More on Sontag.

"As she saw it, she was entitled to frame bold opinions, and to change them as the world changed." New Yorker contributor Joan Acocella remembers Susan Sontag.

On a similar note, towards the end of his remembrance in Salon, Craig Seligman, author of Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, turns to her late essays:

The quality of the prose in those writings has changed because the quality of the anger has changed. But given the disheartening events that elicited that shift, not even Sontag - who could talk about cultural achievement with a Nietzschean absolutism that bordered on the callous - could have taken much consolation from her triumph. By 2004, the United States was a society very different from what it had been even during the ugliest years of the Vietnam era, and the rage smoldering beneath every sentence of that great, judgmental final essay was a different order of rage: a rage without hope. Speaking out, speaking angrily no longer had a goal so simple as stopping the war, because the war was, in the phrase she hammered at with disquieting control, an "endless war." "The torture of prisoners is not an aberration." "The photographs are us."

Also: Val Wang recalls an unexpected and unwanted run-in with Sontag. Wang works as a news editor for the UNICEF site, and so, couldn't help being struck by an almost absurd coincidence: "Susan's death came just days after the tsunami hit South Asia."

In a piece for TomDispatch, Rebecca Solnit considers the same strange juxtaposition, and then: "Sontag wrote beautifully about the images that we see, particularly those of suffering and of war. Now I wish she had said more about what we don't see, about how photographs must be weighed against the obliviousness they dispel as well as against the callousness they might generate, the exploitation they might cause, and the perils of interpretation."

Posted by dwhudson at January 4, 2005 8:28 AM