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.
23.Karla Eoff to David Rieff, e-mail, September 28, 2004.
24.Roiphe, Violet Hour, 44.
25.Karla Eoff to Sontag’s care group, e-mail, September 22 and September 25, 2004.
26.Roiphe, Violet Hour, 54.
27.David Rieff to Sharon DeLano, e-mail, November 9, 2004.
28.David Rieff to Stephen Nimer, e-mail, November 9, 2004.
29.Roiphe, Violet Hour, 56.
30.Author’s interview with Peter Perrone.
31.Roiphe, Violet Hour, 58.
32.“Outlandish: On Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier,” in Sontag, At the Same Time, 101.
33.Author’s interview with Sharon DeLano.
34.Katie Mitchell, “A Meeting of Minds,” Guardian, November 18, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/music/20
05/nov/18/classicalmusicandopera.thomasstearnseliot.
35.Author’s interview with Marcel van den Brink.
36.Rieff, Swimming, 104–5.
37.Author’s interview with Andrew Wylie.
38.Author’s interview with Sharon DeLano.
39.Sontag, Reborn, 88, November 4, 1956; November 16, 1956.
40.Roiphe, Violet Hour, 75.
41.Emma Brockes, “Annie Leibovitz: My Time with Susan,” Guardian, October 7, 2006.
42.Rieff, preface to Sontag, Consciousness, xii.
43.Rieff, Swimming, 137.
EPILOGUE: THE BODY AND ITS METAPHORS
1.Author’s interview with Don Levine.
2.Author’s interview with Joanna Robertson.
3.Author’s interview with Kasia Gorska.
4.Andrew Goldman, “The Devil in Marina Abramovic,” The New York Times Magazine, June 13, 2012.
5.Author’s interview with Sharon DeLano.
6.Author’s interview with Karla Eoff.
7.Author’s interviews with Annie Leibovitz and Judith Cohen.
8.David Thomson, “Death Kit,” The New Republic, February 12, 2007, 26–27.
9.Sontag, On Photography, 11.
10.Ibid., 98.
11.Ibid., 105.
12.Ibid., 110.
13.Author’s interview with Annie Leibovitz.
14.Annie Leibovitz, Portraits, 2005–2016 (New York: Phaidon Press, 2017), afterword.
Index
The pagination of this digital edition does not match the print edition from which the index was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.
20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Lawes), 41
4' 33" (Cage), 262
Abendländische Eschatologie (J. Taubes), 137
abortion, 111–12, 113, 395, 423
Abramović, Marina, 699–700
“Absent God, The” (S. Taubes), 139
Absolut Vodka, 649
abstract expressionism, 183, 184, 492
Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, 685–87
Acocella, Joan, 650
“The Hunger Artist,” 527–28, 613, 630–32, 635–36
acupuncture, 280, 681–82
Adorno, Theodor, 113, 142
Adult Children of Alcoholics (Woititz), 448, 753n
aesthetics
camp and, 199, 200, 276
of death, 228, 354–55
ethics and, 390–94
“Aesthetics of Silence, The,” 291, 327, 442, 559, 619
Against Interpretation, 122–23, 265–71, 308