Word: sontag
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...epicene urban subculture, Susan Sontag explained in "Notes on 'Camp,' " her remarkably astute 1964 essay, was reveling in the "great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement . . . The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure." Kitsch is amusing, not threatening. An ironic acceptance of pop effluvia, Sontag wrote, "makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated." Sontag's hip intellectuals did not like cheap science-fiction movies or Fabian: they "liked" them...
Such perversity is now commonplace in the city that was at one time a cosmopolitan gateway to the Middle East. Last week in the Muslim-controlled western sector, new depths were achieved when gunmen turned their vengeance on an 84-year-old Frenchman. Camille Sontag and his wife Blanche, 85, were driving along a seaside boulevard when a cab blocked their way. Gunmen leaped from the vehicle and pressed a pistol to Sontag's temple. Seconds later he was packed into the cab and driven away, bringing to nine the number of French currently believed to be held by extremists...
...outside the Village, Paley has an entirely different reputation. Her first book of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), was lavishly praised by critics and by colleagues as disparate as Philip Roth, Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag--but not for the book's political messages. In fact, the tales were devoid of exhortation. Their main concern was human --mostly female--suffering. Her second book, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), also evoked the anguish of women caught in what she called "the courts of kitchen drama." Wives were abandoned, mothers were overburdened by cherished babies, and grown...
...Emily Dickinson quite often, Virginia Woolf, and Dickens. Poe ... oh, all the time, I see him on misty nights at Sheridan Square when the raindrops are falling." Young admits her visions are irrational, yet they are real and useful to her. Even as balanced a writer as Susan Sontag summons up persuasive phantoms, those subtle abstractions that take shape in her essays but scarcely survive outside their contexts...
...Critic Susan Sontag has pointed out, cancer unjustly serves as a metaphor for the monstrosities of our age. In human discourse, it is the epithet for all that is demonic, mysterious and implacable in the experience of man and society. Given this aura of dread, these two serious books of medical popularization-the first is subtitled The Inspiring Stories of People Who Conquered Cancer and How They Did It, the second is an account of a pioneering leukemia treatment-represent significant acts of demystification...