{"id":378,"date":"2008-12-20T18:15:29","date_gmt":"2008-12-20T18:15:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=378"},"modified":"2020-05-07T13:34:19","modified_gmt":"2020-05-07T17:34:19","slug":"susan-sontags-underworld-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2008\/12\/20\/susan-sontags-underworld-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Sontag&#8217;s underworld journals reborn"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"270\" height=\"168\" align=\"left\" title=\"sontag050117_400.jpg\" id=\"image377\" alt=\"sontag050117_400.jpg\" src=\"http:\/\/thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/sontag050117_400.jpg\" \/>&#8220;I don&#8217;t intend to let my intellect dominate me,&#8221; she commented. &#8220;I intend to do everything &#8230; to have one way of evaluating experience\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u201d does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u201d I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it <em>is<\/em> everywhere!&#8221; In an especially revealing passage, she then went on to comment, &#8220;I am alive &#8230; I am beautiful &#8230; what else is there?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The publication this month of the first volume of Susan Sontag&#8217;s <em>Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963<\/em> (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a significant event in the literary world. The book gives us more fully than ever the mind and sensibility of one of the 20th century&#8217;s finest writers at work during her formative years. It provides compelling insights into the worlds (and underworlds) that she successively inhabited&#8230;read the complete review in <em>The Chronicle Review<\/em><strong> <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/temp\/reprint.php?id=v1xvs1p6k37s7jtw4qpfj7pqykln5z50\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">&#8216;I am alive&#8230; I am beautiful.. what else is there?&#8217; <\/a><\/strong>photo of Sontag by Jill Krementz<strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/chronicle.com\/temp\/reprint.php?id=v1xvs1p6k37s7jtw4qpfj7pqykln5z50\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t intend to let my intellect dominate me,&rdquo; she commented. &ldquo;I intend to do everything &hellip; to have one way of evaluating experience&Acirc;&nbsp;&acirc;&euro;&rdquo; does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful&Acirc;&nbsp;&acirc;&euro;&rdquo; I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it, too, for it is everywhere!&rdquo; In [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}