Sontag Showed Lighter Side During Illness

[Khephra]

NEW YORK -- As she lay ill last summer following a bone marrow transplant, Susan Sontag would listen to music, keep up on current events and indulge a passion seemingly too light for one of the world's leading intellectuals: Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, '40s and '50s.

"It was a whole era she hadn't watched; she was more interested in foreign films," said her close friend Sharon DeLano, a writer and editor who visited often with Sontag over the last months of her life. "That's how she was to the end, always wanting to learn new things."

snip.............

"One of the things so sad about her death is she represents something that I'm afraid that's passing," said fellow author Francine Prose. "I don't think that many people these days say, `Oh, I want to be an intellectual when I grow up.'"

Another Sontag admirer, author Joyce Carol Oates, noted Tuesday that Sontag "could become quite powerful as an adversary. She did not believe in compromise."

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/news/wire/sns-ap-sontag-appreciation,0,6246051.story?coll=sns-ap-entertainment-headlines

[KlatooBNikto]

1. What a truthful and courageous intellectual she was! She will be missed.

[neweurope]

2. I was so looking for news about her - thanks!

We heard on German radio to-day she died yesterday and I wanted to know more. For us here in Europe she was a very, very important person and we are very sad she died.

RIP Susan

:cry:

[saltpoint]

3. Good to have more on Susan Sontag. Thanks.

There sure is a huge chasm between people like Susan Sontag and people like Laura Bush.