A Big Hearty Welcome To . . . Me!

Joshua Gibson

Well, hello Blue Oregon.  I've been enlisted to bring the hotness to your friendly weblog.  And by hotness, of course, we mean Susan Sontag.  Susie died yesterday, after a brave thirty-year fight against cancer and interpretation.  She was both the "zealot of seriousness" and the patron saint of camp, and as such occupied a unique place in American intellectual life.  Her insistence that the September 11 terrorists were not "cowards" and her suggestion that perhaps American foreign policy might just make a few people cranky caused the estimable Andrew Sullivan to name a sarcastic award in her honor.  But politics aside, Sontag was the blazing star of literary and film criticism.  She made popular culture into a serious subject, introduced dozens of French intellectuals and artists to American shores, radically re-evaluated the art of photography, only to take it all back thirty years later, defended Leni Riefenstahl and Salman Rushdie and wanted to have Andy Warhol's babies.  Not too shabby.  And that's not even to start on her staging of Waiting For Godot in Yugoslavia to protest human rights violations in the early 90s.  Take that, Jane Fonda!

I'll finish this introductory post by saying thanks to Kari for asking me to join and in hopes that you all will enjoy my company.  I'll also end in utter agreement with Susie's attack on interpretive criticism:

"In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art."

Oh, and by the way: I write about pop culture, politics, books, movies and gay sex at Fagistan.

Check me out.  I'm fucking hot.

By Joshua Gibson Dec. 30, 2004