shrine

Omg — skip the first half of the clip to see Susan Sontag speak (and ignore Jack Kroll and Agnes Varda). In an average Hollywood movie, she declares, you don't see real people (whether mainstream people or marginal people), you see ideas that people have about what people are supposed to be or the way people are supposed to be represented— (here, to my annoyance, Varda interrupts.)

Also, allow me to gush about the incredible sangfroid she possesses while coolly lighting a cigarette at 1:57 and then leaning back resplendently on the armchair at 2:02. In a cloud of tranquility so gauzy and diaphanous, she turns her head to face Varda at 3:00 with a gaze that is at once so intense and disinterested that it kills me. If, hypothetically, I were Agnes Varda, I would just die. In a bowl-cut and a floral minidress, no less.

Additionally, Terry Castle wrote about Susan in the London Review of Books. She regards Robert Walser as required reading (we could have been friends!), is friends with Marina Abramovic (but of course), and says things like "Don't you loathe academics as much as I do? How can you abide it?" Reading these, I'm like, Terry, G.T.F.O. (in jest of my own envy, obviously.)

Alas, I am twice removed from the lady I fanboy about all the time: she prefers other women, and she's been dead for nearly six years now.