What I'm Reading/Watching

Week of July 17

A few weeks ago I suggested I might do a weekly round-up of what I’ve been reading and watching. I generally think that’s a lot of fun, but it turns out that my summer 2023 is almost entirely consumed with reading for work. Meaning you’re not necessarily getting books and movies that I’m gravitating towards independent of my current writing projects and research interests. Still I’ve enjoyed many of these quite a bit. 

The most recent episode of my new podcast – In Bed With the Right – deals with Susan Sontag, and as a result I’ve been reading my way through a lot of Sontag. The main subject of our episode (expect a second, broader episode centered on Sontag later in the summer, featuring my friend Terry Castle, author of perhaps the best memorial essay on Sontag) is a book edited by David Rieff called simply On Women. Moira and I got to speak with Merve Emre, who wrote the beautiful opening essay to that collection. 

To be quite honest, I think the collection is worth it, if only for two amazing interviews in it, and Merve’s introduction – but I don’t know that the essay selection as a whole blew me away. There are a full three essays on the subject of physical attractiveness – which to me foreshortens Sontag’s thinking about gender rather decisively. There’s also the famous essay about Leni Rieffenstahl and fascist aesthetics – which is pretty easy to find just about anywhere. But the volume does have an exchange about that essay between Sontag and Adrienne Rich, which I thought was exceptionally worth it. We focus on that exchange quite a bit in our episode – which should release on Monday (July 24). 

In preparation for the episode, I also read a bunch of books about Sontag. I rather liked Benjamin Moser’s Sontag, though probably more because of the life it relates (in really impressive detail) than because of its acute insights into its subject. The whole book is structured around this pattern where Sontag is concerned about the vexed ethical relationship between image and reality, “a thing and its symbol”, which seems fair enough, but zooms out far too much for my taste. It makes Sontag far too systematic a thinker – an odd approach for a writer associated with essayism, and indeed with applying her intellect to a variety of specific problems and phenomena, and coming away with interesting and telling details independent of a preconceived framework. Moser is best where he identifies Sontag’s odd blind spots – the way her travelogs seem content with bromide and manufactured reality. But he makes it all about her individual psychology – her inability to see – and not nearly enough about her intellectual milieu and the selectiveness with which it applied interest and commitment. 

I very much loved Sigrid Nunez’s memoir of Sontag Sempre Susan for the way she made clear that Sontag both was quite an oddball, while also attuned to the extent to which she was characteristic of a certain model or set of thinker. Sure, she was sui generis, but her myopias and blindspots need not be explained by reference to her distant mother, for instance, but are characteristic of a particular style of intellectual life. Sontag, who lived with Sontag (and dated her son David Rieff) is great on the mixture of guilelessness and self-stylization in a figure like Sontag (not just Sontag herself), a mix of self-disclosure and self-withholding. As part of the preparation for the episode I read Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil, which makes a very similar claim, although from a scholarly point of view. For Nelson, thinkers like Sontag were essentially performing at a kind of stoicism: you could glimpse the personal in the political, you could glimpse the somatic in the intellectual, but you glimpsed it worked-through. You glimpsed it processed, reflected, to some extent mastered. 

Another book I’ve started and don’t think I’ll recommend is Carol Brightman’s Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and her World. McCarthy is a fascinating subject, but the biography is weighed down by muchness at every level: too much writerly flourish, too much research sluiced out onto the page. I will try and finish it before our episode on McCarthy, but I can’t imagine I’ll tear through it the way I did (all my misgivings notwithstanding) through Moser’s. 

On a totally different subject, I just completed a long German-language essay on the history of US swimming pools (it’s a summer feature) – thinking through issues of class, immigration, race and climate. I thought Jeff Wiltse’s Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America was absolutely fascinating – he tells the story of the public pool as one about the passing of a utopian age. There once were big, even luxurious public pools in every US city, and they got destroyed by racism and by disinvestment (well, racial disinvestment, so I suppose racism again) – the process by which first white people and then city governments withdrew from these public resources once they had to be shared with African Americans really does feel like a leading indicator for racialized disinvestment in the US, to the point that Heather McGhee (in The Sum of Us) speaks of “drained-pool politics” as a defining dynamic of US politics since desegregation. 

That makes a lot of sense to me, but I think the years since Wiltse’s book came out (it was first published in 2007, I believe) have added another wrinkle to this story: the anthropocene. A lot of these pools existed because of basically public works projects changing the natural environment, above all hydrology projects (San Francisco’s Fleishhacker Pool, was made possible by San Francisco buying and damming of an entire valley in Yosemite National Park). And it was a response to the fact that US rivers and lakes became too polluted to swim in. These pools partly existed so people could cool off during heat waves. You see where I’m going with this: these pools are early attempts to come to terms with the anthropocene, with a warming planet and the unequal fallout from that – and with the question what government can and should do to deal with catastrophic climate. (Oh, I also re-read Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law and portions of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz for this piece, which remain just so amazing.)

Finally, I should mention a few shows I’ve been watching: I finally finished the second season of Reservation Dogs in anticipation of the show’s third (and final – sniff) season, and it’s still amazing! I have also (of course) been keeping up with the Staten Island Cravensworths over on What We Do in the Shadows – the show is starting to show its age a bit more this season, but good lord, that pride parade episode is a think of fucked-up beauty! I’ve been making my way slowly through the new season of The Great and it still grabs me – it’s funny, chaotic and mean as hell, and Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult have evolved into one of the all-time great toxic TV-couples. 

Finally, I want to put in a plug for Deadloch, an Australian crime show on Amazon Prime. Well, more precisely it’s a parody of a True Detective / Broadchurch-type show – two mismatched cops solving a string of grisly murders – that also contains a really good central mystery. The show is set in a tiny Tasmanian town divided between an established (if dying) fishing community and a bunch of lesbians who have decided to settle down here. Shortly before the annual “Feastival” (full of performance art, meditation retreats and a four hour film called Poseidon’s Uterus) dead bodies (all men) start piling up at alarming rates. Definitely recommended!