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28 January 2009

things I learned today Comparing Susan Sontag's diary to your diary can be rather damaging to one's self-esteem.→[More:]

Sontag at 15: "Immersing myself in Gide again—what clarity and precision! Truly it is the man himself who is incomparable."
Firas at 15: 'Akeel also just gave me a VCD: "The World Is Not Enough".'

Sontag at 16: "Today, a wonderful opportunity was offered me—to do some research work for a soc instructor named Philip Rieff… At last the chance to really involve myself in one area with competent guidance."
Firas at 16: "You know, most of life goes to waste. I mean, what lives after a person—genius? I mean, I just read in the Lit book about this woman who committed suicide after writing a series of poems—collected as Ariel… I guess ppl are lucky to have anything survive @ all."

Sontag at 17: "I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness."
Firas at 17: "Yeah, I know", I said, smiling indignantly. … Rarely have I had a better excuse to shoot someone."

(What do you do when you feel immensely undereducated?)

post by: Firas at: 22:36 | 13 comments

(What do you do when you feel immensely undereducated?)

Read more books.

posted by gomichild 28 January | 22:44

Do some research on the stupid and offensive things she wrote, like the white race being the cancer of history.

That'll give you a more balanced perspective on her contributions and make you feel better.

posted by jason's_planet 29 January | 01:03

Eh, from a certain perspective, the white race is the cancer of history. I think it's capitalism, myself, which happened to have a lot of white folks involved in it early on.. But with this economic crisis there is surely something going on, and it's pretty cancerous.

posted by By the Grace of God 29 January | 07:28

What command of the English language for a fifteen-year-old!

posted by Specklet 29 January | 07:43

I think one saving grace is that the article points out how this would have been a relatively common stage for 15-year-olds in 1948:

this was a period during which it was fashionable among certain adolescents to read serious literature and listen to serious music ... And Sontag's intellectual precocity, though striking, is hardly peerless—just think of the age Mozart was when he was writing some of the music she listens to with such discrimination!

And certainly if you look at writers from the era who went to like English boarding schools they were ahead of her in precocity, although probably less in verve.

posted by Firas 29 January | 08:02

Yes, Firas, that is all true. But. I still feel like a schlub.

posted by Specklet 29 January | 09:34

Hell, from a certain perspective the human race is the cancer of history. Of course, it's also the seed and the fruit and all.

I think the tendency to claim individuals and individual actions for greater groups is the cancer of history. It wasn't white people who wrote Die Zauberflote, it was Mozart. It wasn't white people who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, it was Timothy McVeigh. Sure, there've been a lot of things done expressly in the name of the larger group; that's usually how things get fucked up, I think. Then again, that, like any sweeping generalization, contains as much absolute falsity as it does absolute truth.

posted by Hugh Janus 29 January | 09:41

Hugh Janus - we SO need to hang out.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 29 January | 09:47

The other thing about Sontag when I read her is that old Gertrude Stein adage about "there ain't no there there." Sure, she can squawk on about Gide, but where is this woman's emotional center?

I know people who are similar to this kind of headiness in real life, and talking to them is like taking a long walk down a dark tunnel because someone keeps shining a flashlight at you.

You know the tunnel will end because of the light, but you're not exactly sure who's holding it when you arrive.

posted by Lipstick Thespian 29 January | 09:55

I don't know much about Sontag as a person, but her book Illness as Metaphor once helped me get through a very bad year, during which someone I loved a lot was dying of brain cancer. So, I find at least some of her writing to be really powerful.

posted by BoringPostcards 29 January | 10:09

Hugh Janus - we SO need to hang out.

Hell yeah, man!

posted by Hugh Janus 29 January | 17:05

I smell a bromance coming on.

And I also need to crack a 3 1/4" floppy so that I can extract all my journal entries from my teen years. The problem is that it was originally written in Word Perfect and I changed the file name to look like a "necessary" file so that my parents wouldn't snoop on the shared (Internet-less) computer, and then on top of that, there's a password.

posted by TrishaLynn 29 January | 19:16

Yo Trish, sorry I never emailed you about that sewing machine but it isn't there anymore, the boss woman found some friend to take it upstate. Your friend may actually be glad not to have had to pick it up. Those fucking things are heavy.

posted by Hugh Janus 29 January | 22:14

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