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Tuesday, January 11, 2005
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MOI, Ph.D
UD found this rather a nice approach to Sontag ... until the very end! ' What might academics do to honor this singular force of nature who largely shunned universities and institutional cover, but who credited her years at Chicago, Harvard, and Oxford with providing her the "best university education on the planet"? Here's a life kit for those who would do something: At least once, write an article, for a publication read by other than professional peers, that says absolutely what you really think. Pay no attention to whether it will offend the chair, disturb the editor at that university press you're courting, threaten your ability to cling to the same institutional home all your life, or support clichés you privately reject. Strip it of all eponymous crutches -- Derridean this and Foucauldian that -- all citations to prestigious academics meant to add false authority to your views. Hone the sentences to so fine a form that one of them might stand up and saunter away from its paragraph, looking for a new home -- perhaps a book of quotations, or the marble wall of an august institution of learning. Better yet, write a novel, with all the uncertain certainty that implies. Then, as a final touch, at the spot where dedications go, add a simple phrase: "For Susan Sontag." ' FANTASTIC! This sort of advice is what Philip Larkin described in "Poetry of Departures" : ...To hear it said He walked out on the whole crowd Leaves me flushed and stirred, Like Then she undid her dress Or Take that you bastard; Surely I can, if he did? And that helps me stay Sober and industrious. But I'd go today, Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads, Crouch in the fo'c'sle Stubbly with goodness... Yes, UD was flushed and stirred by Romano's insistence that she say fuck it and do and say what she wants! When she wants! How she wants! Screw institutional affiliation and the whole business of impressing people by telling them where you are and what you do there! I'm FREEEEEEEEE..... Then UD looked at Romano's self-description at the bottom of his essay: "Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University." Four affiliation namedrops in one sentence. Carlin, Carlin, Carlin... |