Tag Archives: “Terry Castle”

Kudos for Terry Castle’s The Professor — “the prime-cut book of the year”

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Castle: Love me tender

Speaking of The Chronicle of Higher Education … In the onslaught of the holiday season, we rather lost track of Terry Castle‘s honors.  Her The Professor and Other Writings was named one of the top ten books of the year by New York Magazine, which praised her “big human stew of tones: goofy, analytical, slangy, raw, confessional.” It was also among BookForum’s “favorite books of 2010” by which noted that Terry’s “radical candor makes it hard to enlist her under any ideological or political banner, and this recalcitrance alone gives her book an invaluable civic function.”  Amazon also named it #2 among its top ten books in gay and lesbian studies.

But Carlin Romano in the Dec. 12 Chronicle of Higher Education provided the pièce de résistance:

Looking back at the year in criticism between hard covers, one finds lines lingering in the mind, and not a few belong to Terry Castle. Her images of Susan Sontag as “sibylline and hokey and often a great bore,” a “bedazzling, now-dead, she-eminence.” Her self-portrait as a “japing, naysaying, emotionally stunted creature,” the “Spoiled Avocado Professor of English at Silicon Valley University.” …

Castle’s own self-grasped pathology (“Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer”) makes the essay a masterpiece on the anxiety of influence in intellectual life. Yet deftly woven in, with all her other jewels of insight, is the superb, ruthless, spot-on assessment of Sontag as a “great comic character,” one with whom Dickens, Flaubert, or James “would have had a field day.” For Castle, “the carefully cultivated moral seriousness—strenuousness might be a better word—coexisted with a fantastical, Mrs. Jellyby absurdity. Sontag’s complicated and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. The high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of gossip, drollery, and seductive acting out.”

Romano concludes: “If this is the higher potty mouth, bring it on. Castle remarks at one point that ‘the tenderness between lesbians and straight men is the real Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.’ OK, love me tender. For any gourmet of cultural criticism with an unabashed taste for truth, this is the prime-cut book of the year.”

Still seeking Susan Sontag …

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sontag3Czesław Miłosz told me in 2000:  “It seems to me every poet after death goes through a purgatory, so to say.  …  So he must go through that revision after death…”

He was referring to T.S. Eliot — but he might as well also have been referring to prose writers, too, such as essayist and novelist Susan Sontag. We recently participated in the cyberspace roasting with Terry Castle here — but reading an interview with Sontag by my friend James Marcus (of House of Mirth blog fame) reminded me of how inspiring and impressive she was in the first place — a figure so relentless and towering that you craved her approval and patronage.  You can read the Marcus interview here.   An excerpt that reminds me why I’ve spent a lifetime with my nose in a book:

“Reading should be an education of the heart,” she says, correcting and amplifying her initial statement. “Of course a novel can still have plenty of ideas. We need to discard that romantic cliché about the head versus the heart, which is an absurdity. In real life, intellect and passion are never separated that way, so why shouldn’t you be moved by a book? Why shouldn’t you cry, and be haunted by the characters? Literature is what keeps us from shriveling into something completely superficial. And it takes us out of ourselves, too.”

“Perhaps some people don’t want to be taken out of themselves,” I suggest.

“Well, reading must seem to some people like an escape,” she allows. “But I really do think it’s necessary if you want to have a full life. It keeps you–well, I don’t want to say honest, but something that’s almost the equivalent. It reminds you of standards: standards of elegance, of feeling, of seriousness, of sarcasm, or whatever. It reminds you that there is more than you, better than you.”

“Spoiled Avocado Professor” and the “six-foot tall first-generation Turkish woman”

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More reviews of Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them — in New York magazine here, and The New York Times here.

UPDATE:  Reviews of The Professor pouring from the MSM in a Vesuvial flow:

  • At the New Republic here.
  • At Canada’s National Post here.
  • And the Huffington Post picked up the San Francisco Chronicle review here.
  • And there’s a podcast from a Santa Cruz radio interview here.

(New Republic review off the “wow” meter: “The Professor goes places no book ever written about professors has ever gone. And it understands more about the academic vocation, and the art of self-examination, than the shelf of grave and socially responsible studies of and by professors that have appeared in recent years. It is a superb weapon for tearing up that soul-destroying cardboard figure of fun its title names.”)

Meanwhile, Elif Batuman is guest-posting at the New Yorker here.

UPDATE:

And … and … and … Batuman’s book is reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle here:  ” … Batuman’s collection of ‘many unclear purposes’ is comic and baggy and wayward…”

ANOTHER UPDATE:

And here in the Christian Science Monitor:  “Part sleuth, part pundit, Batuman both plays the game of literary exegesis and skewers it”:

When a colleague maintains that Babel’s “Red Cavalry” cycle would never be totally accessible to her because of its “specifically Jewish alienation,” Batuman responds, “Right…. As a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.” It goes right over his head.

Reading at Kepler’s: Forever seeking Susan Sontag

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SMallPosterThere’s no escaping Susan Sontag.

Terry Castle, author of The Professor and Other Writings (she was also introduced as a “miniature dachshund enthusiast”), gave a reading of her new book at Kepler’s on Tuesday night.  Or rather, she gave a reading of her book’s deathless essay, “Desperately Seeking Susan.” (The London Review of Books carries the 2005 Sontag anti-memoir here.  By the by, Slate has an excellent Q&A interview with Terry online here.)

We are all desperately seeking Susan.  “All of the reviews of this book keep going back to it,” Terry admitted.  The vivacious former “towel girl” for Susan may never live it down:  She had been invited to Sontag’s memorial service, “and disinvited the day after this piece came out.” She received a nasty email from Sontag’s son, David Rieff.

Why did she write it?  “The obituaries had not, and did not, capture whole facets of her personality,”  Terry said diplomatically.  The reading, attended by about 50, was punctuated by knowing laughs from the audience.  Even the question-and-answer period, following the reading, was stuck on Sontag.

Perhaps it was the locale – Kepler’s — that inspired this week’s reminiscences.  Castle said she first encountered Sontag in 1995 at this very bookshop.  Sontag’s eye fell on book by Temple Grandin,  a high-functioning autistic author who advocated more humane treatment for animals, and whose book, Thinking in Pictures, was all the rage at the time.  “Somebody’s got to take that woman on,”  Terry recalled Susan saying, aggressively.  It was as if Sontag had threatened to take on Mother Teresa, Terry added (“I myself am not a vegetarian…” said Sontag, while going on to tout vegetarian ethics.)

We could never quite be Sontag, though a generation of women mesmerized by her tried and tried and tried.  And perhaps the relief Castle’s short anti-memoir provokes is the realization that, well, Sontag couldn’t quite be Sontag, either.  But the knowing laughter had a bit of unpleasant smugness below the surface.  Was it Sontag’s fault we felt short?   After all, she didn’t ask for the idolatry  … did she?

Castle’s essay inspired more than ire – it inspired international catharsis.  Castle received grateful comminiqués from “people all over the world who had been “insulted, dissed” and had been on the receiving end of “unbelievable” rudeness.

“Desperately Seeking Susan” mentions a beautiful, fawn-like assistant named Oliver – but he was only one in a series.  Another one sent Terry a “stream of consciousness email” that almost jammed Castle’s electronic inbox because of its size.  She learned that Sontag’s former assistants even “had a support group to deal with their emotions.”

One told Terry he had watched Sontag open the envelope with her million-dollar advance for The Volcano Lover.  “It was the first time she had real money,” said Castle. “She collapsed on the floor saying, ‘I don’t deserve this, I don’t deserve this…’”

After “sobbing violently for a minute or so,” the assistant “heard and saw her say, ‘Yes, I do,’ ‘Yes, I do,’ ‘Yes, I do,’ picking herself up off the floor.”

As the Kepler’s kaffeeklatsch broke up, I cornered poet Ken Fields (he, too, had been laughing).  Did he think the merriment had, perhaps, a bit of a bitter  edge?

Instead of answering directly, Ken launched into a story about a young Stanford-based journalist who had been assigned to interview Sontag.  At one point in the interview, she asked him to turn off the tape recorder.  Off the record, she suggested he ask her if she thought The Volcano Lover, the novel that had become her obsession, was a feminist novel.

The journalist played along and asked the question.  And got a Sontag outburst as a reward. “That is the stupidest question ever heard!  Of course not!” she exploded, and launched into a tirade.

The interview nevertheless continued.  Again she asked him to stop the recorder.  She suggested he ask a second question.  It was another set-up, with a Sontagian outburst.  It happened a third time to the (by then) hapless, hopelessly browbeaten interviewer.

Ken Fields finished by recounting when Edmund White was a visiting lecturer at Stanford.  During refreshments after a colloquium, Sontag’s name came up in a discussion among White, Fields, and Castle.  Castle described herself as a former friend of Susan.

The visiting author corrected her at once:  “We are all former friends of Susan Sontag.”  Perhaps another support group is needed?

Terry will give another reading tonight, at 7:30 p.m., at Books Inc. in the Castro, and another, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 9, at City Lights. Just don’t ask about Susan.