Susan Sontag tells Rolling Stone in 1979 that “rock’n’roll was the reason I got divorced”.
There are of course better obituaries around and much more one could say about Sontag, which will somehow include the bit where she says that she always thought a definition of a writer was one who was interested in everything. But perhaps - a very short personal tribute? I wanted to say - that I read "On Photography" one late night in Oxford and was amazed at what Sontag and the essay could do. And that was the start of an intermittent crush on her - a half-hearted love, since it only involved a handful of her essays and hardly any of the novels. And I like the - moral? - seriousness which with she approached books and writing - as well as the clear delight she took in reading and writing.
(It seems - if not wrong, exactly, then inappropriate - to talk about one woman's death when hundreds of thousands died in the tsunami disaster. But there's less than nothing I can say about the tsunami victims that wouldn't be at best trite. I'm damn well not going to say, with the Straits Times, that 2004 was a year of D&D - death and disaster. The hell is wrong with the ST columnists?)