Susan Sontag, on her birthday January 16
“The point is not to teach us something in particular. The point is to make us bold, agile, subtle, intelligent, detached. And to give pleasure.” Susan Sontag
An inescapable force of protean genius, her subversion of critical theory and practice cast a looming shadow over our culture for decades. Her collections of essays, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, and Under the Sign of Saturn, Where The Stress Falls, the monumental On Photography, and her novels The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover (literary history as seen through the lens of social psychology) & In America, are together a superb introduction to American arts & letters, as I think they shall remain for some time.