Word: sontag
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Decline of the Best. As he watches the sun slowly set on Western civilization, Vidal, scribbling his epitaphs in the shape of aphorisms, could hardly glow more brightly. Nothing is beyond his sardonic appreciation: the Kennedys, Tarzan, the 29th Republican Convention, Susan Sontag, pornography...
Partly because of his obsession with privacy-he refuses to reveal his first name, rarely gives interviews, shuns Parisian literary circles-Cioran is hardly better known in Europe than in the U.S. Yet there are impressive testimonials to his significance. Critic Susan Sontag, in her introduction to The Temptation to Exist, calls him "the most distinguished figure writing today in the tradition of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein." And Nobel prizewinning poet, Saint-John Perse, hails Cioran as "one of the greatest French writers to honor our language since the death of Paul Valery. His lofty thought...
...white race is the cancer of history."-Susan Sontag...
...those who seek refuge in conventional words, a few are supplied. They are, however, often as inscrutable as the rest of the contents. In a dissertation on the virtues of silence, Writer Susan Sontag declares: "Notoriously, the sensuous, ecstatic translinguistic apprehension of the plenum can collapse in a terrible, almost instantaneous plunge into the void of negative silence." Actually, the ads that are stuffed into the box are as entertaining as anything else. "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel," asks the Sierra Club, fighting a dam downstream from the Grand Canyon, "so tourists can get nearer the ceiling...
...Sontag's arrogance towards photography as a non-systematic, non-verbal mode of communication is uncalled for. Hers is, however, the world of words, and if she seems overly elitist at times, perhaps it is because she is such a master of her world. On Photography is elegantly written, thought-provoking, the kind of book that makes you impulsively write in its margins, and undoubtedly one of the most significant pieces of photographic criticism yet written...