To Read & To Write

For readers of the late Susan  Sontag , Benjamin Moser's  Sontag: Her Life and Work , will help retrieve her well-known critical essays and novels, such as  Illness As A Metaphor  and  Notes On Camp , and place them in the light of her deeply fraught childhood and her struggles with identity. Two concerns, amidst a vast number of them, include the alcoholism of her mother and  Sontag 's acceptance of her homosexuality in a still largely conservative America. Moreover, Moser traces  Sontag 's life (spanning 1933 - 2004) as well as her ancestry by using historical documentation, most notably  Sontag 's actual diary entries, in which a paradoxical politics concerning the idea of authenticity reveals itself, as well as another major theme recurrent in Sontag's work: the division between mind and body. What might make this book stand out for many readers is quite surprising: Mosers' grasp on the multi-faceted layers of Jewish culture and history i...

This is not a review, but more of a synopsis of Susan Sontag’s 2003 book titled “Regarding the Pain of Others”. Highlighted within it are points that I believe to be the most important particularly for figuring out how to think about news in recent years, something that has become more of a problem for me as I’ve matured. A topic that I couldn’t fit into this is regarding advertising images (“Advertising photographs are often just as ambitious, artful, slyly casual, transgressive, ironic, and solemn as art photography”).  In “Regarding the Pain of Others”, Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004) writes about the phenomenon of photography in relation to documenting war. While painting and other forms of art are understood as the creator’s interpretation of the violence of war (for example, Goya did not paint from life, but conjured up the image of war from his experience and view of it: terrible, violent, earth-shattering), the photograph is typically seen as evidence, regarded as matter-of...

The feeling of not being here - or there - with half your heart belonging to one place and the other half belonging to the other, and for completely different reasons… of wanting to live your own particular way, but having others tell you to live another particular way - this may be a roller coaster of emotions familiar to most, if not all of us. The immigrant experience, however, compounds this, no matter where you’re coming from. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance Of A Puerto Rican Childhood is the autobiography of Judith Cortiz Cofer. She tells the story of her childhood lived between two cultures: Puerto Rico, her birthplace and place of familial ties, a place of rural abundance, and a city in New Jersey, where Spanish was spoken at home, and English in school, where Puerto Ricans lived cramped in old buildings abandoned by previous Italian and Irish immigrants, where a mother refused her own assimilation into American culture, but encouraged her daughter to “fit-in”. Cofer’...

Reading “The Diary Of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait” is a perfect way to become acquainted with one of the most renowned artists of all time. First, Carlos Fuentes’ introduction gives insightful and well-researched information on the socio-political backdrop of Mexico during Kahlo’s life (1907 – 1954), shedding light on the importance of Frida Kahlo’s work on Mexican culture and history. Fuentes looks into the syncretic nature of Mexico, making symbolic connections to Kahlo’s art, some intended by Kahlo, some not. The physical body of Frida Kahlo (broken and sick since a tragic accident when Kahlo was eighteen), visualizes the trauma of Mexican heritage, also broken through colonization. Like Frida, Mexico is fractured, a national identity both influenced and torn apart by outside forces.  Perhaps some may still argue that these types of introductions are no longer necessary to appreciate an artist’s work, and that the art can stand apart from any kind of context. Esp...

The title is “H Is For Hawk” because, like in those children’s picture books in which C is for cat and M is for mouse (and on and on), the hawk is an animal. And the underlying question is *what, exactly, is a hawk*? What does it look like, what does it do, where does it come from, how does it live? In her novel “H Is For Hawk” (2014) Helen MacDonald writes about the field of falconry (her profession) and readers learn answers to those questions about hawks. Her narrative answers those questions in different ways. Partly through her uncanny fascination with the famous T.H. White (author of “The Once and Future King” and a lesser known book, “The Goshawk”) and her experiences while reclaiming her life after her father, her guiding light, suddenly passes. It is a goshawk, one of the deadliest kinds of hawk, she connects to afterwards: “There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at...

If you are not too familiar with Marc Chagall's work, "Chagall" by Raymond Cogniat (1985) is a good place to begin. The "America Windows", the beautiful blue stained glass windows gifted to Chicago for the bicentennial in 1977 and now located at the Art Institute of Chicago, is the piece of artwork that attracted me to this artist first and foremost:  https://www.artic.edu/artworks/109439... My personal interest springs from that middle panel: a wand, held up between what looks like the sun and moon, a floating book, the cityscape below in all its pretty treachery, the purple bird, a bit of green, a table. Elegantly simple in subject matter, at least seemingly, those windows can be looked at for quite some time. They penetrate into the viewer, engulf them in its blue, making the city feel more whole and less fragmented. As Cogniat writes of Chagall's stained glass: "...in his stained glass the wall itself vanishes and the whole interior is fi...

We know that women have influenced and created sums of what we understand as mankind. We know this in our hearts and minds. But do we recognize it? Do we give heed and homage to the importance of their paths, their footprints? Maria Mitchell, Emily Dickinson, Rachel Carson. Virginia Woolf. Margaret Fuller, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Peabody. Harriet Hosmer. Louisa May Alcott. Those are just over a handful of the women whose minds and biographies Maria Popova traverses with her pen, writing a very different kind of history, without any neglect to men. But in "Figuring", it is these women whose femininity, addressed and articulated in countless unfathomable ways, who are brought to the fore. Their figures are mapped by Popova in a text-book *like* style that is anything but simply chronological. Popova is brilliant in contextualizing moments in the personal lives of each subject (who also include men such as Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph...