Friday, May 14, 2010

why do I love susan sontag?


"Sontag caught a rising wave, and Against Interpretation came to us like a message in a bottle from an antique land. We were hiding from the Vietnam Way by miming education. Sontag was a thirty-something Jewish Intellectual who had trekked from Tucson to Berkeley to Chicago to Cambridge to Oxford to Paris and, finally, to New York, devouring schools like a cat on a trail of kibble. For us, this was mysterious and quaint; it meant no Yucatan, no Casablanca, no Lhasa, no Waimea, no smuggling, no jail, and no rock and roll--and we were no less vain about our prerequisites than Sontag herself. So Sontag was not one of us, but she was a hottie--one of those supersmart lipstick lesbians you met at Saint Adrian's Company down on Broadway for all-night marathons of intellectual speed-rap."

--Dave Hickey, "!Una Lesbiana Enamorada!: The Reverse Bowdlerization of Susan Sontag," from Harper's, December 2009


because even in a review of Reborn, her notebooks to 1963 in which she wrote to herself, "I'm not a good person/Say this twenty times a day/I'm not a good person. Sorry, that's just the way it is," she can still inspire an admirer to write the above.

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