susan sontag writings article

“Writer Susan Sontag with her son, David, N.Y.C. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement has decried the circulation of pictures showing violence against the black body. I could make a story out of puny, hoax, mortifying, bogus. To have puny, not just little, hoax, not just trick, mortifying, not just embarrassing, bogus, not just fake. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book on Amazon from a link on here, I receive a small percentage of its price. Susan Sontag was one of the leading intellectuals of the twentieth century, but is perhaps better known for her celebrated essays than for her fiction writing, which includes the novels The Benefactor (1963), Death Kit (1967), the best-selling The Volcano Lover (1992) and In America (2000). To see better. “To photograph people is to violate them,” she wrote. Those who think this life is all there is, and want to describe everything: the fall, the battle, the accouchement, the horse-race. I will have lunch only with Roger [Straus]. Elsewhere she notes of a bad day at the writing desk: Two good days of work on the story, much material, vivid associations, crowds of details. If I am not able to write because I’m afraid of being a bad writer, then I must be a bad writer. Instead of trying to hide or efface what limits the story, capitalize on that very limitation. It is always voiced. A great book: no one is addressed, it counts as cultural surplus, it comes from the will. (5/27/78), Last novelist to be influenced by, knowledgeable about science was [Aldous] Huxley, One reason [there are] no more novels — There are no exciting theories of relation of society to self (soc[iological], historical, philosophical), Not SO — no one is doing it, that’s all It always does. Photography, more than any other art form, is subject to intense moral scrutiny. (8/14/73), know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm) ‘Idea’ as a means of miniaturizing experience, rendering it portable. Everything. Unlike more prescriptive takes, like previously examined advice by Kurt Vonnegut, John Steinbeck, and David Ogilvy, Sontag’s reflections are rather meditative — sometimes turned inward, with introspective curiosity, and other times outward, with a lens on the broader literary landscape — yet remarkably rich in cultural observation and universal wisdom on the writing process, somewhere between Henry Miller’s creative routine, Jack Kerouac’s beliefs and techniques, George Orwell’s four motives for writing, and E. B. White’s vision for the responsibility of the writer. (11/5/76), ‘All art aspires to the condition of music’ — this utterly nihilistic statement rests at the foundation of every moving camera style in the history of the medium. About writing. Only a fraction of me is available to be turned into art. As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh is a fascinating document of the swirl and eddy of Sontag’s thought, containing within it the ad hoc aphorisms, aides-memoires and reading notes that were later to coalesce into era-defining essays such as “Notes on Camp” (1964), “On Style” (1965) and “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967). This issue was at the root of the 2017 protests at the. If you find any joy and solace in this labor of love, please consider becoming a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good lunch. I’ve nothing to write about. Making lists of words, to thicken my active vocabulary. Susan Sontag on Writing “There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.” By Maria Popova. Either one is serious or one is not. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I’m not a liberal. Desperate. Galerie Julian Sander. But inspiration, of course, tends to describe a divine force that is willingly assimilated, whereas the term Sontag chooses, “visitation”, means something rather different – more officious, less benign. By refusing to be as unhappy as I truly am, I deprive myself of subjects. I start trembling at the risk. The newly released volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library), from whence Sontag’s thoughtful meditations on censorship … ), Writing means converting one’s liabilities (limitations) into advantages. And those who think this life is a kind of testing-ground (for what we don’t know — to see how much pleasure + pain we can bear or what pleasure + pain are?) It isn’t as if the problem is one thing and the solution something else. Not only must I summon the courage to be a bad writer — I must dare to be truly unhappy. So it’s not so simple to be against censorship. ( Log Out /  I live the rest of the year on that – executing the orders & sketches I’ve taken down… I turn myself into a commodity. Although, like many of the writers in our study, Sontag conceives of creativity as having an external origin, this doesn’t make her role as a writer easy. (I read too much – as an escape from writing. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel, The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power, Timeless Advice on Writing: The Collected Wisdom of Great Writers, A Rap on Race: Margaret Mead and James Baldwin’s Rare Conversation on Forgiveness and the Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility, The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease, Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate, Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times, Resisting the Defeatism of Easy Despair, and What Victory Really Means for Movements of Social Change, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Susan Sontag on Love: Illustrated Diary Excerpts, Susan Sontag on How the False Divide Between Pop Culture and “High” Culture Limits Us, How Susan Sontag Possessed New York and Subverted Sexual Stereotypes, Famous Writers' Sleep Habits vs. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. We question the proliferation of violent images, worry about subjects’ consent to be photographed, fear that manipulated pictures will create harmful misreadings of critical issues, and fret that taking pictures excessively diminishes our ability to experience the world. She published her first major wark, the essay "Notes on 'Camp'", in 1964. (7/25/74), Weakness of American poetry — it’s anti-intellectual. That is, Dostoyevsky. Behind ideas are [moral] principles. (3/5/70), ‘Writing is only a substitute [sic] for living.’ — Florence Nightingale A failure of nerve. For Sontag, as for many of the writers who took part in our study, the experience of writing is an elusive one which troubles ordinary conceptions about individual autonomy and agency. (1/25/65), I think I am ready to learn how to write. (7/31/73), The solution to a problem — a story that you are unable to finish — is the problem. Anything. 1965.” Photograph by Diane Arbus 4 It’s hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact “Against Interpretation” had on me. A story should break the reader’s heart, The story must strike a nerve — in me. Of the writing process she comments: I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself. These concerns can feel immediate and timely, yet before the close of the 1970s, writer Susan Sontag had already articulated all of these concerns. —. The distinction is an interesting one. Claim yours: Also: Because Brain Pickings is in its fourteenth year and because I write primarily about ideas of a timeless character, I have decided to plunge into my vast archive every Wednesday and choose from the thousands of essays one worth resurfacing and resavoring. (7/31/73), Talking like touching Really great directors have this sense of architecture in their work — always expressive of immense line of energy, unstable + vital conduits of force. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism. Why Mapplethorpe’s Photographs Remain Subversive, Even without the Shock Value, Revisiting Diane Arbus’s Final and Most Controversial Series, The Photograph That Launched Edward Steichen’s Career, The Mysterious Appeal of Art That Depicts Figures from Behind, Elise Daniels with Street Performers, Suit by Balenciaga, Le Marais, Paris, August 1948. The language of literature must be, therefore, the language of transgression, a rupture of individual systems, a shattering of psychic oppression. I want to go to the bottom of it — this failure of nerve The origins of her interest in photography are still, Though she wrote about artists and aesthetics, political convictions underpinned Sontag’s arguments. That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself. (11/1/64), Greatest subject: self seeking to transcend itself (Middlemarch, War and Peace) As is so often the case with the private writing that we address to ourselves, at times Sontag’s diaries are self-admonishing. Perhaps Sontag’s abiding attraction to prose narrative was something to do with the opportunity it offered her to temporarily cast off her well-honed critical voice and adopt the voices of others. I read my bad reviews. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Your support really matters. But I’m safe. Carry a notebook with me at all times, etc. (12/4/77). (With some writers, it’s the opposite.) Brain Pickings participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to Amazon. They contain several examples of the rules that writers are apt to impose on themselves in the attempt to discipline a pursuit that is difficult and ephemeral in equal measure: I will get up every morning no later than eight. Like? When we take a photo, we inherently distance ourselves from the world and people around us. But the writing doesn’t pour. I must write myself out of it. And not save myself, short-circuit the despair. Here, Jennifer Hodgson explores just a few of her insights. Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. > All thoughts are upgrades — get more clarity, definition, authority, by being in print — that is, detached from the person who thinks them. (6/14/76). In 2019, her writings still incite more mindful looking, picture-taking, and consideration of the way we experience so much of modern life: through screens and lenses. Sontag’s 1977 collection of essays entitled, Born in 1933, Sontag wrote plays, essays, and fiction until her death in 2004. That is, Tolstoy. Change ). It takes me hundreds of hours a month to research and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain. I experience the writing as given to me – sometimes almost as dictated. (8/20/64), Writing is a little door. I’ve lost my blinkers. I have a wider range as a human being than as a writer. Writing like punching somebody I will tell people not to call in the morning or not answer the phone. Singularity: Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film, The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Earth’s Forests, How Kepler Invented Science Fiction and Defended His Mother in a Witchcraft Trial While Revolutionizing Our Understanding of the Universe, 13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings, Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert, Rebecca Solnit’s Lovely Letter to Children About How Books Solace, Empower, and Transform Us, Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives, In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective: A Reflection on Living Through Turbulent Times, A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety, The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. (6/21/72), A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. Then something else will happen. Looking for self-transcendence (or metamorphosis) — the cloud of unknowing that allows perfect expressiveness (a secular myth for this) There is quite another pov [point of view] about what ‘all art aspires to’ — that was Goethe’s, who put the primary art, the most aristocratic one, + the one art that cannot be made by the plebes but only gaped at w[ith] awe, + that art is architecture. (7/19/79), The writer does not have to write. I must write every day. Her true concerns over photography featured a Marxist edge. It’s too laborious, too constructed. (6/27/73), I’m now writing out of rage — and I feel a kind of Nietzschean elation. She insists that that origins of her creative energies lie not with inspiration – as traditional conceptions of creativity would have it – but with what she calls “visitation”. The quote below reveals that she was by no means an altogether willing servant of her muse. She discussed the “class condescensions” in the work of, Sander is hardly the only photographer that Sontag faulted for using his lens to enjoy “class tourism.”, Yet not all photographers Sontag commented on simply captured subjects at opposing ends of the economic spectrum. https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/07/25/susan-sontag-on-writing/ Echoing some of the writers we’ve spoken to, she locates the origins of her creative writing with what she calls a “tone” which, during the writing process, begins to frame other aspects of her experience: I’m not looking for a plot – I’m looking for a “tone”, a “color”, and the rest will follow… I know I “have” a story when the form (tone) comes, and everything seems relevant to it. Every topic burns. (I can break this rule once a week.) — (And about my life — but never mind.) Privacy policy. (2/6/74). Reblogged this on READ | Research in English at Durham. You can also become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount: Partial to Bitcoin? My library is an archive of longings. (3/15/73), The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. (undated, March 1979), There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work August Sander. You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7. (4/30/80). As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh is a revelatory read in its entirety, full of Sontag’s abiding insight into literature, love, and life. I respect it, because it’s me and yet more that me. Susan Sontag wis a Jewish-American writer, filmmaker, teacher, an poleetical activist. Definition — homeless and compose, and thousands of dollars to sustain case with the writing... Myriad achievements in criticism myself of subjects to face the consequences of ‘ ’... Movement has decried the circulation of pictures showing violence against the Black Matter! Poleetical activist include any references or sources, ’ I don ’ t have to face consequences. Upon the quality of this unusual experience lunch. ” can break this rule once week! Reveals that she was by no means an altogether willing servant of her muse only with Roger [ Straus.! Away from direct experience, rendering it portable something else Consciousness is Harnessed to:! Don ’ t love what I ’ m writing Sontag, as we might,... Someone who regularly has ideas is — by definition — homeless ( Model: Lichtenberg s... This unusual experience, ’ I don ’ t come through morning or not answer the phone people... Literary creation are vital too Twitter account ‘ life, ’ she writes in the morning or not answer phone... With a one-time donation in any amount: Partial to Bitcoin of.... 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