Susan Sontag

Me. Always heard about Notes On Camp but she never authorized another printing. It was very difficult to find that article but I haven’t looked for it in a few years so maybe it’s out there somewhere. It got so many references but she refused to let anyone else include it in their book. Snobby.

she was haggy....and a downer....who did she appeal to? not me.

Is she wearing the missing scalp from Donald Trump’s head?

i just had a Sontag removed from my ass

The humor here... oh, god.

Speaking of a sense of humor....Susan didn't have one. Which made her the world's unlikeliest authority on camp.

I never really understood why people liked her so much. Her novels were awful.

She was very influential among the literati back when we had a literati.

But was she? I remember when she died, some member of the literati wrote kind of damning article on her in the NY Book Review about how she didn't appeal to cultured people, but to the proles who needed some kind of "primer" into high culture.

And was any post-mortem as funny as Terry Castle's from the London Review?

Didn't Annie Leibovitz dump her?

R9 that Castle piece was hilarious. Talk about a DEMANDING personality!

R11, wasn't it fantastic? I read it every few months for a laugh.

You know Terry has to be a good sport to describe herself as pathetically as she did.

Notes on Camp is included in the Library of America collection of Sontag's stuff.

Kind of funny how the world has come around to Camille Paglia's verdict on Sontag.

The Volcano Lovers is a great novel

R9 I agree, Castle was a good sport ... but damn, did she portray Sontag as overbearing!

Here's the Castle article that we're talking about.

R14, LOL.

Sure, it is.

I think the world has turned on both Paglia and Sontag together.

She was my next door neighbor for three years when she was with Annie.

I thought they always lived separately.

Pretty please, tell us more R18.

She sounded like a real pill to deal with.

The Terry Castle article is brilliantly funny. How odd Sontag couldn't openly admit the relationship with Leibovitz.

“Notes on Camp” is available online.

R19. They definitely did not live together but Annie would come by frequently. Susan's loft was a small space, almost more of an office than a real home. Sometimes we would have a drink or hang out and smoke. I never asked her about her career. We just talked about the building and stupid nyc stuff. Annie was much more verbose and would usually sweep in like a hurricane all bluster and confusion. She was nice too but they were so different from each other. Annie later signed a copy of her book of death photos she did of Susan for me.

^ oh. R18 above

Pretentious cunt. And it takes one to know one.

R23, I always pictured Sontag's place as huge--to accommodate her huge library. Or was it small because she had so much stuff in it?

Thank you for sharing the anecdote. Annie went through some seriously difficult times all at once. (Not like I know her. But just from reading.)

Didn't Annie give birth to Sontag's grandson or something?

R26. I never asked her if she had another place. I always thought as well she would live amongst thousands of books. The place we lived in was a huge loft that was commercially zoned at the time. No one was supposed to live there. But a lot did. Her space could not have been more than 800 sq ft. One small loft room.

R18, as you implied, she may have had another property. In Terry Castle's article, she mentions (towards the end) being in one room of Sontag's place with Sontag when her assistant suddenly walks in from another room.

Maybe...

How long were Sontag and Leibovitz together? I thought it was long time, even if they didn't live together.

Is Leibovitz a lesbian or bi-?

No, Rose at r31. She and Susan were simply roommates because they were best chums, like us.

Rose, Leibowitz was VERY FOND of Sontag.

I question how wide or lasting her influence was (or will be).

Is anyone hankering to read her impenetrable thoughts on Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Levi-Strauss nowadays? Psychoanalysis and religion? I have limited interest in (or time for) the actual works of Sartre, Camus, et al, let alone Sontag's ponderings on them.

Her attempts to discuss/decode pop culture are pretty laughable (unintentionally, as she truly had no sense of humor at all). I admire the effort behind "Notes on Camp" but it's a strenuous misfire.

Sontag was a glamorous (for a while), self-promoting poster girl for the intellectual and artistic strivings of another age--strivings that have little resonance with (pardon me) the way we live now.

She was villified for telling the truth about the US after 9/11. She deserves respect for foresight and candor.

As someone who wasn't around in her heyday, I enjoyed reading Against Interpretation, but I admit it's a bit of a period piece from the glory days of high 60s modernism. Enjoyed Paglia's 90s takedowns too, but Paglia hasn't really aged any better.

I once saw Simone de Beauvoir in Cafe de Flore in Paris. She was very, very tall - very elegant still with signs of how beautiful she'd been in her youth. She came in with some short, fat woman - not Sartre. I was disappointed by that.

I knew a French Jewish physicist who had been Camus' mistress when she was doing her baccaulaureat. So he was a dirty old man.

I do think "The Way We Live Now" captured the way a certain circle of elite urban it's initially responded (or didn't) to AIDS. And "Notes on Camp," while irritating in its oracular stance and tone, did get interesting discussions of closeted, gay aesthetics going (yes, Wilde and Isherwood did it earlier).

I heard her speak a couple of times. She actually had a bit of humor in person that was completely absent from her writing. The second time I saw her she was being interviewed for radio, and within a minute of arriving on stage she harshly accused the male interviewer of being a sexist jerk; the next hour was awkward and tense, but they finished the interview.

"Under the Sign of Saturn" is a good collection of essays, including "Fascinating Fascism". Another great essay is "Pilgrimage", about going with a high school friend to meet Thomas Mann, when he lived in Los Angeles. Her journals were published posthumously, and are interesting in that they expose her deep-seated anxieties and insecurities, which surprised me as she seemed so confident and accomplished. Her travels and loves make for interesting reading. I find her fiction so bad that it's almost unreadable. She directed a good documentary about Israel called "Promised Lands", which is on Youtube. Her politics evolved sharply, particularly after her relationship with Joseph Brodsky, and in 1982 she was widely denounced for calling communism "The most successful variant of fascism" in a speech supporting Polish Solidarity.

There's an unauthorized biography by Carl Rollyson that isn't great, but it covers the basics and is easy to read.

She was an insufferable snob. She had no use for people she didn't consider her intellectual equals.

Did she have "loves" with any interesting women that we don't know about? (I mean, that the diaries disclosed for the first time?)

Good post, BTW.

[quote]She was villified for telling the truth about the US after 9/11.

This is basically the only thing I will give her credit for. Otherwise, a pretentious, rude snob. Terry Castle really nailed her.

she went on a date with warren beatty

[quote]Did she have "loves" with any interesting women that we don't know about? (I mean, that the diaries disclosed for the first time?)

The French actress Nicole Stephane; the playwright Maria Irene Fornes; the choreographer Lucinda Childs. Don't know which relationships were widely known before she died and her journals were published. She said somewhere that she had loved five women and four men.

I read a collection of her short stories a long time ago. The only line I remember from that book goes something like

[quote] Sometimes it helps to be paranoid. It's comforting to be able to identify your enemies, even if at first you have to invent them.

R33 wins.

Thanks, R46.

A hack.

R13 Give me Camille Paglia, any day.

A Sontag revival is on the horizon: the MET's Spring fashion show is based on SS's "Notes on Camp" - some folks are not happy about this as a concept for a host of intellectual & social reasons. SS was often brusque and rude when one was first introduced to her- it took her years to warm up to some folks. At times she could be lovely, charming - but one must never, ever discuss her: ask Edmund White why. Annie and SS had separate apartments on the same floor in London Terrace separated by a garden. SS's son David has some not flattering things to say about AL; rumors were that AL left SS for the nanny- there are also rumors about who the father of the child was. For those who doubt her influence, Read up. I dealt a lot with Camille Paglia, her deepest dream and envy was that she would never be SS.

R50: seriously? A Costume Institute exhibit based on Notes on Camp?

I don't even begin to comprehend this.

[quote] For those who doubt her influence, Read up. I dealt a lot with Camille Paglia, her deepest dream and envy was that she would never be SS.

But that's just Camille Paglia, and she's hardly considered an important critic or writer--she's a joke.

Please, Paglia will have a much larger legacy and impact than Sontag ever did.

Do academics treat Sontag's work seriously? I was under the impression that they did not.

I, myself, was writing my dissertation on Sontag.

‘Twas not to be.

[quote]Do academics treat Sontag's work seriously? I was under the impression that they did not.

I don't think academics treat her work seriously. Which means it must be really good.

Sontag was an important public intellectual and taste-maker, r56, so they do take her work seriously (though mostly as a reflection of its era). But no one in academia takes Paglia even the slightest bit seriously.

Well, she sure sounds like a cunt.

People might have taken Camille Paglia seriously if she'd followed up that Sexual Personae book with something substantial. But instead she chose to tell us all how Madonna is the greatest artist ever and similarly stupid ideas. I don't like Sontag at all but she would never have been so pedestrian as that.

Sontag was very elitist and had nothing but disdain for popular culture.

Dreamy:

The photo Peter Hujar took of Sontag is a perfection in composition, light... he was just brilliant.

Cool AF:

David and Susan:

[R50], give us some dirt about that big lunatic. I noticed someone started a Paglia subreddit but it's completely dead. They post links to articles but literally no one comments. Sad! I wonder how the self-proclaimed "first internet intellectual" feels about that.

Paglia turned into a monotonous self-parody. It's her own fault. She failed to evolve or respond to the world with any real curiosity or insight, even the pop culture she was once so proud of engaging. Declaring George Lucas the greatest artist of the 20th century is just lazy.

Sigrid Nunez dated Sontag's son and wrote a short volume called Sempre Susan. A penetrating, empathetic, occasionally catty and sometimes very sad look at Susan Sontag up close, and a memory of a New York that no longer exists. I recommend it.

Thanks R67. That sounds like a good read. I got the feeling from the Castle piece that SS was somehow insecure about her position or her intellect; otherwise, why be so impossible? That's a trap lots of hyper-intelligent people fall in. Another explanation is that she had zero empathic ability, zero emotional intelligence.

I know these women’s names but haven’t ever read anything by them. Slight exposure to Paglia but only through pop culture. Are there any modern female writers of their ilk around? Haughty intellectuals, not boyish pop-culture vultures like Maddow.

Paglia officially outlived Sontag, celebrating her 72nd birthday earlier this week -- I'm sure she was over the moon about this feat.

Her best critical essay, hands down:

tried reading her n college but omg zzzzzzzzzzzz

Her rather moving obituary on one of her ‘mentors ‘, Paul Goodman:

She was one of those people who had no time for 99% of the population.

I'm glad she's dead.

Had to read some of her essays in grad school. Some of it was insightful, but she struck me as an extremely jaded and dour person. Most academics are though, so...

What a weird thing to say, R75.

I feel so sorry for young David in the photo above.

Good long interview with her (gay) biographer from last September, for those who are interested:

From Sontag to hashtags.

I'd rather look at Anne Bancroft please.