I swore up and down all weekend that I would take the day off to relax today and of course I chose to work for hours instead just as I have pretty much every day as long as I can remember. Now it's nearly twilight and I'm worn out and furious with my lack of resolve, so I'll just say the hell with it and go to Popeye's and then read Reborn, Susan Sontag's youthful diaries, which is exactly what I'm in the mood for:
"1/6/58. H back; games of sex, love, friendship, banter, melancholy resumed. Tells of a whorish, splendid time in Dublin. Christ, she's beautiful! and hard to be with, even on the plane of her own duplicity. Egotistical, edgy, mocking, bored with me, bored with Paris, bored with herself.
We've taken a high-ceilinged, white room in [Grand] Hotel de l'Univers, rue Gregoire de Tours, for the next nine days."
I read this over two evenings last week, and confess that, to my surprise, I was bored most of the time, and began to skim read parts of it. The effect was to wonder if my own journals might be just as boring to anyone not connected with or personally effected by them; and after a look, decided they would be. I did not want to be bored by Sontag's youthful thoughts, but I surely was. I did wonder if the parts cut from it might have been better, meaning more interesting, but we'll never know.
I read both massive volumes of John Fowles' journals and was only bored from time to time, infrequently. So maybe there is a special gift in maintaining an interesting journal, one that I do not have.
Posted by: Account Deleted | February 17, 2009 at 11:11 AM
No one should be allowed to pick up a camera without reading Sontag's writings on photography.
I didn't and don't agree with all that she wrote but it forced me to think through exactly why I disagreed.
Wonderful writer.
Posted by: Steve | February 24, 2009 at 08:29 PM