Sunday, June 20, 2004

Busted!

Has Joshua been tattling on Susie? And to Sully no less?It sure looks like it:
"QUOTE OF THE DAY: '... Sontag's elitism has an exclusionary malevolence that goes well beyond the notion of a priestly caste of artists and thinkers. As early as 1964, she attributed the cinema's relative security from hordes of interpreters in part to 'the happy accident that films for such a long time were just movies; in other words, that they were understood to be part of mass, as opposed to high, culture, and were left alone by most people with minds.' That use of 'people with minds' as a synonym for literary intellectuals has always ruffled me, since the unavoidable corollary is that people who aren't literary intellectuals don't have minds. And that's offensive... Sontag is noticeably reticent on the subject of her own family, and the few spots where she does refer to it give off a whiff of contempt... but then, Sontag has always had a low opinion of her fellow citizens, predicated on the embarrassing robustness of American bad taste. For her, vulgarity is a mortal sin rather than a venial one. 'Today's America,' she scowled in 1966, 'with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House,' (as a Southerner, I resent that), 'is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing.' Then she got really high-handed: 'After America was won, it was filled up by new generations of the poor and built up according to the tawdry fantasy of the good life that culturally deprived, uprooted people might have had at the beginning of the industrial era. And the country looks it.' That's some fairly supercilious class bias to be issuing from the granddaughter of immigrant Jews, not to mention from a radical (at that point) leftist.' - Craig Seligman, from his new book, 'Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me,' thanks to a diligent reader.
- 4:17:54 PM"

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