Susan Sontag

Hi Susan!

Well I guess OP when you die there is not much you can do. 16 years later and she still hasn't found a ghost writer.

OP = Camille Paglia.

Because she was totally repugnant and only able to brainwash a small subset of New Yorkers that she mattered. Her plays and movies were flops. Nobody loves a critic.

She claimed to be against the market but somehow her $28M mansion was OK.

Americans don't read serious works anymore. Authors of substance are no longer guests on talk shows. Popular magazines especially are entertainment-and-gossip-oriented.

I found her superficial and "clever" much like Joan Didion, whom I also dislike. I did think her essay on camp was seminal, but more for what it was about than what she brought to it.

She was very good-looking, though.

For female intellectuals I preferred Martha Gellhorn and Janet Flanner.

I, for one, LOVE how deliciously cunty she is in this interview. It's quite exquisite, really.

Q: "Did you really say 'Who is Camille Paglia?"

S: "Did I really say it? You mean DO I really say it? Of course I really said it. What a way to ask me. 'Did I really say something that EW reported?' Yes I really did say it." . Q; " Meaning what?"

S: "Excuse me. Are.. are we not speaking English?"

And it goes downhill from there.

Q: " As a novelist, don't you find yourself drawn to the questions of what most people are seeing as art? Thinking.. being sold.. um..

S: "No. (Long pause) No I don't. And you know I don't. I've said it in countless interviews. I'm not drawn in precisely the way you think I ought to be drawn... Clearly you think I should be. I think I shouldn't be. So there's another disagreement."

My GOD the cuntiness of it all! Makes you make a FACE!

A beautiful, flawless, Fabergé egg of cunty.

Susan Sontag, we speak your NAME!

R7 She’s above us mere mortals.

[quote]She was very good-looking, though.

Really? I wouldn't say that.

R9 in her day, she was really interesting looking.

R3 I love Camille Paglia.

wow, as an English Lit major who went back to college for a special education teaching certification and M.S. in Education, I am stunned to know that Susan S. gets time here.

Love her!!! Has she still been around, I would've loved to hear her thoughts on populism and Donald Trump. She would've been blistering and acerbic!

Had*

As long as we are sorting through the angsty women authors/writers, let us not forget Sylvia Plath....

I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” – Sylvia Plath

“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence." Sylvia P.

“My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.” ― Sylvia Plath

“Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.” – Sylvia Plath

I don't think I'd compare Plath with Sontag. Plath was both trapped and inspired by her own experience in a way that Sontag either was not or refused to fully acknowledge.

Off-Topic, but: This is what I love about DL. I get to jump from threads on big dicks, dumbass influencers, and other nonsense to those about politics and literature.

Oh my.

Never quite as important and influential as she wanted to be. To quote Spender, she thought 'continually of those who were truly great.' But like Spender, she was great-adjacent. As Edmund White noted, if only she'd won the Nobel she'd be much nicer. Forceful cultural presence, but no one great legacy work.

Terry Castle’s story of her bizarre friendship with Sontag is an enlightening read...

R20 Weird to read that again. Castle telling that story is either brave or delusional. I can’t find them now, but when that came out there were a few articles and lots of online chatter doubting some of Castle’s experiences with Sontag. And talk of her simply being a “loser” next to Sontag (which basically confirms Castle’s account).

.....

Cunty ≠ admirable, r7. Think Leona Helmsley, or . . . I don't know . . . Camille Paglia.

Yeah, that interview at R7 was the first time I came across Sontag a couple of years ago, and I don't see anything admirable in her at all. She just seems tiresome, full of herself and unnecessarily argumentative. She comes across like one of those people that like to lecture others and make them feel uncomfortable because it makes her feel superior.

I though Notes on Camp undervalued the gay underpinnings of camp.

Her 9/11 comments were prescient and she began to be a non-person afterward.

[quote] And talk of her simply being a “loser” next to Sontag (which basically confirms Castle’s account).

It's a very standard narcissist-enabler dynamic. I don't doubt that it happened: I'd be surprised if Sontag didn't have one of these enablers at the usual universities on her circuit. (Few are as funny as Castle, though.)

Susan Sontag's estates has missed a huge opportunity for merchandising. The brand Susan Sontag could move a lot of merch.

I see:

"Late mid-century intellectual" jewelry and accessories

fragrance (several - one featuring real civet, which is now having a comeback, another that smells like "West Greenwich Village", etc.)

"Late mid-century intellectual" party dips, frozen hors d'oeuvres

halloween masks

knit wear

A.I. voice for siri, Alexa, GPS

possibly: life sized sex doll

Say what you want but Susan never got handsy and needy like Professor Avital Ronell.

Oh. My. God. Hahahaha!

[quote]She’d been telling me about the siege and how a Yugoslav woman she had taken shelter with had asked her for her autograph, even as bombs fell around them. She relished the woman’s obvious intelligence (‘Of course, Terry, she’d read [italic]The Volcano Lover[/italic], and like all Europeans, admired it tremendously’) and her own sangfroid.

She gave major dyke face.

Is This The Way You Bitches Live Now?

[quote]‘Of course, Terry, she’d read The Volcano Lover, and like all Europeans, admired it tremendously’

I'd never before considered Susan Sontag and Donald Trump in the same thought, but there it is.

Terrible novelist

Mind as passion

The interviewer is stupid. He insisted on asking her simplistic questions that she wouldn't answer and refused to be cornered into a box.

If I were interviewed like that I would say when asked "who are your favorite..." I would respond with "too many to mention and let's just leave it at that" rather than try to explain anything to this idiot.

Someone I knew well when he lived in San Francisco in the 80's-90's moved to New York. He would later write "Sontag and Kale: Opposites Attract Me". The book offers his insights on these two women and is dishy fun to read. Craig became good friends with Pauline Kael until she died, IIRC. He respected Sontag but had a blast with Kael.

Kael was incoherent in print during the last couple decades of her life. Not so Sontag.

I had a (Jewish) professor in college who always referred to her as "Susan Shabbat".

I read the recent biography of her that won the Pulitzer, what a tiresome woman and not nearly as clever or gifted as she thought she was.

[R39] Her fatal flaw was her near-complete lack of humor. While ON PHOTOGRAPHY, NOTES ON CAMP, THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY (all modest works that may be devoured in one sitting) and some of STYLES OF RADICAL WILL are all worth reading, she really wasn't a great writer overall in that she often lacked the ability to make complex arguments and topics seem intelligible. Her worst writings are pretentious, opaque and jargon-laden, which may be related to the fact that she wrote on amphetamines. I deemed THE VOLCANO LOVER to be unreadable after attempting to start it several times and her film scripts (DEATH KIT) are absolutely hopeless. Perhaps that fact that Sontag is no longer around to sell herself accounts for why nobody buys her schtick these days.

Does she have an OnlyFans?

The only time I really liked her was when she dragged Leni Riefenstahl to filth in "Fascinatin' Fascism".

Sontag leaves no legacy in arts and letters. She is a camp figure, best remembered as an anti-style icon, and a notable, A-list, self-impressed pretentious intellectual cunt. In that, there is value, a camp intellectual bitch figure, a kissing cousin to Leona Helmsley and Imelda Marcos. Sontag is not a Hannah Arendt, neither a Louise Nevelson nor a Diana Vreeland. Sontag is a cunt.

R7 I love how she gets trapped in her bitchiness. She says of course she asked the question about Paglia--then denies asking it--then catches herself.

She really was a terrible person.

She chose a humble burial site in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris.

[quote] THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

Oh, [italic]dear.[/italic]

She thought [italic]very[/italic] highly of herself.

But most cultural criticism doesn't last, and her fiction was forgettable. And of course she plagiarized Willa Cather (an infinitely better novelist).

R45 comme il le faut

[quote] I would've loved to hear her thoughts on populism

She's dead. The word 'populism' only became a buzzword after she died.

[quote] Say what you want but Susan never got handsy and needy like Professor Avital Ronell.

I'd like to get handsy with this guy.

Huge cunt, self important and not terribly interesting.

Don't forget Carrie Bradshaw had Sontag's "Beyond Interpretation" on her bookshelf, right next to her shitty novels in the SATC movie

SJP is planning a Sontag Knitwear Collection

[quote]In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

This is the brilliant conclusion of Against Interpretation. Funnily enough, it sounds exactly like something that Camille Paglia would have written.

Thanks so much, R20, I really needed the laugh this morning. The description of Sontag pretending to dodge sniper fire in downtown Palo Alto is priceless!

R52. Is that the hard-to-find sequel to “Against Interpretation “?

Boy George is collaborating with Cardi B on a Susan Sontag musical.

I thought her big 9/11 argument—that the hijackers were not “cowards”—was a complete straw man. No one was saying the hijackers were cowards, they were saying the hijackers were HIJACKERS.

My favorite moment in the Castle essay was when she thought Laurie Anderson was saying something nice to her at a dinner party only to realize that Anderson was saying “pass the salt.”

R58. Some people WERE referring t them as cowards. She was right, but as usual, pedantic or utterly tone deaf to the emotions of other people.

She chose a humble burial site in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris.

R45 There are no "humble" graves in Montparnasse Cemetery.

R60 No shit Sherlock. The statement was meant to be ironic.

[quote]Boy George is collaborating with Cardi B on a Susan Sontag musical.

Never on Sontag

Sontag in the Park with Susan

Sontag on Sontag

Sontag, Bloody Sontag

She was one of the most insufferably pretentious people who ever lived.

True, R66. I had an acquaintance in the academic world who was sort of becoming a friend of mine, nice guy, and then he said that meeting her and chatting with her briefly was probably the highlight of his entire life.

My response started with a huge mental eyeroll, but as I turned that statement over in my mind again and again, the idea of a person who would think that highly of SS became so incomprehensibly repellent to me that I let the connection cool.

The Volcano Lover cured my insomnia

Ask me on Sunday.

I'm still wondering what kind of applause R12 was expecting for being a bragging cuntlet.

I very much enjoyed her seminal work in "Cramp."

Style icon

Any contemporaries?

Bump

R39: would you recommend Ben Moser's biography of Sontag?

R30 God, she sounds so much like Trump. All her novels are rightfully forgotten

R36 I just bought your friend’s book! Thanks for the recommendation. Can’t wait to read it!

She was inarguably the greatest female essayist of the 20th century. The DL hates her because she is a lesbian.

Wasn't she the inspiration for the Met Gala or something a few years ago.

[quote]The DL hates her because she is a lesbian.

I doubt that. Any time I've seen old interviews with her, she comes across like a really nasty cunt. People are just not going to like people who behave like her, whatever their makeup is.

Bullshit, R37. Sounds like you don't know how to read.

R78, that is VERY arguable.

R78, if you think Sontag was a better essayist than, say, Joan Didion or Janet Flanner, I would argue your literary opinion is not to be considered.