Sontag's son David Rieff wrote a book about her, meant as a tribute, called IIRC "Swimming in a Sea of Death" and by the time I had finished it I thought that there never was a more self-centred horror in the entire history of human relations. It was a good book, though.
Little mice driving cars might not cure depression, but it could help if used on conjunction with kitten photos and pictures of puppies looking wistfully at the camera.
I also saw that rat thing and though the end quote was absurd, but my main question was what the control was. I mean, they got bits of cereal out of it. I imagine rats in general feel less stressed after eating bits of cereal.
Also, looking at the abstract, I notice the paper perpetuates experimental science's gender bias: "male rats housed in an enriched environment were exposed to the rodent driving regime".
Years ago I read a satirical novel about academia whose title I can't recall (pretty sure it wasn't Small World, though). It took place mostly at a series of conferences around the world and a minor running joke was that, regardless of where the conference was being held or what the subject was, Susan Sontag was always there.
I would go to the mouse-driving conference if somebody pays travel and registration.
They were testing out a self-driving delivery robot on campus. They had to stop because the robot would block the curb cut if someone in a wheel chair was crossing the street.
A woman got stuck in the street because she could go back because the light changed and the robot couldn't go back because it was programmed by people who figured the curb cuts were there for decoration.
Was the robot programmed to sabotage competing modes of delivery?
CMU does lots of DARPA work, right?
Susan Sontag may be the writer that I have read the most about without ever having read anything she wrote. Maybe her closest competition is Hegel.
Wheelchair lady should count herself lucky.
13: I'm pretty sure she didn't write his books.
13: Notes on Camp is good. You can probably skip the rest.
Honestly, camping gear has changed so much in the past two decades, it probably isn't useful anymore.
My vague impression is that most of what she actually wrote was pretty academic rather than popular, but that she was famous as a public intellectual for expressing opinions on topical stuff in formats that were ephemeral enough that they aren't still being read. That is, I haven't read anything but Notes On Camp myself.
16, 18: So what camp did she go to, anyway? Was it one of those Jewish camps in upstate New York?
I'm not really funny, am I?
It is odd thinking that there's a whole era of academic work, with male scholars thanking their (often degreed but without formal academic employment) wives for 'typing' and editing, where there's just no way of knowing overall how much of the work was done by whom.
That and marrying their students. The 70s were different.
Let's just say that since they could both survive on one academic salary back then, they were both getting paid half the salary.
20: Did anybody read or see The Wife? I saw the movie. I wasn't sure if it was plausible that this kind of arrangement could persist in secret for a novelist's whole career.
Right -- it's a natural extension of the concept of the feme covert. Man and wife are one person, the man, for purposes of salary and for academic credit.
To be clear, in 16 I was referring to Sontag's Notes on Camp. If Hegel wrote anything about camp, I'm sure it's excruciatingly dull.
I love Susan Sontag,she's someone I still go to, On Photography, Illness as Metaphor, Notes on 'Camp', Regarding the Pain of Others. Absolutely essential.
26: Well, they said that about Phenomenology of Spirit too.
Also, the essay "Shiny Adidas Tracksuits And The Death Of Camp" (not by Sontag) is a fun read, but probably pretty hard to find.
28: Available from Amazon for a dime + shipping.
https://www.amazon.com/Shiny-Adidas-Tracksuits-Essays-Magazine/dp/0425164772
Did anybody read or see The Wife? I saw the movie.
It just arrived from my DVD rental service. Planning to watch it this weekend.
31: Well, in that case, I'm sorry for spoiling it.
Text from my dad after I pointed out on the rat study that the rats weren't forced into the cars regularly or spending time in traffic: "Bait and switch. That's what happened to us, and Car and Driver helped it happen. Life of Riley..."
And the workaholic rat maze planners will set up little offices in the back of their chauffeured rat cars, never realizing as they sketch and scheme that the once carefree rat traffic is slowing year by year to a corticosterone-reeking standstill.
35: Is there an element of camp when an highly-respected academic makes a silly pun?
1: I look forward to my daughter's biography of me: "In The Shade of a Colorful Tree: LK Didn't Manage To Write Much, But She Was Basically Pretty Nice"
I have complicated feelings about Sontag: she was a driven and ambitious thinker -- two value-neutral traits -- and I've always been ambivalent about humanistic writing that purports to give definitive answers. I think she truly wanted to find answers, and she was very smart, so she gave a good account of herself. But I also don't really believe those answers exist. (Disclaimer: I spent years studying the essay as a skeptical form, in a skeptical manner, which is a vast labyrinth at the center of which is a sad hybrid monster with the body of an English professor and the head of a very hungry starving poet, who eats your academic career.)
The Essayist Takes a Cigarette Break
Yours, for 50% of royalties.
16,26,38
I liked Illness as Metaphor a lot.
Why, people?! I'm not a literature grad, you'll need to explain to motivate my impoverished overly-literal brain.
42: What's the question, Mossy?
Maybe that's irrelevant. I agree with lurid in 38. Whatever the question is, there's not an answer.
I do recommend reading Susan Sontag's critical writing over reading about Susan Sontag. I can say that for sure. I am very fond of this portrait, though.
I say "critical writing" because The Volcano Lover is a foaming hot sulfurous mess.
I guess discomfiting the bourgeois was the whole point of how she used a sofa.
Why, peep, is why I should read or not read any of these sulfurous foamy books.
Was she bisexual? (googles) Ah, yes, that explains it!
Wow: I'm pretty bourgeois and that's about the most comfortable position I can imagine. It's soothing just to gaze at it.
[preview]
Wait, explains what?
49: That explains her odd couch posture?
Mossy should read the books to make up for the fact that I haven't read the linked articles.
I did my time in graduate school. Lots of reading, until I figured out that I could get by with just reading the abstract and listening in class.
52: that's not... real, surely? Is bisexuality correlated with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome or anything? lourdes, quit laughing.
Mossy, I can send you Sontag's one piece of autobiographical writing, about how she met Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades (?) as a teenager. I thought it was cute, but last time I checked it wasn't online anywhere. I would guess that you wouldn't care for her essays, but I could definitely be wrong. I keep thinking I don't agree with her much, and keep coming back to her writing as a study in form.
48: Well, Barry says they are "absolutely essential", so I just borrowed Against Interpretation from the library for my Kindle.
Send it!
That couch posture would be super comfortable, until you started smelling the gangrene from your right foot.
Going back to the actual topic of the Sontag article -- am I correct in assuming that no one has read the Rieff/Sontag Freud book?
It's odd to me that it isn't obvious who wrote it, given that they each went on to write numerous books separately.
I've looked into the matter and decided the Freud was kind of an asshat, so I don't want to read a whole book on him.
Apparently Rieff only wrote one other, and Sontag's authorship is obvious to anyone familiar with her work. Which is to say yes, no-one read it.
You have your Id, the anti-id, and the synthes-id. That's pretty much it.
65: But did you know that there's a fake ID song?
62: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Rieff -- it looks to me like he wrote more than 1 other book. Although we shouldn't discount the possibility that his other books were written by his second wife.
If you expect your spouse to ghost write your books for you, that should probably be made clear before getting married. Open communication is the key to a healthy relationship, after all.
63: Upon further reflection, I think you're confusing Freud and Hegel.
Germans are all pretty much the same anyway.
Moser lied to me. These intellectuals are all the same.
there's a whole era of academic work, with male scholars thanking their (often degreed but without formal academic employment) wives for 'typing' and editing, where there's just no way of knowing overall how much of the work was done by whom
The 'faculty wife' of the 1950s and 1960s was apparently a housewife and helpmate with highly advanced skills in typing, editing, transcription, paleography...
"I have to thank my wife for typing the whole of this difficult manuscript in spite of the heavy burden laid on housewives by a six years' war and its oppressive aftermath."
And speaking of 'oppressive'...!
I'll check Wikipedia before I see which one invented penis envy.
The greatest faculty wife novel remains Conjure Wife, surely.
"And last but not least, I thank my wife Susan for writing typing out the whole manuscript, maintaining the wards around the house and defeating the charms of my academic rivals."
In memory of Tiddles, who perished in a cauldron-related incident. 2012-2019, "Purring in heaven".
My wife thanked me for typing in her master's thesis.
It was originally a Ph.D. thesis, but your typing was so bad they dropped her degree.
77: now available on Kindle, just £2.84...
79: It's her own fault. She should have married better.
77: Adding to my reading list. Thanks.
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Is this the thread to bitch about PG&E? I just hope the power remains on until I've cooked dinner and downloaded some Netflix shows.
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My mom typed my dad's dissertation before they were married. They met because she was working as his advisor's secretary, and apparently loan of female labor to one's graduate students used to be a thing when faculty had personal secretaries. As she tells it there was a real art in swapping the custom typeballs in and out of the Selectric to do mathematical symbols.
Where you at, BA? The East Bay flats seem to be keeping their lights on. The air seemed briefly dicey this morning and we put on face masks but then it cleared up and we felt stupid and took them off.
The trick is to have the stupid come from within and wear a mask over it.
The freeway message boards currently read POWER OUTAGE? REDUCE SPEED AT EXITS. I take it the question mark, like every communication from a state agency lately, means WE HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT PG&E WILL DO NEXT OR WHEN, NOR WHICH CLEAR AND PRESENT HAZARDS THEY'LL FORGET TO TURN OFF.
having texted multiple friends to tell them to head our way from the evacuation zone, will be interesting to fit them all in our relatively small flat if they start to turn up! thus far they are all staying in santa rosa, understandable as who wouldn't want to be close to home, but power will soon be, if not already, out there, i for one would probably agitate to head further south. extending evacuation zone to coast is scary.
My brother says their power has been disconnected, for the next 3-5 days.
the thought of evacuating in the dark, with all power cut off, in western sonoma is terr-i-fy-ing. that landscape - so dry, so riven with ravines, the coastal hills are so so so fucking steep. i am just hoping all the meteorologists wake up with egg on their faces and it was all a big nothing burger.
Duuude. I was just reading the weather warnings. I mean, they've been all 'this is an extreme windstorm, seriously get out' but that didn't register to me until they wrote that they're expecting wind speeds six standard deviations above normal.
Sacramento isn't expected to feel the brunt of it and I trust the big redwoods in my backyard in winds up to 65mph. So I'm not personally worried.
I think the meteorologists would love to wake up to huge embarrassment that their predictions were wrong.
exactly. this is truly scary shit.
85. So far I still have power, though it's supposed to get turned off. I'm in a Berkeley apartment building, a stone's throw from the university.
Checking just now, the noaa weather prediction for tomorrow is described as "breezy" with "gusts as high as 47 mph". Not exactly scary.
The bad winds are forecast for farther north than we are, looks like: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-26/diablo-wind-california-kincade-fire-tick-fire-risk-weather
Yes it's the coastal hills in Sonoma Marin I'm worried about, tho the Oakland Berkeley hills fire was pretty sit so there's that.
Evacuation warning for Santa Rosa now. Grim night but I should sleep and hope Wildcat Canyon stays peacefully cool.
13: Same. I have the impression that she's your typical Local Author who had the good luck to be Local in New York City.
I'm only surprised they didn't bring up the old story of Rosalind Franklin not giving Jim Watson proper credit for his work on the structure of DNA.
Today is heavy-smoke day for Oakland. I smelled it before dawn, and confirmed on the sensor sites.
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13, 103: I'm sure there are many authors of either bestsellers or historic classics I've heard more about than Sontag, but I agree with the sentiment. I might have learned her name from Andrew Sullivan's blog. No specific post comes to mind but I have the impression he would have loved to hate her.
"Susan Sontag may be the writer that I have read the most about without ever having read anything she wrote."
This is an interesting question to ask oneself. I'm trying to think who mine would be. Probably Isaac Newton? If he counts as a writer.
I mean, for most writers I have read a lot about I have at some point at least tried to read some of their stuff because if I've read a lot about them it's because I'm interested in them. But I can imagine Sontag being the sort of writer one reads a lot about inadvertently, as it were.
Plenty of omnipresent writers I've never heard anything by. Saul Bellow, for example. Gertrude Stein. But Susan Sontag is the writer I have read the most about without either A) having read anything she wrote or B) being even able to name one of her books.
Further to 113: or that might actually be the late Harold Bloom.
Modern equivalent: Zizek. Name a Zizek book? No. I could pick him out of a crowd more than virtually anyone I HAVE read a book by though.
115: That's a good choice. But did he write any books?
114.2: Ha! I can't name a Zizek book either. But I do remember reading an editorial he wrote about Beethoven's 9th Symphony -- something about it being the quintessential neoliberal artwork.
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Bernie was in town tonight. His advance people fucked up and scheduled his rally at the same time, on the same campus, as the city's mayoral debate. I love the guy, but way to step on local democracy there, Bernie.
I had a ticket to the mayoral debate so I missed Bernie. But I almost bailed on the mayor thing when I saw Bernie had Dispatch opening up for him. I really like that one song I know of theirs.
Anyway, as I was walking home I got talking with a guy up from Massachusetts who, I guess, follows Bernie around New England in a similar way as one might follow Phish.
I asked him how the show was. He said it was alright but he's tired of Bernie always using the same material.
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