Susan Sontag’s Blog
Jane Holloway | December 22, 2008Hey guys-
I’m Jane, and I’ll be working for Nao Bustamante along with Robin Riskin for the among friends symposium. For now though I’d like to discuss another woman: Susan Sontag. Sontag was an American critic and most of her stuff got published in and around the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Socially, she was a quite the scenester and a wunderkind of 16 when she started at UC Berkeley. Her obsession was culture – absorbing it, interpreting it, writing about it, living in it. She wrote about photography, interpretation, AIDS, pain, camp, and today we get a chance to see her look at herself. I just got her recently published journals and I feel like they should have a place in the among friends blog. Click the link and we can read these together.
Let’s go to something really personal:
“1/2/58
Poor little ego, how did you feel today? Not very well, I fear – rather bruised, sore, traumatized. Hot waves of shame, and all that. I never had any illusion she was in love with me, but I did assume she liked me.”
I choose something so intimate because I’d like to make sure that you feel as weird as I do when I read this entry (Sontag’s and mine too I think). For me, it’s not so much the message of unrequited love but the transmission of the message itself that gets to me. I’m embarrassed! Embarrassed for her, embarrassed for me, embarrassed to relate all of this to someone else, lengthening that icky chain of information disclosure.
And aren’t I a total creep for reading these? But is it okay to keep on reading if I feel bad about it?
My reaction to these journals is so embedded in my readings of other journal-like web productions, like facebook status or Twitter. Those short tell-alls, similar in form and maybe even sometimes in content to Sontag’s entry here for me can be weird in a different way: someone’s facebook status is published for the world to see and never intended purely for personal use or record. I wonder how different these aphoristic web journals are from Sontag’s (Click the twitter link – it’s MC Hammer’s Twitter, and he can be pretty intimate about his marriage at times). Are we engaging with MC Hammer the same way we engage with Sontag’s old school model of self-publishing? What do you think? There’s more to say about this.
this is awsome
rebecca | December 24, 2008this is awsome
Hi jane- I'm not even sure if I'm supposed to comment
Gus Stadler | February 7, 2009Hi jane-
I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to comment on these things–I just discovered the blog thanks to a link John M. provided. . . I read the Sontag journals over winter break and was thinking about similar issues. Sontag’s son edited the journals, and I suspect that some family drama is being played out in his taking on this project. What your post made me realize is how I found reading them so refreshing and, in a sense, calming, in the world of status updates, etc. They are so substantive and full of feeling, even when the feeling is about her inability to feel feelings. I try to avoid “end of privacy” narratives–they’ve been bandied about in relation to media for hundreds if not thousands of years. But I do worry that something is being lost here. Also, I think you can’t make a clear distinction between journal writing as for oneself, and wholly private, and facebook/twitter as for your friends, and wholly private. I think there is an imagined addressee in the traditional journal, or maybe addressees. and even if that addressee is some version of oneself you’re still writing, in some way, to an other, to a public. . . whatev. . . .
Thanks,
Gus Stadler