Comments on: Susan Sontag’s Secret Diaries Show She Wasn’t Always Such a Shrew

By: mike

mike — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:28:30 +0000

sontag had no original ideas and had to compensate with suffocating pretense and self-importance.

By: seitan-on-a-stick

seitan-on-a-stick — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:17:18 +0000

Wasn’t it funny when we found out that Camille Paglia (rhymes with “uglier”) is really Roy from Siegfried and Roy.

BTW – Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on Camp’ is always required reading (if a little dated now.)

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:47:53 +0000

She sounds like a chick who could have used medication. Y’know: little happy pills. I bet she was fun at social functions. While I’ll agree a little bit of introspection can be healthy; I don’t think an “unexamined life is not worth living”. Too much navel-gazing just gives you eyestrain (and perhaps migraines). So, to quote the great Neil Tennent: “Why do you want to sit alone in gothic gloom, surrounded by the ghosts of love that haunt your room? Somewhere there’s a different door to open wide. You gotta throw those skeletons out of your closet and come outside” (Se a vida Ã©) That’s the way life is. Trite, perhaps, but there ya have it.

By: Walker

Walker — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:57:51 +0000

To read if you haven’t –

The Benefactor – (This is one of my favoirt books â€“ It changed the way I read.)

On Photography -

By: greybat

greybat — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:02:14 +0000

Since I’ve known next to nothing about Sontag’s personal life, I’ve always enjoyed her lectures and writings.

By: Jeff Guard

Jeff Guard — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:21:37 +0000

how great is she, if she’s impenetrable?

It’s neither innovative nor intellectual to be inaccessible and alienating, especially to that which you are. If the only way to make yourself impenetrable is by completely detaching yourself, then what do you really have? That’s her joke, her Mona Lisa smile.

Chatter about how smart she is, all she really wants is for you to forget about her and the insecurities she hopes no one can see.

I giggle at Susan Sontag; what a big fat fraud. of course, any housewife in Iowa can tell you that.

By: DistinguÃ© Traces

DistinguÃ© Traces — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:59:05 +0000

Camille “pathetic fucking media whore please please put me on TV I am begging you” Paglia gets to write the epitaph for Susan Sontag?

No.

She doesn’t.

Jesus Christ.

By: Kid A

Kid A — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:54:09 +0000

@Japhy Grant: thank you, you perked up a dull evening.

By: Japhy Grant

Japhy Grant — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:11:32 +0000

@Adam:
1. Susan Sontag means never having to share your personal opinions with people.

2. Marriage, itself a theatrical performance in which the performers are the main audience, is artificial, and thus capable of being artful. Marriage isn’t bourgeois unless the actors are.

3. Wilde said “Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence” in derision, but in joining the institution of marriage, gays and lesbians have the chance to improve on it, to take their own imagination and apply it to an existing, but evolving model.

4. First rule of Susan Sontag is don’t talk about Susan Sontag.

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:39:30 +0000

After reflecting on the life of arguably one of the most incisive and widely read public intellectuals in her time, you’re only left to wonder what she thought about gay marriage?

Allow me to take a stab: she would have thought how limited and reductive this fight for marriage has become and how it’s primarily a battle for comfortable, unimaginative gay people who can’t think beyond the stifling model of bourgeois heterosexual marriage.

But I don’t mean to put words in her mouth.

By: Trenton

Trenton — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:33:10 +0000

She’s one of my favorite intellects and critics of the 20th century, and I’m glad to know that this is out there,but I’d be afraid to read these things. They might too much humanize Sontag, who I very much like in her implacable, ice queen splendor atop the pedestal that I have fashioned for her.