A NY Times Magazine culture issue with the mandatory Susan Sontag reference.

A.O. Scott: Thanks so much for this evocative piece which so well displays what Sontag would have praised as the erotics of reading. She has been the muse and inspiration of my whole dedicated career as a reader and thinker, and I think she is the greatest American writer of the 20th century. Our culture seems to have given up on the centrality of reading but nothing can take away from her centrality in the reading realm. When all the stuff about cultural iconography fades away the monument of her works will still be there.

Thank you for your thoughtfully beautifully revealing essay ... I am experiencing a similar anxiety writing this post as you expressed in your writing about Susan Sontag, your personal muse. Amusing and strange... Thanks also for "The Sweet Spot." with you and Mr. David Carr debating about media and discussing contemporary cultural issues. It would be great to revive that kind of weekly programing reflecting social media and film.

Two simple observations: For starters, Moser's criticism rings hollow, inasmuch as male and female homosexuals are on opposite sides of the AIDS epidemic spectrum. Secondly, insofar the sexual politics of `Camus' Notebooks` are concerned, the only detectable reason behind the purported dichotomy seems to stem from the simple fact that, in this particular case, the reader, namely Susan Sontag herself, happened to be female, once married to a male husband, and later having affairs with various lovers, not necessarily male, as, for some reason, the article appears to assume.

A.O. SCOTT, Thank.You.

When is the Magazine going to upgrade its commenting system? It removes paragraph breaks, which makes comments unreadable.

I met Susan many times while working in that amazing temple of books, literature and philosophy, the bookstore on the upper east side called Books & Co. She would come for everything, for the choices made by the amazing book buyer and it seemed to me to simply be in a place that seemed to echo her mind. Robert Musil, James Joyce, essays by the hundreds. Her books and writing seemed to drill into art, cinema and into the multifarious creations of the world's writers. I have missed her and that bookstore since she and it left us. We now truly live in a different world.

'“Against Interpretation,” a collection of articles from the 1960s ...' As Scott later suggests, that's also the title of a specific essay. It can be found online and in several print editions, including one published as part of the Library of America.* That said, Sontag's essay has too many flaws to put into a comment, but the first sentence is mere speculation, and citing prehistoric art does nothing to change that. And Sontag's references to Plato and Aristotle are not supported by exact citations. Indeed, there are no notes appended to the essay. In the first paragraphs, the essay appears to be a straw man attack on classical literary theory. But Sontag extends that attack into "modern times", when she asserts, without evidence, that "the mimetic theory persists." Yet Sontag never mentions mimetic theory after part one. * "Susan Sontag: Essays of the 1960s & 70s" (details at loa.org).

A.O. Scott, Thanks for clarifying some thoughts I, too, have had about Sontag ... and for mentioning "Pilgrimage." When I read it in 1987, I was so excited and moved by her recounting of this event in her life that I wrote her a letter (through her publisher) … I don't have a copy of the letter I wrote her, but I must have empathized with her youthful embarrassment in meeting Thomas Mann. Much to my surprise, sometime in early March 1988, I got a handwritten letter from her, in which she said in part: "You focus on the theme of embarrassment, and that pleases me very much, because many people seem to think (but perhaps they don't want to think about embarrassment) that 'Pilgrimage' is about meeting Thomas Mann. "Almost to the very end of the writing, my title was not 'Pilgrimage' but -- you won't be surprised -- 'An Aria About Embarrassment.' Then I decided that was forcing matters on my readers, and a more discreet, opaque title would be better. "As you have understood, that anecdote is just the pretext -- the frame -- for an account of certain feelings. Some call those feelings adolescent. I don't. if they are adolescent, then so am I still -- because I still have the feelings I describe in 'Pilgrimage.' All (!) that has happened in the ensuing forty years is that I've acquired some other feelings as well. That's a longer story, of course …" The letter is one of my few cherished possessions ... along with that Dec. 21, 1987 issue of The New Yorker.

One last note. I have always loved 'Under the Sign of Saturn' on Walter. Always will.

After a high school literary period saturated in symbolism and interpretation, in 1964 I found Kenneth Patchen's "Journal of Albion Moonlight" in my college bookstore. I loved it. One of the passages I recall best is the brief polemic against interpretation. While being asked who or what each character in the journal symbolized the interlocutor states that so-and-so represents Hitler. The response is that the interpretations and symbolic assignments of the various characters is erroneous, that Hitler would appear in the novel when he appeared and that the characters are who they are. The book both is and is not an allegory, somewhat like Schrodinger's cat. Appreciate the book for what it is. What the reader imagines it to be is the reader's experience, not what is on the page. I think of Sontag's "Against Interpretation" in that light.

@sharon 5 times now I have attempted to "Reply" to your comment about having Ms Sontag's books, but I keep getting kicked back to log in again. So here it is. When a "critic" or a "biographer' attempts to demean or denigrate the work of someone based on their personal history or qualities it is simply an ad hominen attack and indicates a lack of substance in the argument. We have Thomas Mann's books and we have Susan Sontag's books. Their personal qualities may be interesting, but they do not reflect on the significance of their work.

Thank you A.O. Scott. Your writing drives me to Susan Sontag. There is so much feeling and discovery here. Books are everything, as you say.

It's been too long since I took the time to slow down and read a piece as nourishing, illuminating and personal as this. Makes me want to go back and read more. For which I can only say thanks, I really appreciate it...

As the title says, Susan Sontag taught me to think. Hers were the only books (along with a few poetry collections) I took to college with me in 1972. I have them still. God, I miss her voice. Thanks for dusting it off.

I just read James Atlas 'The Shadow in the Garden' about biography. I'm doing a documentary on biography. I was going to talk to him to find out he just died. Susan almost did her own biography. She was a persona more than a person in so many ways. Her journals are something else. I am reading the bio as well. I sometimes think that a bio is nice way to spend thinking about someone in different ways. Most biographers are terrible, comes with the territory. She was born in....

Thank you for this lovely, moving, brilliant essay.

LOVE THIS ARTICLE. "I don’t like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret" that A.O. feels *compelled* to divulge. Delicious paradox, luxurious and specific analyses, ambivalent tribute to ambivalence, and a kind of thought-display that feels natural and a little nostalgic to those of us from a certain aesthetic generation. Also dig the rhetorical device of a numbered argumentative sequence. You go, A.O. Consider me all kinds of ready for similar meditations, deliberations and concatenations.

I always remember Susan in Paris in that small apartment with nothing in it. Scribbling away at that novel. I idolized her situation and her then. We would meet at a café nearby and smoke and talk and drink coffee. Ravenous was the word I had for Sue. In everything. She was beginning to have that hauteur and boasting which I grew to hate. Sitting with her at the Japan Society retrospective of Ozu I felt embarrassed having to listen to that commanding voice boom her opinions over people who might not want to hear. Still loved her.

Ignorance is a bliss?

An interesting read, she was clearly Scott's cup of tea. But over the years she's also been "lauded, applauded, debated and vilified" From the LA Times in 1992: Herbert Mitgang once called her a “literary pinup.” Customarily acerbic John Simon lauded her in a story titled, “The Light That Never Failed.” She has been taken to task in the New Criterion for supposedly promoting a doctrine that would “release high culture from its obligations to be entirely serious.” Carlos Fuentes believes her essays to be “great interpretations and even fulfillments of what is really going on.” Kevin Costner’s character in “Bull Durham” dismissed her novels as “self-indulgent, overrated crap.” And Time magazine canonized her as someone who “has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience.” And Scott says: What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: “From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.” I'd say the process of unmaking and redefining the terms and procedures of human consciousness takes not just art, but a measure of interpretation and discernment as to exactly what we do and how we do it. I find her intriguing and relate to some of her thinking, but to each their own as they say.

Mr. Scott, This is wonderful. M

What Sontag said about Mann is very relevant here. Why should I want to learn about the domestic details of her life? I have her books. I certainly do not need or want to examine the reconstructed quotidian structure or array of personal detritus of her life. It was her mind that hooked and enveloped me. I regarded her as a kind of intellectual mother (born only 4 months before my own mother). I followed her thinking obsessively because I realized her perceptions were acute, extraordinary, and strangely necessary for me. I needed her thinking to avoid my falling into assumptions that I was not able to even see without the illumination of her written questions, observations, and arguments. I am reading Moser's biography, and yes, I am finding that his project seems to be, weirdly, an effort to diminish her (even though he cannot: I read details that no one needs to know and I form an opinion about him, the author, not her, the woman who keeps house badly, does not bathe every day, at times cutting to her friends. I simply do not want to know who she slept with, etc: I do not, and I gain nothing by knowing. Thus, this enormous book, only half-read, languishes unopened for days at a times as I pick up, instead, On the Pain of Others, or On Style again because of Susan Sontag's gaze on the bio's dust jacket photograph. I miss her. What would she say about our situation today? We are where we are because there no one has appeared to replace her.

Thank you, Mr. Scott, for a superb, seductive essay. Even though I gravitate towards Thomas Bernhard's exclusivity over Susan Sontag's apparent proclivity to make art more inclusive, her brilliance infuses her writing with an irresistibly erotic patina.

This is brilliant. Got my heart racing a bit, in sympathy and appreciation. Thank you, Mr. Scott.

Wonderful piece. It does feel like you're completing work assigned 20 years ago, and that feels very close to home for me---I'd describe most of my career in that way. Lovely work including those intimate 6x6s too

I love this. I think many of us who work as writers or artists need our touchstones (mine's Keats)--someone we know, vicariously, even better than we know ourselves by becoming a part of ourselves.

I can't rid myself of the thought that I just read an essay based on the finer art of 'naval gazing'. I suppose we all do it at one time or another but I remain puzzled over the value of an introspective on something or someone who triggered an epiphany. After reading (say) Kerouac, the idea of sitting in a wingback chair atop a bus painted in Day-Glo colors, smoking weed and sipping electric KoolAid was about all the understanding I needed to know about his influence on my youth. And with Susan Sontag, she learned how to remove filters and let the words flow. Brave and smart is my takeaway.

"Against Interpretation" ignited my imagination when I first read it in my late teens. It was way over my head, but I fell hard for Sontag's aphorisms: a work of art is not just about something, it is something; the imagination of disaster; artists are always seeking new forms; collage as the radical juxtaposition of objects; death is the opposite of everything. Her essays for me were a complete departure from the way I read literature or looked at paintings or listened to music. I recently read Moser's bio and was startled and shocked sometimes, but A.O. Scott's piece put my early infatuation with her and the universe of ideas solidly within a context - or maybe my own consciousness about art, the artist and work like Scott's.