Seriously, Who Is Susan Sontag?
The short answer is she was an essayist of some import in the American 1960s-80s, or that is when the bulk of her work was published. She was reflective, against the materialism of her time and above all else a serious person.
Though I had never heard of her fame, all her books I came across have circulated well. If you want to know how important a book is, asking the library how many people have read it is a legitimate way to decide. So on the authority of the people visiting my branch, I have done a little bit of reading myself. No doubt Sontag herself would approve of this method of happenstance in talking about her work.
Susan Sontag was a humanist. She always wanted to write, gave up her marriage and at times her son to do so. An American savant writer educated in the classics, and contemporary with the existentialists, Sontag wrote in safe easy-to-understand prose that readers would flock to and movie makers would reference. Sontag was a thinker; her thoughts encouraged people to give up dissecting paintings and art, and to instead absorb each work as a whole. She has written commentary on being at war and on being ill. Ideologically it is all about taking the politics out of the lived experience. If I understand her process correctly, the point was to make an argument for a good point whether it was right or otherwise.
Sontag wrote for movies and has her own page on the International Movie Database.
The author was also an avid name dropper, as her own name was dropped often. She knew Andy Warhol , she often spoke of Barthes and Sade, she was pals with Annie Leibovitz. Knowing a bit about her contemporaries will lead you closer to the truth of who she was; however, it is her writing that survives her person. Everything I have read indicates that she was as beautiful as she was intelligent (she was an early reader and held multiple degrees). Her looks cemented her fame, but also, writers vastly admire her essays which were researched in some cases for up to a year before publication.
To Susan Sontag, the greatest compliment was to call something "serious."
For more on her and her writing, the library is adequately stocked in print and ebooks, these are a few:
The Volcano Lover 1992, format: book
On Photography 1977, format: ebook
Against Interpretation and Other Essays 1978, format: ebook
2 thoughts on “Seriously, Who Is Susan Sontag?”
I’m not sure you’d wish for “If you want to know how important a book is, asking the library how many people have read it is a legitimate way to decide” as a hill to die on. Some items should be held by a public library despite zero circulation, while other items that were never ever going to circulate (like Hindi DVDs, circulation of which has cratered and is never coming back) should not be acquired in the first place. Then we’d have to discuss selection criteria in general.
And, when you get right down it it, does Susan Sontag need more press, and isn’t it true that writing a blog post about her makes its author look smarter?
But Hindi movies are so much fun to watch! The colourful costumes, the positivity, the romance. I also know they circulate in the 100s per title, and so does Susan Sontag. Even with streaming technologies the plethora of titles available through the library makes our city more equitable. Funny that I have heard of the Kapoor family and not this famous writer.
Yes Susan Sontag needed to be discussed. Millennial minds are always looking for the next great experience and Sontag wrote of how to have experiences. She may not have been news to you but it was great to accidently find her content while going through the stacks.