Susan Sontag

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.

grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. · Letter from Birmingham Jail
ALLEN GINSBERG · Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber
DAPHNE DU MAURIER · The Breakthrough
DOROTHY PARKER · The Custard Heart
Three Japanese Short Stories
ANAÏS NIN · The Veiled Woman
GEORGE ORWELL · Notes on Nationalism
GERTRUDE STEIN · Food
STANISLAW LEM · The Three Electroknights
PATRICK KAVANAGH · The Great Hunger
DANILO KIŠ · The Legend of the Sleepers
RALPH ELLISON · The Black Ball
JEAN RHYS · Till September Petronella

FRANZ KAFKA · Investigations of a Dog
CLARICE LISPECTOR · Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady
RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI · An Advertisement for Toothpaste
ALBERT CAMUS · Create Dangerously
JOHN STEINBECK · The Vigilante
FERNANDO PESSOA · I Have More Souls Than One
SHIRLEY JACKSON · The Missing Girl
Four Russian Short Stories
ITALO CALVINO · The Distance of the Moon
AUDRE LORDE · The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
LEONORA CARRINGTON · The Skeleton’s Holiday
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS · The Finger
SAMUEL BECKETT · The End
KATHY ACKER · New York City in 1979

CHINUA ACHEBE · Africa’s Tarnished Name
SUSAN SONTAG · Notes on ‘Camp’
JOHN BERGER · The Red Tenda of Bologna
FRANÇOISE SAGAN · The Gigolo
CYPRIAN EKWENSI · Glittering City
JACK KEROUAC · Piers of the Homeless Night
HANS FALLADA · Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?
TRUMAN CAPOTE · The Duke in His Domain
SAUL BELLOW · Leaving the Yellow House
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER · The Cracked Looking-Glass
JAMES BALDWIN · Dark Days
GEORGES SIMENON · Letter to My Mother
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS · Death the Barber

BETTY FRIEDAN · The Problem that Has No Name
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA · The Dialogue of Two Snails
YUKO TSUSHIMA · Of Dogs and Walls
JAVIER MARÍAS · Madame du Deffand and the Idiots
CARSON MCCULLERS · The Haunted Boy
JORGE LUIS BORGES · The Garden of Forking Paths
ANDY WARHOL · Fame
PRIMO LEVI · The Survivor
VLADIMIR NABOKOV · Lance
WENDELL BERRY · Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

‘One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.’

– Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea

To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful,fn1 one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility.