Conversations With Susan Sontag


And now that I feel all aware that I name-checked Super-Intellectual Woman, I'll explain a bit that, yes, she's way fucking smarter than me, but she doesn't light my fire because of that (otherwise, there'd be mucho people I refer to in a pinch when, right now, I think, intellectually, it's just the one).

She's great, in part, because, in conversation, she is maddeningly precise about all the things that one should aspire to be precise about. Like modernism. And culture and politics. And what it is to be a writer vs. an intellectual. She shows that most supposed intellectual writers (like that guy who wrote about intellectuals) are actually hand-waving cream puffs.

She is apparently contradictory and yet entirely consistent. She is relativistically concrete. Even if you don't agree with her, you've got to admire her rigor.