sunday morning sontag

A wonderful treat in the Sunday NYT this morning: excerpts from Susan Sontag's journals, with musings on writing, art, sex, queerness, New York, other people, Paris cocktail parties, love, daily schedules...a rich, messy pleasure to read. A foretaste, though you should read it all:

1958:

St. Germain des Prés. Not the same as Greenwich Village, exactly. For one thing, expatriates (Americans, Italians, English, South Americans, Germans) in Paris have a different role + self-feeling than provincials (e.g. kids from Chicago, the West Coast, the South) who come to New York. No rupture of national identification, and mal-identification. Same language. One can always go home. And, anyway, the majority of Villagers are New Yorkers — internal, even municipal, expatriates.

1959:

My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.

It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.

I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer.

And also from 1959, in rueful, funny allcaps (this made me laugh so hard I spilled coffee on my shirt):

I SHOULDN’T TRY TO MAKE LOVE

WHEN I AM TIRED.

I SHOULD ALWAYS KNOW WHEN I AM

TIRED. BUT I DON’T.

True dat.