She Came to Bury Sontag...

Let it never be said that you can't find items of literary interest in Page Six, as yesterday's column informs us, "Certain members of the cognoscenti are buzzing about Terry Castle's recent essay in the London Review of Books ridiculing her former friend, the late Susan Sontag." It's hard to see, though, what in the dreary article could actually set anybody's tongues wagging. For one thing, Sontag died months ago, which means that just about everybody with any substantial connection to the author, or significant appreciation of her work, has already weighed in on the subject and moved on. Frankly, one wonders why LRB is running a Sontag piece this late in the game, especially when the best writer they can find is an English professor with a blatant crush who blows up her "an on-again, off-again, semi-friendship, constricted by role-playing and shot through in the end with mutual irritation" to the point where it reminds one of Teddy Wayne's hilarious McSweeney's jape, "Johnson's Life of Boswell."

I will, say, though, that the "role-playing" line took on intriguing connotations when, later in that paragraph, Castle calls herself "[Sontag's] forty-something slave girl." Maybe that's where the alleged buzz is coming from, if it really exists. It certainly isn't from the accounts of Sontag's pretentious and/or outlandish behavior, or the complaints about her refusal to declare herself a lesbian; as noted above, we've been through all that before.