Sent to you by hao via Google Reader:
The New York Review of Books——a challenge but with a lot of fun to read and study.
文字毫无水分，始终最爱。
"Notes on Susan", by Eliot Weinberger
- 很妙的一个形容！
The front-page news in 1982 when, after years of supporting various Marxist revolutions, she declared that communism was "fascism with a human face".
- 对现代文艺元素——艺术创作，音乐，本身即为文学评论，进而文学的观察。最后一句话，让我想起了今年德国文献展的一个主题"Life!"。
Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended.... Painters no longer feel themselves confined to canvas and paint, but employ hair, photographs, wax, sand, bicycle tires, their own toothbrushes and socks. Musicians have reached beyond the sounds of the traditional instruments to use tampered instruments and (usually on tape) synthetic sounds and industrial noises.
The new sensibility is rooted in "new sensations such as speed," the new crowds of people (emerging markets? emmigrants?), and the proliferation of material things. It blurs the distinction between high and low art, refuses to be sentimental, views the artwork as an object and not an "individual personal expression," and does not believe it should be a vehicle for meaning or moral judgment. "The new sensibility understands art as the extension of life."
- "Against interpretation"即《反对阐释》，当初，中文版有点看不懂，而且看得很慢。阅读加理解20页，需要整整两个小时，真是龟慢，还是看英文版好！
- 这句评论，写得太棒了！
What was missing in the book (Against interpretation) was any sense that Sontag was raising the revolutionary banner in a very tiny kingdom.
- 继续妙，最后一句，写得太好玩了，哈哈。
When, in a famous sentence—the entire last section of her title essay—she declared, "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art," the first-person plural reflected how isolated that kingdom was. It was already forty years after the first Surrealist manifesto or, closer to home, seven or eight years after "Howl" or On the Road. "We" could have taken the subway downtown.
- 喜欢这个词儿，"ruminative"，作者用来形容sontag的评论。ruminative是ruminate的形容词变体，ruminate始源于16世纪中期的拉丁语"ruminari"，意思为"chew over"，即中文"反复咀嚼"，接着"meditate"也发展使用起来。拉丁语中还有一个词叫"rumen"，意思为"throat"-咽喉，为17世纪中期出现的"ruminant"的起源。总结以上《Oxford: dictionary of word histories》的发现，"ruminate"也有可能是"rumen"与"meditate"的结合，不光"默想"，还动用头脑咀嚼理解，已达到"深刻""有意义"的贡献。
The essays are ruminative, utterly humorless—her favorite word was "serious"......
- "The white race is the cancer of human history...." by susan sontag
She came to regret that last phrase, and wrote a whole book against the use of illness as metaphor, and yet this sentiment never led to any public curiosity about those who are not cancerously white.
- She may well have been the last unashamed Eurocentrist.
- Her next book, Illness as Metaphor (1978), probably more than anything else she wrote or said, made a gen-uine difference in the world. Its thesis, bolstered by Sontag's usual extraordinary range of historical facts and citations, was simple: cancer is not a metaphor for anything. Cancer is not the result of repressed emotions or of personality disorders, as was widely believed at the time. Cancer should not be a dirty secret. Cancer is "just a disease—a very serious one, but just a disease. Not a curse, not a punishment, not an embarrassment."
- 关于"有趣"：
"An Argument About Beauty," which is an argument against the word "interesting" as a replacement for "beautiful": One calls something interesting precisely so as not to have to commit to a judgment of beauty (or of goodness). The interesting is now mainly a consumerist concept, bent on enlarging its domain: the more things become interesting, the more the marketplace grows.
Sontag had a tendency to blame everything on consumerism, though surely one could also say: "the more things become beautiful, the more the marketplace grows." And she herself was frequently not immune to the use of "interesting" as a catch-all, as in (on Barthes) "everything he wrote was interesting."
- 关于翻译：
Even translation gets its lumps, for it "entails a built-in distortion of what the novel is at the deepest level," which is "the perpetuation of the project of literature itself." (Why translation distorts the perpetuation of literature—one would think the opposite is true—she doesn't say.)
- 假命题："time is not essential for poetry."
......along the way, she makes some false pronouncements on poetry: time is not "essential" for poetry (rather like saying time is not essential for music). "Poetry is situated in the present." The metaphor is "necessary" (her italics) for poetry, and "a great poet is one who refines and elaborates the great historical store of metaphors." Obviously a great poet is more than a metaphor machine, and some employ no metaphors at all.
- 关于《巴登夏日》（苌苌曾写过一篇书评）：
.....Summer in Baden-Baden, "a crash course on all the great themes of Russian literature,"....
Sontag—as with so many books—was responsible for bringing the novel back into print, which itself belies the claim in her opening sentence that it "seems unlikely that there are still masterpieces" to be discovered from the second half of the twentieth century, written in major languages.
- 作者给sontag做盖棺论：
As a critic, she was a Roland Barthes who dreamed of being a Walter Benjamin, and moreover, a Walter Benjamin who dreamed of being a Russian novelist. But she was born too late, and in the wrong place.
- 最深的，没有安全感，像个时刻需要爱抚的孩子。想起这里的另一个老许。
A sign of boundless energy—the jacket of At the Same Time reproduces a scrap from her notebooks, which reads: "Do something. Do something. Do something."—but, one also suspects, a sign of a certain insecurity, as though she still needed to prove that she had arrived and that she was the best informed in the room. It was evident in her predilection for pronouncements, in her belief—she is again describing Canetti—that "to think is to insist." In Sontag there is always the insistence that she is, like Serge, "right," even when that rightness contradicts—as it did in so many political matters over the years—the right things she had said before.
- 大智若愚——天才的人性。
In 1967, she had written in her journal: My image of myself since age 3 or 4—the genius-schmuck.... Sartre (cf. "Les Mots") the only other person I know of who had this "certainty" of genius.
(By "schmuck" she meant her personality flaws, and her inability, at the time, to form long-lasting relationships.) It is a Hollywood cliché that a beautiful actress needs an element of ugliness to become a great star, and one might say that a genius needs an element of stupidity, or something wrong, to become a great imaginative writer. Sartre certainly had his. But Sontag seems to have had nothing stupid about her at all. Arguably the most important American literary figure or force of the last forty years, she may ultimately belong more to literary history than to literature.
后记：重新再扫一遍，发现早上记得太快，没来得及考察整体。其实，作者通篇都试图列举种种事例揶揄sontag，不过，到了最后，公正良心大发，还是不能昧着良心说话啊。所以不得不，十分不情愿的，还加了个"arguably"地承认了sontag在文学史上的地位。长叹气一声，这些高傲的自以为是的文学评论家啊。唬弄读者啊？！可谁叫他们写得有自我独到见解呢？好看啊……
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