Death Kit :: Susan Sontag

And right you are Ginevra- Listen up all of you reading this blog... this blog... this blog ((((echo))))
Look forward to some hot hot writing from the multi-talented queen of art and science, Ginevra.
And from me- thoughts, like trash blowing in the wind, of a random nature.

I am writing at this moment to disprove my perception. The whole reverberation of Susan Sontag's book "Death Kit". Reality is below ground in this book. I have an old copy with an awesome font that inspiresme to create my own font already. I haven't read any of Sontag's books about images, like "On Photography" but I have been wanting to for a while and this book might just be the final push that I needed.

The story is of a man who has lived a life of indecision- he got a degree in medicine, and was always interested in literature. He is a rising star (if you can call a high-end salesman a star) in his company which sells microscopes ((image cognition abounds throughout, down to the cheesy symbolism of the blind girlfriend, a symbolism which I believe Sontag is skewering- or is she a player in the blind symbolism game? will I ever know?)).

His llife is ordinary>> despite his success in business he is depressed, and lonely too. Tries to kill himself. It seems like a typical plodding modern novel about a detached modern man.

Until he gets on the train that stops in a tunnel, the lights go out, he goes out and kills a workman who is tearing down a wall- or so he thinks. He's not sure. He confesses to a (blind) woman who he was secretly lusting after before the tunnel. To his surprise she says that he was sitting across from her and couldn't have possibly done it, plus to his surprise she wants him so bad that she drags him into the bathroom caveman style and they do have sex.

OK, so it still has that moderny-seeming trend- like hitchcock- not to use the pigeonhole technique. but there's this nice surrealism going on that feels Derenesque. The blind symbolism is kind of nice because it speaks to how people who don't use their eyes can't judge and organize objects based on visuals (not good or bad).

Many other things happen between reality and under reality, including the story of Wolf Boy and droll office pitter patter (en vogue in commercials nowadays), nice walks in the sunset and blood & guts. Feels like a POSTmodern rennovation of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" replete with Freudian fenestration- on how we perceive life, the inner and outer realities coinciding- and how visuals (real and imagined) impact our perception. Perception sometimes meaning how you organize things like past events, self, love, and it's all mumbled up.

And does Sontag leave it jumbled/ organized because that's real to her- or am I just too lazy to really go in and figure it out. I'll never really know because it just so happens that I am too lazy to find out. And reading is my hobby, not my serious doctorate. Why don't I just read romance novels and whatnot then, since I'm not willing to truly find out what I'm reading. I think romance novels are harder to decipher than art intellectual novels. CIA code-crackers get to work on that every day on the romance genre as do stereotypical women who enjoy that.

And by the way- Sontag has some beautiful ways of writing and these ways make her writing a must-reads.