25-10-2009, 11:13 AM
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment...06539.ece#
From The Times obit for Sontag:
In other words, Sontag was a fully paid up member of Intellectuals for American Imperialism, albeit the Radical Chic wing (Intermittent Lesbian Branch). A sort of Gloria Steinem with brains, if you will.
Hitchens interviewed Sontag in the aftermath of her 1982 speech. The article that resulted was entitled “Party Talk: Christopher Hitchens talks to Susan Sontag who has recently taken New York intellectuals by surprise,” which dates the piece to 1982. From the typeface of the article – which I clipped but didn’t date or paginate – it would seem to have come from The Observer. Hitchens included this extract from her speech:
Later in the piece, Hitchens offered us this portrait of life chez Sontag:
I wonder who the writer was; and how much subsidy he trousered from the Republic of Langley in the course of his career?
From The Times obit for Sontag:
Quote:At a 1982 rally for Polish Solidarity in New York, she famously declared communism to be “Fascism with a human face”, which was widely but erroneously read as a conversion to the Right. Her political activism and concern for human rights also took her to Yugoslavia in the early-1990s, where she called for international intervention to put an end to the erupting civil war there.
In other words, Sontag was a fully paid up member of Intellectuals for American Imperialism, albeit the Radical Chic wing (Intermittent Lesbian Branch). A sort of Gloria Steinem with brains, if you will.
Hitchens interviewed Sontag in the aftermath of her 1982 speech. The article that resulted was entitled “Party Talk: Christopher Hitchens talks to Susan Sontag who has recently taken New York intellectuals by surprise,” which dates the piece to 1982. From the typeface of the article – which I clipped but didn’t date or paginate – it would seem to have come from The Observer. Hitchens included this extract from her speech:
Quote:Imagine, if you will, someone who read only Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone who in the same period read only The Nation of the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Could it be that our enemies were right?
Later in the piece, Hitchens offered us this portrait of life chez Sontag:
Quote:I went round to see Susan Sontag in her town house on the Lower East Side. ‘Book-lined’ would about describe the place, which she shares with her son and a Polish writer, member of Solidarity, who was caught abroad by the Warsaw coup and is now living the part of the man who came to dinner.
I wonder who the writer was; and how much subsidy he trousered from the Republic of Langley in the course of his career?