Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontagwas an American writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist. She published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. Her best-known works include On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, The Way We Live Now, Illness as Metaphor, Regarding the Pain of Others, The Volcano Lover and In America...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth16 January 1933
CountryUnited States of America
asthmatic bank beastly bleeding city close cosmic data fairly jungle neither nor printed
This city is neither a jungle nor the moon. . . . In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.
fantastic follow knowing priorities trying
It's fantastic knowing you're going to die; it really makes having priorities and trying to follow them very real to you.
opening-up healthy doe
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
time moments photograph
To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.
different needs steel
As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.
nostalgic
But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures
vitality attention eagerness
Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
photographer imposing
Photographers are always imposing
becoming-one ironic world
Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism -- victimless collecting, as it were... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.
illumination literature information
The wisdom of literature is quite antithetical to having opinions. 'Nothing is my last word about anything,' said Henry James. Furnishing opinions, even correct opinions - whenever asked - cheapens what novelists and poets do best, which is to sponsor reflectiveness, to pursue complexity. Information will never replace illumination.
mass-culture age answers
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.
worst-case-scenario needs taste
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
answers destroy questions
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions
art artistic beauty decay durable extremely moral morality nowhere physical rapidly tendency
Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.