My Letter to Susan Sontag
mons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63818412
This is the draft of a letter to Susan Sontag that I just found in my notebook from July 1988. I remember well attending the Summer workshops of the Writers Institute at Skidmore College in 1988, I believe being in Steve Millhauser’s class. Susan Sontag was one of the invited writers on the faculty. After her lecture some people of my class and I surrounded her with questions, so I had a chance to talk with her directly. She had a striking beautiful face, and intense dark eyes. I had read her treatise on Photography, and was excited to meet her in person.
Dear Susan:
The question about your age group was a slip produced by the attempt to avoid a straight question about your age, which suddenly struck me as impolite, but which was spurred by the realization in my mind that we couldn’t be separated by much in age; hence the concept of a group we are both members of [implying that the correct answer would have been “yours.”] At the same time it occurred to me that a sharp and persistent critic of all conventions cannot take offense at the violation of a minor one.
Now that I imagine myself back into somebody about to meet Susan Sontag, I find it utterly implausible that I should have brought up your age, of all things. I suppose I was similarly unprepared to dress up for the occasion, as the narrator is in your “description of a description.”
Leaving age for good (incidentally I wished I could in earnest), I hope, I’m sending you an assortment of things I worked on in the fields of science, fiction, mail art, and photography. If I’m right, you have a mind to appreciate the work. I’d like to draw your attention to the prose piece on the cover of PROP and to the Monkweed on page ??.
As I told you, I greatly enjoyed the two pieces of fiction you read [at Skidmore]. I had a special affinity for the narrative extrapolation in “description (of a description),” a technique I have tried out before. Of course, with less success.
[draft breaks off here. I’m almost sure I never sent it. But pasted in my notebook is her address on a slip of paper, in her handwriting]
Leave a Reply