Susan Sontag

[STUPID BOB]

Susan Sontag passed away today. She was 71.

[stilltrucking]

I finally got my Texas CDL, it expires when I turn 70, I sure would like to get my sixty dollars worth.

[jimboloco]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... bit_sontag

[stilltrucking]

she wrote:

for me the primary obligation is human solidarity

I used to look at obits of famous writers and see how old they were when they rote their first book, now I check to see how old there were when they died.



____________________________
The Human Use Of Human Beings

[judih]

very interesting link, jim.
Susan had guts, intellect and force.

Young to die but she lasted longer than many others with passion.

May the energy continue.

[rumtumtugger]

Thanks for the obit, Bob:


Susan Sontag was one of America's finest critics. Her early appraisals of Antonin Artaud, W. G. Sebald, and others, not to mention "On Photography" and "Against Interpretation" were outstanding works.

She was much despised by "America First" writers who derided her for the "French" cast of her prose and her opinions.

She added a great deal to the store, nevertheless, of American readings and sightings.

"Where the Stress Falls", a late collection of her essays, shows her vision was undimmed to the end.

( link)

http://www.susansontag.com/wherethestressfalls.htm




She was fierce, tireless and brilliant.

[hester_prynne]

Fierce, talented, tireless and brilliant she was, I agree.
I hadn't heard about this until right now.
Makes me sad. I so loved reading her essays, she was very truthful from the heart level, mixed that well with her smarts.

"Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art."

One of my fave quotes of hers......

H

[rumtumtugger]

Here's an interesting BBC tribute site for Susan Sontag:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/4131011.stm

[lescaret]

This quote from a 1992 interview with Susan Sontag ends her NY Times obituary:

"I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says, be serious, be passionate, wake up."

[jimboloco]

Yes, true. Alienation is the doorway into engagement.
Affirming.
or as johnnie lennnon said once, "OK kids, now that we've been thru the disillusionment process, let's step back in and do something kick!"

Young to die but she lasted longer than many others with passion.

May the energy continue.

71 is young. just the beginning.
last week all four of my cancer patients were younger than me (57)/
29, 39, 49,50 they were all of them dears, three chaps and a lady.
now i got another, a bit younger, ageless, eternal. ephemeral.
we talked about flying. his kids all grown look like his siblings save for his wispy hairs amd puffed face.

i do not let my fears or alienations enter the rooms there.
healing energies flow thru me, unbound by love.

[perezoso]

Having read and taught a few of Sontag's essays, one realizes she is the quintessential aesthete, though not a particularly witty one; Sontag was neither philosopher nor great social thinker. We might agree that protesting the Vietnam War was the right thing to do at the time; joining the maoists may not have been. And measuring her essays (I have not read her fiction) against say Orwell, or, Apollo forbid, Bertrand Russell, Sontag's writing seems quite shallow and fussy, and somewhat simple. And she was no Sartre either, though I guess her better essays have a type of existentialism-lite about them. Though capable of writing a sort of jaded New Yorker leftist-insider prose, she seems a bit of a lightweight.

Additionally, like most auto-didactic defenders of the arts (and funny, after some "cherchez" such defenders usually seem to be femme, or at least wannabe femmes) Sontag dismissed Plato's criticism of mimesis in about one rather drab paragraph. It may be an old and boring chestnut, yet Plato's arguments against mimesis (and lyrical poetry as well) still seem quite relevant in a day of warehouses stocked with fluffy texts-du-jour and endless coffee-table collections of the type of soft-porn art photography popularized by Sontag's galpal Leibovitz........

[rumtumtugger]

. www

[Zlatko Waterman]

Could anyone compound a longer list of fashionably dismissive cliches to sully the dead, your Blakean emanation would take the biscuit, SorryNonPosso . . .


--z

[perezoso]

Aw Padre Zlatskow returns:

My attack on one of the 60s reverred idols offends ye? Good. Like her french mentors, Sontag was for the most part a rhetoric spewing narcissist. "Against Interpretation" is feeble, and as I said she dismissed Plato--as well as Freud and Marx-- with a few sweeps of her sapphic hands---

I dont deny she raised some decent points--including protesting the 'Nam War--but is she fit to soar with say Orwell or Russell or even Camus? I think not.


There's nothing so spiteful as a former radical- hypocrite infuriated. BTW don't you have a gitfiddle version of PolkaDots and Moonbeams to attend to?

[Zlatko Waterman]

Dear Perezoso:


On the occasion of a nascent new year, I offer the following information:

1. I am not and never was "an academic." I quit teaching English Composition ( my choice, not Literature, not Creative Writing) at age 55 because I couldn't stand the academic horseshit, committees, political gerrymandering and whatnot. The students were and are the only reason I worked in colleges.

2. I am not, and have never been, a Jesuit. I have two good friends who are.

3. While I joined the catholic church in 1991, I have not attended church in ten years. I am appalled at the bureaucracy of the church and its policies, not to mention its sexual ditherings, so plentiful everywhere, particularly in public schools.

4. I value simplicity and strength in the arts. I am not a fancier of sophistry at heart.

5. I am not a fundamentally combative personality and would rather listen quietly. You and I have things to learn from one another.

6. I am every bit as repelled by "pop" psychology, social criticism and other "megatrends" in the humanties as you are. "Postmodernism" is only another way to explain tendencies in the arts no one understands. The bean counters are not my friends, and I seem to discern, not yours either.

7. I am very, very fond of Pynchon, Joyce, Nabokov, Plato and others who seem to charm you. I am one of the few people I know who has read Steven Weisenburger's "Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel" from cover to cover several times, and delight in such notes as those found on page 222-23 regarding Slothrop's mother, Nalline. But I don't want to get into a "pissing contest" ( as "Stupid Bob" puts it . . .) with you or anyone else over the annotations to Pynchon, Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", or any other complex and intricately allusive work.


Let us live and post in peace together on StudioEight in the year to come. Let this little electronic thumbnail we scribble on not become a "civility free zone."

Wishing you peace and prosperity in the new year,

Your would-be friend,


Zlatko