Reborn, Susan Sontag. Early Diaries. David Rieff (ed.) Penguin Books, 2008.

This is a good read. It has huge gaping holes and is heavy on lists and fragmented observations, but I enjoyed dipping in and out, collecting things along the way.

I like that she’s not straightforward at all. She’s not particularly likeable, she’s not immensely dis-likeable either, she is full of hang ups and contradictions and has incredible insight.

Sontag was a headstrong little thing at 15, fired up with an intense determination to achieve the world in a day. 

I need pretend to no one; I dispose of my time as I will…I intend to do everything…I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involved myself wholly…everything matters!

The diaries begin here, chronicling her sexual awakenings, heavyweight intellectual ambitions, a catalogue of neuroses…suddenly married at 19 with a child, in and out of love with several women, none of whom seem to fully reciprocate her overwhelming need to be loved. Torment. Heartbreak. 

Being in love - this subtle keen unforgettable sense of the other’s uniqueness. There is no one like her, dances like her, is sad like her, is eloquent like her, is foolish and vulgar like her…

Fiercely self critical and yet quick to criticise others. Sexual failings, sexual fantasies, sex mad. Book lists. Goals that jar with her values (‘eat less’, ‘talk less’) 

All her life, Sontag made lists of words into which she occasionally inserted a person’s name or a brief observation. An example:

effete

noctambulous

perfervid

detumescence

disheveled 

so alluring, so cerebral

sodden

intriguing

corrupt dignity

lotophagous

elegiac

Meleager

disponsibility

pardine

demotic

Harriette Wilson

garbure

satura

Beans on toast and Blake.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

Casual breakfast reading.

The performing bear is the only animal image in the collection. He is sad and stoic, full of determination. 

The Unseen Eye; W. M. Hunt. Thames and Hudson, 1994.

from left to right:

Male life mask

Life mask of Beethoven

Life mask of William Blake

I was at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh yesterday and in the library they had a few cabinets full of death masks. There was Keats (aquiline nose, stretched cheekbones), Mendelsohn (nondescript), and a few anonymous ones that have stuck in my mind - one titled ‘idiot woman’ and another ‘insane man’. Tiny, shrunken heads, lopsided mouths, faces startled and perplexed. I wonder what kind of life they could have had.

The Unseen Eye; W. M. Hunt. Thames and Hudson, 1994.

When I was in my early teens I discovered Diane Arbus. I also discovered Weegee, Eugene Meatyard and Dorothea Lange, but Arbus was the big one. I found all these books on photography in the attic and would bring them down in piles to my room and look at them in bed at night. Then I’d return the pile I had looked at in exchange for another. When the piles ran out I just re-looked.

This book brings that all back to me, the feeling of discovering images so overloaded with truth and despair that I couldn’t look away.

W. M. Hunt is the collector behind this book. Here is what he’s written in the preface:

This is a book of photographs, a selection from a large collection gathered over many years, comprised of what I describe as magical, heart-stopping images of people in which the eyes are somehow obscured, veiled, hidden, blocked, averted or closed. I have never really sorted out why I was initially drawn to collecting, to something so particularly, or what fuelled and sustained this passion. However, I maintain that these are all portraits of me. They are all manifestations of my unconscious.

I have decided to split this book into several posts to do it justice.

These two photos have this particular effect on me: I want to look away but I can’t. I find them incredibly disturbing, even though I know that the face with the white cloth is just a ‘hooded witness’ at a trial. The other is a Weegee, ‘Masked and Shackled Man, 1940s’. Here there is something happening that I don’t understand, that is mysterious, but I can’t get away from the simple distortion of the human face. It is an image of terror.

Making Choices, 1929, 1939, 1948, 1955; various, The Museum of Modern Art New York, 2000.

I was drawn to this book, initially, by the title ‘making choices.’ It’s something I find interesting in relation to art. Today, someone who makes good choices can be called an artist. Duchamp once said that in the future, the artist will simply be someone who points. 

Making choices is also the job of the curator. This book selects four separate dates in the early 20th century, and sources from the museum’s collection interesting images/objects from each of those years - architecture, design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and, interestingly, film stills. The process becomes an act of selection - choice making - and extreme refinement. 

Lots of nice images here to stuff your eyes with. Good one, MOMA.