Leonid a gut in biography of william

Susan Sontag‘s brand of earnest enthusiasm is completely redundant, right? The idea that you might live with a body of work [ha!] -especially written work [ha! ha!]- for a long time and then find a way to articulate what it means to you and perhaps us/we too is obviously ridiculous. Isn’t it?

I don’t think these things stand or fall around Sontag and I don’t think that it’s any easier to do the work of exception now; to stand back, up or out enough to be willing and able to celebrate, polemicise, passionately engage, act commitedly, work with words, difficult though they ought to be. No easier, no harder, no more necessary. No less.

Sontag is not the tool or resource I reach for either; she was historicised/historical, boringly everywhere and thus to be avoided as well as out of sync with some of what she was celebrating when I first encountered her ‘great’ essays on the ‘great’. I didn’t start with Sontag, but if you did, my only question was where you went afterwards? -because you did go ‘on’, no?

Then there are all the obvious ways in which she does incarnate American culture’s definitive civilisational moment, which I’m not going to call by any name or term, but which she surfed and was flooded with. Commodity/celebrity. You know, if you endlessly tell everyone every day that you are greatly detained with greatness, difficulty and authority, the wise will only listen awry. If you do it in the literally shiny pages of Vanity Fair, the wise become a little deaf. And yet. Flooded and surfing means that it is not contradictory. It is what it is.

So, I tried to critique Sontag’s In America honestly and for what it’s worth this little review called it right. I don’t mean to be dismissive, though, which is partly why I’m re-archiving it here and now. Nor do I mean to be seen to be right! [agents on the Estate Express don’t make ‘rightR

Austrian poet and writer (1875–1926)

"Rilke" redirects here. For other uses, see Rilke (disambiguation).

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), known as Rainer Maria Rilke (German:[ˈʁaɪnɐmaˈʁiːaˈʁɪlkə]), was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence.

Rilke traveled extensively throughout Europe, finally settling in Switzerland, which provided the inspiration for many of his poems. While Rilke is best known for his contributions to German literature, he also wrote in French. Among English-language readers, his best-known works include two poetry collections: Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien) and Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), a semi-autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge), and a collection of ten letters published posthumously Letters to a Young Poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter). In the later 20th century, his work found new audiences in citations by self-help authors and frequent quotations in television shows, books and motion pictures.

American short story writer (1862–1910)

Not to be confused with Oh Henry! or O'Henry Sound Studios.

William Sydney Porter (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910), better known by his pen name O. Henry, was an American writer known primarily for his short stories, though he also wrote poetry and non-fiction. His works include "The Gift of the Magi", "The Duplicity of Hargraves", and "The Ransom of Red Chief", as well as the novel Cabbages and Kings. Porter's stories are known for their naturalist observations, witty narration, and surprise endings.

Born in Greensboro, North Carolina, Porter worked at his uncle's pharmacy after finishing school and became a licensed pharmacist at age 19. In March 1882, he moved to Texas, where he initially lived on a ranch, and later settled in Austin, where he met his first wife, Athol Estes. While working as a drafter for the Texas General Land Office, Porter began developing characters for his short stories. He later worked for the First National Bank of Austin, while also publishing a weekly periodical, The Rolling Stone.

In 1895, he was charged with embezzlement stemming from an audit of the bank. Before the trial, he fled to Honduras, where he began writing Cabbages and Kings (in which he coined the term "banana republic"). Porter surrendered to U.S. authorities when he learned his wife was dying from tuberculosis, and he cared for her until her death in July 1897. He began his five-year prison sentence in March 1898 at the Ohio Penitentiary, where he