Susan Sontag R.I.P.

i also liked that she championed contemporary european film directors like tarr, sokurov, etc. sad that she won't get to see their next films....

xposts

as am!st suggested - i imagined her fighting on into her 90's (She wouldn't have appreciated my use of "fighting" there i dare say!). I saw here on TV a year or so ago talking about taking up playing the Piano, which she hadn't played at all 'til her late 60's.

Is this, Regarding the Pain of Others, an extension of that article?

So did I, which is why I'm more shocked that I probably should be.

well, wouldn't you know!

thx R.S.!

Sontag was very self-consciously a European-style public intellectual who always struck me as rather adrift from the sensibilities of her compatriots, alas. She was like a female Roland Barthes, anchored in the intellectual scene of 1950s and 60s Paris.

Her death is a calamity, but she did well to cheat death in the 70s when her cancer seemed terminal. And I hope she will be widely commemorated and remembered and read in the US now, because that nation needs her mind more than ever. I fear, though, that she is not only dead but 'a dying breed'.

R.I.P.

Between Europe and America, Susan Sontag lecture, 2003

youn, the one novel I read by her (I think I finished it) seemed very dry. I've never been able to get through any of her others. I'd recommend her essays, but I can be pretty obtuse about fiction.

To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck. Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom.'

literature is posited as an American constitution style check upon, rather than an eraser for, national identity, and passport to global, rather than European, citizenship. Europe just so happens to be the most global of continents.

in fact, she might consider her particular interaction with literature to be distinctly American. from a PBS interview several years back on her novel "In America"...

SUSAN SONTAG: Well, what's interesting is all these things are always in America -- in the post-Civil War United States people were already regretting modernization and corruption and the mercenary spirit and harking back to an older America where people were virtuous and family values were stronger and people weren't so interested in money. So that's a perennial idea. And then there is this wonderful, I must say I participated myself, belief in the power of possibility of self-reinvention. We always believe in America: We can start again, we can turn the page, we can invent ourselves, we can transform ourselves. So I thought that was... That was the appeal of America for this group of Polish émigrés. They're not economic refugees; they're not coming over in steerage. They choose to come over to America; they want to become different people. And there is a great adventure there to transform yourself, reinvent yourself as actors do, of course, all the time when they're on the stage.

actually it could be argued that sontag's intellectual trajectory was "european" in a deeper sense. rather than be permanently captivated by the midcentury french thinkers that remain the cornerstones of "high theory" in the american academy she--like many of her european peers--sort of moved along to deeper philosophical and historical inquiry.

so RIP susan.

well suffice to say i agree that there was something unusually "european" about her taste and approach, but that this makes her no less "american." if that's possible.

But opposition to the war is hardly confined to Italy, and to one strand of the political spectrum. On the contrary: mobilized against this war are remnants of the left and the likes of Le Pen and Bossi and Heider on the right. The right is against immigrants. The left is against America. (Against the idea of America, that is. The hegemony of American popular culture in Europe could hardly be more total.)

On both the so-called left and the so-called right, identity-talk is on the rise. The anti-Americanism that is fueling the protest against the war has been growing in recent years in many of the nations of the New Europe, and is perhaps best understood as a displacement of the anxiety about this New Europe, which everyone has been told is a Good Thing and few dare question. Nations are communities that are always being imagined, reconceived, reasserted, against the pressure of a defining Other. The specter of a nation without borders, an infinitely porous nation, is bound to create anxiety. Europe needs its overbearing America.

Weak Europe? Impotent Europe? The words are everywhere. The truth is that the made-for-business Europe being brought into existence with the enthusiastic assent of the "responsible" business and professional elites is a Europe precisely designed to be incapable of responding to the threat posed by a dictator like Milosevic. This is not a question of "weakness," though that is how it is being experienced. It is a question of ideology.

It is not that Europe is weak. Far from it. It is that Europe, the Europe under construction since the Final Victory of Capitalism in 1989, is up to something else. Something which indeed renders obsolete most of the questions of justice -- indeed, all the moral questions. (What prevails, in their place, are questions of health, which may be conjoined with ecological concerns; but that is another matter.)

A Europe designed for spectacle, consumerism and hand wringing ... but haunted by the fear of national identities being swamped either by faceless multinational commercialism or by tides of alien immigrants from poor countries.

In one part of the continent, former Communists play the nationalist card and foment lethal nationalisms -- Milosevic being the most egregious example. In the other part, nationalism, and with it war, are presumed to be superseded, outmoded.

How helpless "our" Europe feels in the face of all this irrational slaughter and suffering taking place in the other Europe.

And meanwhile the war goes on. A war that started in 1991. Not in 1999. And not, as the Serbs would have it, six centuries ago, either. Theirs is a country whose nationalist myth has as its founding event a defeat -- the Battle of Kosovo, lost to the Turks in 1389. We are fighting the Turks, Serb officers commanding the mortar emplacements on the heights of Sarajevo would assure visiting journalists.

Would we not think it odd if France still rallied around the memory of the Battle of Agincourt -- 1415 -- in its eternal enmity with Great Britain? But who could imagine such a thing? For France is Europe. And "they" are not.

Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die.

A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides -- that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.

And it makes me wonder, who are her heirs? I can't think of many people a generation or two younger than her who have anything like her visibility as a public intellectual. Do we still have public intellectuals? Or is everyone just a pundit now?

Touché!

My kinda person for this line alone (though I had a much more fortunate series of locations, perhaps).

Strikes me that she's one of those people who I know more about a figure in general than through her writing -- but that this is not a bad thing per se, merely a reflection of how one's interests and foci play out. Much like the death of Edward Said, this causes me more to regret that what I think will be an eventual vindication of the points of view argued -- even if that vindication is thoroughly accompanied by ineluctable tragedy, and even though I think that BushCo on down will not even then understand it -- will not be seen by the person who observed it.

she read at my job a couple years back and this is what one of my co-workers had to say about her:

I just read about the death of Susan Sontag a writer and thinker and person
I revere. I considered her a teacher. She lead me on to so many books and
ideas. I still keep her books nearby.

I count it as one of the high points of my time at Writers House to go to
the PMA with her when she was here, to see
a photograph she had written about, at the PMA, recently published along
with an excerpt from her book "Regarding the Pain of Others," in the New
Yorker.

It was the first time she had seen the photograph since she initally saw it
a few years earlier. When she wrote about the photograph for the book she
said she wrote about it from a postcard reproduction only. There is much I
could say about looking at art with Sontag that day and how much fun it was
to run through the crowded Degas exhibt with her.

On leaving, we went into 30th Street station together and I found myself
standing in front of Josef Thorak's tall war memorial sculpture in the
concourse. I said to Ms. Sontag, "Didn't you write about this sculpture in
'Fascinating Fascism'?" With a distant and private smile she said, "Yes,
yes I did." Her exact words in the essay are "the faintly lewd monument to
the fallen doughboys of World War I in Philadelphia's Thirtieth Street
railroad station." Not making eye contact with me, Sontag continued, "I've
always found it strangely erotic. That's more of my own taste."

We left her that day sitting on the dark wooden benches, her back to the
sculpture, reading.

my first real exposure to her, perhaps unfortunately, was in the first of these lectures, where she talked about the 'state of the novel', comparing it to some debased stawman version of the 'e-book' (as imagined in, say, 1997). that left a bitter taste in my mouth. i read something on these boards where mark s said she was something like and arch-Modernist in diguise, which seemed right to me, at least at the time. I did read "illness and its metaphors" this year too, which, for the most part, I found smart and well written. it was fun being halfheartedly anti-sontag while she alive, but if feels suddenly unfair to be opposing caricatures of her ideas now that she's gone. r.i.p.

(brilliant critic, brilliant writer, hero of mine, should have come out)

(ie the mind is connected to the cunt...always has been, always will be)

i think it's rather mean of anthony to criticize her for being "closeted"--she wasn't closeted to my knowledge, she was just a private person.

anyway, i think "on photography" is fascinating but deeply flawed, and i was happy to see that sontag herself repudiate the book's main (and facile) argument, that an inundation of graven images desensitizes us to violence and calamity. the reality is more complicated and more case-based as sontag acknowledged in her more recent writings.

i think his point (with which I disagree) is that public intellectuals/celebrities have an obligation to be public in their private lives. it's unclear whether the obligation applies to heterosexuals, however.

i find this arms length pontificating dishonest, and i find that work is more valabule(sp) when biases are noted, when people say i am writing about (camp) because i am part of a culture that uses (camp).

i think that she did this w. illness as metaphor--it is strong, because of the harrowing biography, and i dont think she did this with aids as metaphor.

i also think that subjects that are public (film, media photography, etc) are the exception to this rule. what i got out of the foto books was a suspicion about object and a belief that fotos were not art, but something more nebulous and stranger, something that lost aura (because from what i understand of behnjamin aura is only about object) when disemmaited (sp) and gained something larger--this was not refuted in on the pain and suffering of others, but expanded and, as A said, made w. more shadows and grace notes.

(also, a question--why should the husband be mentioned and not her lover)

(also gossip is actually really important in how it subverts offical discourse, something that sontag should have appreciated)

Even apart from this factor, how many parents would be comfortable publishing personal reflections on their sexuality, hetero or otherwise?

sontag is the closest we got the barthes (?)

also, give me a citation for the orphan, please.

anthony can you explain the concept of "aura" to me, perhaps as benjamin articulated it and as you're using it to summarize sontag's views in "on photography"?

This is sad news. I remember several years back when she was involved in a much smaller controversy, after she wrote an essay called "The Decay of Cinema" in The New York Times Magazine. Of course, she got a lot of flack for being too hung up on Sixties European cinema and not keeping up with World Cinema. Maybe, but she definitely was still going to the movies, as I saw her many times at MOMA, the Film Forum (watching an old Mexican movie,Aventurera?) and the Anthology, to see some old Mike Leigh TV stuff, and some four-hour Syberberg movie, where she chatted enthusiastically with some strangers in the queue. I didn't know her personally but I was always happy to see her at these places or just walking around town.

I think it is true that her writing style followed a somewhat European model, but it was a cool, lucid playful model- she wasn't a mouthpiece for the latest jargon-clotted Continental theories.

The funny thing about the NPR interview is that she doesn't sound timid and shy as she makes herself out to be. If that's how she feels on the inside, then that shows strength of character.

If her writing style does follow a European model, then it seems that she achieved it in a particularly American way, through deliberate effort and enthusiasm. (That's what her obituaries suggest.) I think I read Old Wives' Tale because she recommended it in a book review. There was another Russian novel that I got for my sister that I need to read.

Actually, I think one of the good things about Illness As A Metaphor is the distance she keeps with the subject matter, despite her own personal experience. As for Notes On Camp, isn't camp more of a gay male strategy than a lesbian one? (and certainly would have been in 1964 when the essay was published). In what ways do you lump together lesbian and gay male experience, apart from the common one of being oppressed on grounds of sexual orientation, which might have been the lot of many non-gay people back in 1964?

I agree with this. More generally, I think criticism of a writer's work on the basis of what (s)he might have done if (s)he had been another kind of person is almost invariably fatuous.

I always think of Against Interpretation, so timeous, so OTM, so *celebrated* and yet so ignored by intellectuals who couldn't give up their regular fix of revenge against art, because after all what else were they for? See inter alia ILX and ILM passim.

(and you were (are) right about camp)

I've heard of grudges and all.

ned: sue me if i was taken by the ridiculousness of that phrase; it pops into my head on occasion.

I'm looking for an essay written by Sontag. I've looked all over the internet but I can't find it. It's an essay about the importance/history of litterature and writing. It was republished in the Guardian review in 2006 or 2007. I really need this essay.

Anyone know which essay I'm talking about?

how about "certain emerging sensibilities"???

Ooh, I should've used that.

RFI: There's a quote from On Photography about how the passage of time tends to make all kinds of photos, like even snapshots, seem more artistic. Or something like that. I don't have the book here. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

bump

I know Sontag loved Sátántangó--can someone point me to any kind of extended piece of writing she did on the film, either an online link or which book you'd find that in? All I keep coming across is the same quote again and again.

apparently in 'a century of cinema', original written for frankfurter rundschau, ny times ran abridged version that edited out all references to tarr as apparently too obscure in 1995 (mentioned here - http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/movies/11sata.html). nyer piece mentioning it here - http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/09/12/050912crat_atlarge?currentPage=all. it is apparently collected in where the stress falls.

Thanks. I found "A Century of Cinema" online last night, and sure enough, there was no mention of Sátántangó, so it must have been reprinted from the edited version. I'll look for Where the Stress Falls; I see it has a piece on Berlin Alexanderplatz, too.

http://southerncrossreview.org/43/sontag-cinema.htm

Anyone read the diaries of hers that are coming out?

Are they the ones that the New Yorker ran excerpts from a while back? Those were pretty interesting.

did they now - will have to check out.

They are edited by her son iirc

The documentary (HBO) has a nice sad feel. Patricia Clarkson provides the voice when passages are read.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5H7GJymQns

i'll watch, but jesus, does there have to be a documentary about EVERYTHING nowadays?

http://i.imgur.com/309Lf5m.png

I know what you mean, but surely Sontag deserves one. (I talk more about this Clemenza Speaks, which will be in theaters next month.)

xpost

龜, don't believe anything in that movie. i did not endorse it.

having only been aware of her via some of her essays (notes on Camp etc.) this doc was p eye-opening. I realized I have a habit of getting her mixed up with Joan Didion.

seems like she was kind of an awful person irl tho.

why an "awful person"?

she and joan didion are both giants. very different types of giants though.

"against interpretation" is the sontag that made the biggest impression on me, although her notes of diane arbus is pretty incredible: almost eerie in the cold accurate way she pins a certain kind of nominally liberal elitist

the portrait Hitchens drew in his memoir is of a brave, colossally intelligent woman (she went to the Balkans to perform "Waiting for Godot" at the height of the crises). I haven't read anything to dispute this other than Edmund White's '70s memoir.

I've used Against Interpretation in class a couple of times and it's always worked.

do you think i could do close reading of an excerpt of it with 10th graders?

i'm thinking probably not, even though there are a few brilliant students in this class who would really get a rush out of thinking about culture on such a grand level.

seems like she was kind of an awful person irl tho.
― Οὖτις, Thursday, December 11, 2014 6:16 PM (Yesterday)

I assume this is the same documentary I saw at the festival in the spring. I don't know, I don't remember her being awful in any way. I know she got in trouble for some 9/11 commentary, but I don't think she was saying anything that other people weren't saying--timing could have been better, I guess. What I recall is a brilliant woman who had to be even extra-brilliant to be taken seriously (at least initially) because she was so beautiful.

I'm not talking about her public statements or persona. I'm talking about things like her sister telling her, essentially on her death bed, that she wished Susan had been more honest with her over the course of her life, people noting that she was "not very sensitive" to others' feelings, having a whole bunch of apparently p dysfunctional relationships (exes complaining she was "hard to deal" or "keep up" with etc.) When people say these kinds of things on camera it means they were hurt pretty bad.

she just seemed like someone who was deeply self-absorbed.

this is, of course, totally irrelevant to her work.

I'm not talking about her public statements or persona. I'm talking about things like her sister telling her, essentially on her death bed, that she wished Susan had been more honest with her over the course of her life, people noting that she was "not very sensitive" to others' feelings, having a whole bunch of apparently p dysfunctional relationships (exes complaining she was "hard to deal" or "keep up" with etc.) When people say these kinds of things on camera it means they were hurt pretty bad.

oh cool – so she was no better than the rest o fus

You're right, I'd forgotten about that. I'm sure that's pretty common among people at that level of brilliance--that they leave a trail of people they've taken for granted. Not excusing it.

eh I don't think everybody is an asshole, and that goes for brilliant people too

That's not exactly what I said--"self-absorption" is much closer--and yes, that's not exclusive to brilliant people, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say there's a much higher incidence of it among them. I'm sure we could rhyme off a few dozen names in a matter of seconds.

Liked the doc. More of a Sontag primer than anything--other than a wistfully nostalgic look at late 20th century intellectual life (I take the clip of her being called out by some cable news shithead about "blaming America first" over her 9/11 remarks as a definite "end of an era" moment for her brand of intellectual public discourse--her response, a sigh and an "oh dear," says it all), my main takeaway was pretty much "well, here's a bunch more things I have to read."

did we talk about the lists yet?

I realized I have a habit of getting her mixed up with Joan Didion.

I wasn't even aware Joan Didion existed till about a year ago and still haven't read her.

I should see this doc although it sounds like it won't talk about her ideas.

having a whole bunch of apparently p dysfunctional relationships (exes complaining she was "hard to deal" or "keep up" with etc.)

I get this picture of one of her exes being dragged to a six hour screening or something. I have no idea about her life beyond what she thought about what she watched or read.

http://the-toast.net/2015/03/12/notes-home-camp-susan-sontag/

Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things; Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are Camp and Non-Camp ways of behaving. Crying over a letter from home is distinctly Non-Camp. Sharing any baked goods found in a care package is Camp. Jumping the Bridge portion of the ropes course without a harness is Camp. Not having a date to the talent show is Not Camp. There are “campy” movies, clothes (thank you for sending me another pair of denim shorts; my usual severe all-black ensemble has served only to make me an object of fun and I have not had occasion to wear my cape even once), furniture, popular songs (have you heard the one about the little lady from Nantucket?), novels, people, buildings (particularly the Game Equipment Hut)…This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. My bunkmate Rachel, for example. She is hopeless, and I hate her. I wish very much I were bunkmates with Denise, who brought seven different colors of lipgloss with her and is the most popular girl in the cabin.

Rewatched the documentary (seven years ago--time, etc.) off Tubi. In honor of her formulation that with every truth in fiction its opposite is also true, inspiring and depressing.

Didn't know this was on the way:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt26688713/

The usual caveats about biopics aside--starting with the word "biopics"--I eagerly await it.

I haven't yet seen Kirsten Johnson's documentaries, but based on what I do know of her, I trust it will not be a conventional biopic.

I like Kristen Stewart, that's a good choice. Kirsten/Kristen will lead to a thousand typos.

I thought this was a good piece

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-podcast/desperately-seeking-susan

It is. See also Sigrid Nunez's SEMPRE SUSAN.

great little book

Almost finished Mark Harris's Mike Nichols biography. From early in the book:

"On his first morning on campus, waiting in an endless line to register, he struck up a conversation with a fiercely bright and opinionated girl who was just sixteen but already enrolling as a transfer from Berkeley, eager to dig into the great books in Chicago's core curriculum."

You can fill in the rest--1949.

She married her professor Philip Reiff a year later.

I wonder if I need that Moser bio.

I see the ebook is on sale right now so I guess yeah