Tag: Susan Sontag

Literary Birthday: Susan Sontag

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

When Susan Sontag (born today in 1933) published Notes on Camp in 1964, she was already something of an enfant terrible in the literary world. This inventively formatted and passionately argued book-length essay further fueled her reputation at a time when the lines between high and low culture were blurring fast.

In elliptical fashion, the normally fiery critic danced around defining camp (“a certain mode of aestheticism”) and tried to give some idea of the overwrought and self-conscious (except when it isn’t) artifacts that are part of the camp canon: Tiffany lamps, Swan Lake, King Kong, Flash Gordon, and “stag movies seen without lust.”

The next year, Sontag entered herself into the evolving canon of camp—its droll downtown Manhattan subdivision, at least—by sitting for one of Andy Warhol’s “screen tests.”

Writer’s Desk: Writing as a Form of Reading

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

sontagreaderIt’s a truism that one of the best things new writers need to remember is to read. A lot. Not to imitate (though some of that is inevitable, especially at the start) but to understand just what writing is, and to see a book through two sets of eyes at once:

  • How is the writer able to make me respond this way?
  • How can I get the reader to respond, in any way?

In “Write, Read, Rewrite, Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed,” Susan Sontag limns the linkage between the two:

First, because to write is to practice, with particular intensity and attentiveness, the art of reading. You write in order to read what you’ve written and see if it’s O.K. and, since of course it never is, to rewrite it — once, twice, as many times as it takes to get it to be something you can bear to reread. You are your own first, maybe severest, reader. “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself,” Ibsen inscribed on the flyleaf of one of his books. Hard to imagine writing without rereading…