Word: sontag
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...Anne E. Sontag '78 vouches for an even more obscure name--"Mr. Goodpeople." This name, she claims, arose from his closing comments to students to assure timely return of finished blue books. At the end of exams Edwards would say, "OK, good people, let's finish up the Harvard...
NONFICTION: Charles Dickens. Edgar Johnson ∙ Coming into the Country, John McPhee ∙ The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, edited by Michael Davie ∙ Dispatches, Michael Herr On Photography, Susan Sontag...
Most suspense-filled question of January: How will Susan Sontag resolve her two-part series on "Illness as Metaphor" in January's New York Review of Books? So far, she has proved in exhausting detail that 19th century authors considered tuberculosis a romantic disease. Apparently, part two will show that modern authors do not consider cancer romantic. It all rather leads one to worry about Sontag's worldview: it is a bit morbid, after all, to describe the difference between the centuries in terms of fatal diseases...
...camera is, it seems, the me chanical dandy par excellence. It is also the model of free choice. Sontag gives a wry account of the uses of photography in China, where "candid" shots are considered insulting and counterrevolution ary; there, photography, like every other mode of language, exists mainly to propagate ideology, and every image must be wholesome, posed, evenly lit, smiling; the camera is Big Brother's eye on the happy termitary. It is a repugnant alternative to the fragmented image, but, as Sontag gloomily concedes, there are no practicable alternatives...
...hard to imagine any photographer's agreeing point for point with Sontag's polemic. But it is a brilliant, irritating performance, and it opens window after window on one of the great fails accomplis of our culture. Not many photographs are worth a thousand of her words...