A Category of its Own
I’m busy dumping old computer files when I came across the email Jennifer sent me with this story. Powerful prose written in her legendary parenthetical style, but this time I’m moved by the similarity between Jennifer’s mother and what I’ve since read of Susan Sontag. Both were unflinching while healthy and both denied their end until the end.
I know punctuation is usually Jennifer’s province but maybe she’s busy weeping* as she re-reads what she wrote 2 years ago … so: Could you remove the apostrophe from the title, Michael?
What got you going on Susan Sontag?
*I wonder whether she’s weeping about the apparent loss of her writing ability, the almost 20-year-ago death of her mother, or realizing that it might all have been even more complicated than she realized at the time, or realized even as recently as two years ago.
Comment by Peggy — April 30, 2008 @ 6:55 pm
I like this alter (multiple?) ego thing you’ve got going. Why did it take so long to come up with it?
My vote is for all of the above except for number 1.
Comment by michael — April 30, 2008 @ 7:05 pm
Nah, I wasn’t weeping. And oddly, I didn’t actually notice the apostrophe problem. I got distracted by reading half the comments before I realized I HAD read them before; that I had taken a link to the blog entry from 2006.
Well, thanks again for all your comments on that story.
btw, I know my mother thought highly of Susan Sontag, but I don’t know/remember whether my mother knew her.
Wait, Peggy — talk about distracted! — what’s this crap about apparent loss of writing ability? Oh, you mean because I haven’t written anything for the blog! OK, point taken.
Comment by jennifer — April 30, 2008 @ 7:12 pm
Always inspiring to revisit such seminal entries and ponder the rich history of this blog. Still a very impressive piece, LaMadre. Thanks for it!
Comment by el Kib — May 1, 2008 @ 7:50 am
I don’t know that I’ve read Susan but she was Annie Leibovitz’s lover for ten years and Annie included photos of Susan – when she lay dying – in “A Photographer’s Life,” which Ginger gave to us. I’d read about her struggles before her I read review’s of her son’s book.
From salon.com:
Feb. 13, 2008 | David Rieff has written a sobering and often horrifying account of his mother’s final days. In 2004, his mother, Susan Sontag, died from a brutal form of blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome. She fought her illness to the end, implicitly asking those closest to her, including her son, to lie: She didn’t want anyone to tell her she was dying. It’s a striking contrast. The celebrated writer demanded honesty of intellectuals — Rieff says she loved reason and science “with a fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity” — yet maintained a willful delusion about her death.
From Wikipedia:
Sontag drew fire for writing that “Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.” (Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57.)[3] Sontag later offered an ironic apology for the remark, saying it was insensitive to cancer victims.
Not much there to disagree with. How would you’ve liked to have her over for dinner?
Comment by michael — May 1, 2008 @ 8:22 am
Like “Travesties”, sounds both right up my alley and a challenge to which I expect I’d be unequal. Formidable woman. Great harvest of references, Mike, thanks!
Comment by adam — May 1, 2008 @ 9:30 am
Wow! That does sound just like my mom.
Speaking of dinner; here’s one memory. I’m around 12 years old, and we’ve got guests — a college friend of my mother’s and her husband and son, a little younger than me. My mother is taking a course in folklore, and she’s learned about what are now called urban legends. There is one circulating that fascinates her; it ties in with sexism, racism and anti-semitism which is what her PhD thesis is going to be about. This legend, like other urban legends, always circulates as something which just happened to someone about two degrees of separation away — friend of a relative, neighboring town police told a co-worker, that sort of thing. And she has just called all the local hospitals and police departments to prove to herself and the class that it isn’t true. But she tells it the way Orson Wells told the War of the Worlds — prefaced by explaining it isn’t true, but dramatically. (Pre-pubescent boys out there; please stop reading now. Even though I’m not going for full drama.)
It’s about a mother at the mall with her son who needs to go to the bathroom. He’s a little too old for her to take into the ladies room; this is the first time she lets him go in to the men’s room by himself, but he doesn’t come out. A group of _____* come out, laughing and waving something, but he doesn’t come out.
(*Hippies, when I was a kid, but insert your favorite ethnic group here. This was the part that my mother traced through history; this particular folktale has been told for at least 17 (? — maybe I mean 23) centuries, though not set at the mall. Oh, yeah, I should have made that part be an ____* too; pick a relatively new cultural innovation.)
Finally she gets the mall security / manager / whatever because she can’t go into the men’s room, of course. And they find her son has been castrated. (What WERE the hippies going to do with the penis?)
So — back to my mother telling this story dramatically OVER DINNER with GUESTS. The son of my mother’s college friend? He, um, didn’t feel so good. I guess some food we served disagreed with him. Maybe he had allergies. I don’t think he joined us for breakfast either.
Comment by jennifer — May 1, 2008 @ 9:19 pm