January 2008

On Deck +

Contributors +

“On the other hand, I have to say that, as a spectator, I’m much more fascinated by the Republicans. Watching those shifty, devious, unscrupulous creatures clawing at each other in spasms of demagoguery and pander is like beholding the whole vile, fear-driven history of humanity.”

- C.K. Williams on the ’08 presidential race at The New Republic

“It’s the sort of intellect-covered-in-marketing-goo fun that warrants some serious post-festival decompression. Between rushing to take advantage of the shwag stations (read: like shopping in Bloomingdales…for free) to scheduling the evening of back-to-back Hollywood parties, it’s a wonder anyone actually has time to watch the films. It’s a version of LA slightly humbled by geography and weather – the same way the films are a version of their Hollywood counterparts, slightly humbled by budget and niche.”

- Maya Baratz writing on the Sundance Film Festival on the Flickr blog

“As a survival mechanism, and an attempt to short-circuit any retreat into the inner sanctum of art, this is perfectly okay. Yet Mr. Rieff’s discomfort with the details — surely his stock-in-trade in his previous studies of Cuba, Miami, or Bosnia — gives “Swimming in a Sea of Death” a muffled and meandering texture. Unlike his mother, Mr. Rieff is a born reporter, drawn to stories instead of the great abstractions. But since organizing his mother’s extinction into a shapely narrative strikes him as a sort of sacrilege, there is no story. There are only those same unanswerable questions, surfacing over and over in this increasingly disheveled, redundant book.”

- James Marcus on David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death

comment Susan Sontag



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