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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Friday, March 11, 2005

PIECES OF WRITING
THAT DON’T QUITE
COME OFF; OR,
WHY PEOPLE THINK
ENGLISH PROFESSORS
ARE PATHETIC, AND
JOURNALISTS ARE
ASSHOLES.




“The thing about being dead,” said the then-ambassador to Croatia to UD as they walked together on Brioni Island a few years ago, “is that people can do whatever they want with your body. You can’t stop them.” He was thinking about a recent atrocity in the Balkans whose results he’d witnessed: One ethnic minority had dug up the graves of another ethnic minority and abused the corpses. The image of the corpses haunted him. “In case my family forgets, Margaret,” he said, turning to her, “I want to be cremated.”

The figurative abuse of the dead is much more common than the literal, of course - so common that we expect it, especially of the envied and controversial dead. Ted Hughes complains about this in a poem about Sylvia Plath that appears in Birthday Letters. The poem is addressed to their children:

THE DOGS ARE EATING YOUR MOTHER

That is not your mother but her body.
She leapt from our window
And fell there. Those are not dogs
That seem to be dogs
Pulling at her.
Remember the lean hound
Running up the lane holding high
The dangling raw windpipe and lungs
Of a fox? Now see who
Will drop on all fours at the end of the street
And come romping towards your mother,
Pulling her remains, with their lips
Lifted like dog’s lips
Into new positions. Protect her
And they will tear you down
As if you were more her.
They will find you every bit
As succulent as she is. Too late
To salvage what she was.
I buried her where she fell.
You played around the grave. We arranged
Sea-shells and big veined pebbles
Carrried from Appledore
As if we were herself. But a kind
Of hyena came aching upwind.
They dug her out. Now they batten
On the cornucopia
Of her body. Even
Bite the face off her gravestone,
Gulp down the grave ornaments,
Swallow the very soil.
So leave her.
Let her be their spoils. Go wrap
Your head in the snowy rivers
Of the Brooks Range. Cover
Your eyes with the writhing airs
Off the Nullarbor Plains. Let them
Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit
Over their symposia.
Think her better
Spread with holy care on a high grid
For vultures
To take back into the sun. Imagine
These bone-crushing mouths the mouths
That labour for the beetle
Who will roll her back into the sun.



“Vomit/Over their symposia” is very bad. The poem is not a success. But you get the idea.

Now that the first flush of eulogies for Susan Sontag has faded, body-tampering has begun, as in the two essays, one by a journalist, and one by an English professor, that UD will now consider.

UD enjoys a hatchet job, posthumous or not, as much as anyone, and Sontag was a pill, but you want to get this particular rhetorical form right, and there are many perils.




Sontag dissed Kevin Myers, a journalist at The Telegraph, and, once she was safely dead, he wrote “I Wish I had Kicked Susan Sontag” about the diss and how he wishes he’d done something about it when she was alive.

Myers doesn’t clarify the content of the diss; he tells us only that Sontag, when they were both in Sarajevo during the conflict, “ostentatiously disdained us hacks.”

Hacks in Myers’s telling are sensible straightforward people who listen to other people and say true things, whereas “self-proclaimed intellectuals” like Sontag are “insufferably self-important and posturing creatures” who issue empty epigrams which “New England professors with their bow-ties and tweed suits and rimless spectacles” along with “wretched, credulous, self-hating American academia” as a whole “fawns on.” This “ridiculous heroine of US campus culture” produced “bilge that can only exist in Englitish, the impenetrable campus-dialect in which English literature is analysed, discussed, and then buried.”

It’s right to disdain rudeness and hauteur, and Myers might have written a good piece if he’d stuck to that aspect of Sontag. The problem with kicking her for her writing style and her ideas is that Myers hasn’t read her. Sontag was, as the next essay I’ll take up makes clear, a lifelong hater of academia and impenetrability. Myers’s coupling of her with fog-machines like Foucault tells us that he’s not thinking clearly.

Take one “vapid aphorism” of hers that he ridicules as so obviously “asinine” as not to be worth talking about: “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.” That photography’s encroachment upon private life has tended to distance us from that life, to make us passive observers of ourselves rather than unselfconscious participants in the flow of our experience, is a pretty straightforward and uncontroversial claim. Certainly Sontag makes the claim with metaphor and suggestiveness here, rather than with explicit statement, but it comes across, doesn’t it? Her writing style, which is enviable, exhibits none of the longwinded obscurity of academic writing in the humanities, but rather the poetic concision of the European intellectuals who influenced her, and in particular, UD has always thought, the writing of Albert Camus.

Myers’s fundamental problem with Sontag, UD thinks, is incompatibility. He is hot where she is cold. His strings of tantrum-adjectives mean to convince the reader that he’s a regular guy, full of feeling, full of warmth toward the common man. An ordinary scribe like Myers, with universal human instincts, is understandably enraged by his encounter with the now-forever-to-go-unpunished arrogance of a grotesque snob who in a variety of ways made him and other people feel small. And since we’re just like him, we’re angry too, reading his chronicle of Sontag‘s inhumanity. By the time Myers writes that “My real mistake was not radioing her co-ordinates to the Serb artillery, reporting that they marked the location of Bosnian heavy armour. My own life would have been a cheap price to pay.” we’re smiling along with his so-there.

Or are we? UD suspects only Myers’s pubmates are nodding at this point. He has set his prose at far too high a flame, given what we can discern of Sontag’s offense. He thinks humor will damp the anger a bit and get us on his side, but the intensity of his rage makes the humor vulgar and unfunny.

When Myers upbraids himself for his “abject failure” to respond to Susan Sontag at the time, we are supposed to take this as a winning admission of all-too-human weakness; but since the macho content and rhetoric of most of the essay has convinced us that he is a strong man, capable of righteous indignation on behalf of others and himself, this abjection rings false. Myers comes across as willfully ignorant, vindictive, and a bully.




Abjection is the whole story with Terry Castle’s essay, “Desperately Seeking Susan.” From its tired title to its faint-hearted concluding paragraph, the essay is an exercise in the belittling of the self and the worshipful inflation of others (“Lou Reed…O great rock god of my twenties.”). Castle consistently describes herself - a high-profile professor at Stanford University - as an “obsequious…slave-girl,” a “flustered,” “panting” idolator of Sontag. She says she has devoted her life to pathetic efforts to imitate and impress “O great Susan! Most august Goddess of Female Intellect!” Castle is amazed when mortals respond to Sontag as if she is one of them: “Once [Sontag] took me to the Strand bookstore,” a place in Sontag’s New York neighborhood. “[T]he clerk said, ‘Hi, Susan’ in enviably blasé tones.”

UD is aware that Castle, like Myers, is attempting to employ comic overstatement here. But where does truth stop and comedy begin? We cannot know, from her style, the extent of exaggeration in Castle’s relentless description of her relationship with Sontag as “like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge - or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer… ready to drop anything at a phone call … [I was] far too cowed.” When, at public events, Sontag showed special attention to her, Castle was “like a plump teenage boy getting a hard-on in front of everybody.” In her “pathetic isolation” at hip New York gatherings with Sontag and her avant-garde friends, Castle was “so cognitively unassimilable, I wasn’t even registered enough to be ignored…. I might as well not have been born.”

The attempted humor here - like Myers, it’s both all over the place and over the top - falls flat. The hebephrenia seems a bright veil tossed over an expanse of darkness. It plays like an effort to lighten the rage the writer feels, as if to say: “Sure, I’m pissed. But I can laugh at this!”

Castle’s essay ultimately tells us that Sontag was a “troubled” woman, “a great comic character: Dickens or Flaubert or James would have had a field day with her. The carefully cultivated moral seriousness… co-existed with a fantastical, Mrs Jellyby-like absurdity” --an absurdity which, in a series of vignettes, Castle describes as cartoon-like in its lunacy.

As UD suggests above, Sontag hated academia and professors. Castle quotes her: “Terry, don’t you loathe academics as much as I do?” It is therefore another instance of Sontag’s casual cruelty that at an arty New York event, she introduces Castle by saying “Terry is an English professor.” (Castle calls Sontag’s words “soul-destroying.”) Again, Castle intends for us to be appalled at Sontag’s dismissal of the academy (after all, most of the people reading Castle’s piece are professors); but the way Castle has chosen to write about her dead friend provides some grounds for Sontag’s intense dislike. The false self-abasement which, by contrast, makes Sontag more of an ogre than she was; the tendency not merely to admire certain writers but to worship them as gods; a goofy self-mocking surface which hopes to hide its vindictive interior … Sontag rightly disliked these stratagems, and she rightly identified them with academia.