Sontag on Manhood
This coolness of tone--combined with a great intelligence and subtlety about motives--makes Manhood an attractive book in a fairly familiar sense. To its other qualities, though, we may react with impatience, for they violate many preconceptions. Apart from the brilliant prefatory essay, Manhood meanders, circles, and doubles back; there is no reason for it to end where it does; such types of insight are interminable. The book has no movement or direction and provides no consummation or climax. Manhood is another of those very modern books which are fully intelligible only as part of the project of a life: we are to take the book as an action, giving on to other actions. This type of literature, item by item, rather than retrospectively viewed as part of a body of work, is often hermetic and opaque, sometimes boring. Now, it is not hard to make out a defense for hermeticism and opaqueness as a possible condition for literary works of an extreme density. But what about boredom? Can that ever be justified? I think it can, sometimes. (Is it the obligation of great art to be continually interesting? I think not.) We should acknowledge certain uses of boredom as on of the most creative stylistic features of modern literature--as the conventionally ugly and messy have already become essential resources of modern painting, and silence (since Webern) a positive, structural element in contemporary music.
Susan Sontag, "Michel Leiris' Manhood" (1964) in Against Interpretation, pp. 67-8.
2018.07.27
zero six six
2017.07.27
zero six seven
2017.07.27
slow at CAD
It was July 9th, Saturday night. I was drawing while relaxing in the pool. A deer jumped over the fence, and the tablet fell in the water. I quick took a picture.
2016.07.27
I smell a Vorläufer
"What do you mean, Shock of the not?!?"
"You know, that energizing sensation when you ultimately realize that you're ultimately realizing there's this lack in your realizations."
2008.07.27
fetching Ruff Ruff stuff? 001
2006.07.27
fetching Ruff Ruff stuff? 002
2006.07.27
fetching Ruff Ruff stuff? 003
2006.07.27
fetching Ruff Ruff stuff? 004
2006.07.27
What is the Best Design Ever?
Among other things, because it made a lot of 20th century architectural theorists and architects write and say completely wrong things about it.
2005.07.27
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