Notes on Sontag + Barf Manifesto

Notes on Sontag
By Phillip Lopate. Princeton, $19.95.

Barf Manifesto
By Dodie Bellamy. Ugly Duckling Presse, $7 paperback.

Susan Sontag tends to inspire either hatchet jobs or hagiography, so it’s a rare pleasure to read Phillip Lopate’s snappy and smart new meditation on the iconic intellectual, which strips away her mythological patina with acidic eloquence. Early on, he shoos away anyone in search of a takedown, but that doesn’t mean verbal daggers won’t fly. As he reflects on Sontag’s career and public persona, he enumerates her follies with “oh, please” prickliness, scrutinizing her political posturing (“Viva Fidel!”) and eat-your-spinach approach to literature and film (the more formally difficult, the better). Lopate saves his most condemning criticism for her novels, which she—foolishly, he points out—regarded as her most important work.

Even so, Notes on Sontag achieves a remarkable evenhandedness, caressing even as it kicks. The author gives ample credit where it’s due, particularly when he champions Sontag’s unparalleled aphoristic style and her essays, especially those collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. Throughout, Lopate, a beautiful and sometimes very funny writer, exudes a relaxed self-awareness about his own strengths and weaknesses, admitting, for instance, that he once sought Sontag’s approval (she was an acquaintance). In the end, his toughness and self-knowledge actually enhance his praise. He takes Sontag seriously, and even if he finds her ridiculous at times, his persuasive prose makes it clear that he misses her: “Sontag’s best ruminations have a power and cohesion that merit countless revisitation, both to savor their insights and wonder how she did it.”

Novelist Dodie Bellamy’s pamphlet Barf Manifesto—about, among other things, the author Eileen Myles—shares significant thematic DNA with Notes on Sontag. Both texts are interested in the art of writing about writers and in the essay as a literary form. But even as these two books make excellent companions, they bear out significant differences, too. Though a significant force, Myles is less famous than Sontag was; she is also more humorous, more comfortable as a fiction writer, and (hooray) alive and well. Unlike Lopate, Bellamy counts her subject as a close friend, though the deeply honest and ocassionally cranky Barf Manifesto gives us a taste of how complex their relationship has been.

The biggest difference between the books lies in their tone and structure: Where Lopate polishes his meditations into self-contained reflections, Bellamy shifts, sometimes midsentence, among her themes. She opens with a paean to Myles’s poem “Everyday Barf,” gives an evocative portrait of the artist attacking a birthday piñata with a hammer, and then begins to zigzag between motifs—mothers, death, fiction, anger, creative communities. Her verbal upchuck could have become a mess, but the shifts are so exquisitely structured that they rarely fail to marvel. When one steps back from Bellamy’s narrative, her discrete thoughts somehow contrast and interact like the dots on a Seurat canvas, forming a vivid portrait of art and friendship. You’ll wonder how she did it. Barf has never looked so good.—Michael Miller

Bellamy participates in the Jack Spicer tribute Fri 15, and Lopate reads Wed 20

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