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Michael Gira. I Am Him
Excerpt
My wife has strong hands, but her fingers are elegant and supple. I often take each finger into my mouth and suck it. I’m consuming her, bringing her into me, and she brings me into her and consumes me also. As we kiss, her tongue searches my mouth and I suck that gently too. Her salvia is effervescent and clear, a magic solution that ( Read more... ) -
Michael Gira. The Egg
He’s growing inside me. I feel him first as a precise and tiny pain in my groin, then gradually as a definite physical presence in my lower intestine, as if I’ve swallowed a complete egg, lodged there, thinking. Soon I feel him moving. He’s announcing himself gently but insistently, reminding me of his existence in my bowels. Now he’s snaking his ( Read more... ) -
Susan Sontag. On Photography
Susan Sontag was born in Manhattan in 1933 and studied at the universities of Chicago, Harvard and Oxford. She is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for fiction; a collection of stories, I, etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and six books of ( Read more... ) -
Susan Sontag. In Plato’s Cave
Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are great many more images around, claiming out attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about ( Read more... ) -
Susan Sontag. America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly
As Walt Whitman gazed down the democratic vistas of culture, he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality. It seem to him servile or snobbish to make any discriminations of value, except the most generous ones. Great claims were made for candor by our boldest, most delirious prophet of cultural ( Read more... ) -
Susan Sontag. Melancholy Objects
Photography has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts. In fact, it is the one art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility, while most of the pedigreed candidates have dropped out of the race.
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Susan Sontag. The Heroism Of Vision
Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. Except for those situation in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful. (The name under which Fox Talbot patented the photograph in 1841 was the ( Read more... ) -
Susan Sontag. Photographic Evangels
Like other steadily aggrandizing enterprises, photography had inspired its leading practitioners with a need to explain, again and again, what they are doing and why it is valuable. The era in which photography was widely attacked (as parricidal with respect to painting, predatory to people) was a brief one. Painting of course did not expire in ( Read more... ) -
Susan Sontag. The Image-World
Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given be images; and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images be evoking the standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real. But when, in the mid-nineteenth century, the standard finally seemed attainable, the retreat of old religious and political ( Read more... ) -
Susan Sontag. A Brief Anthology of Quotations
[Homage to W.B.]
I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length the longing has been satisfied.
Julia Margaret Cameron( Read more )