hopelessly devoted to deconstructing popular culture and conventional wisdom, one blog at a time

Published Thursday, December 30, 2004 by seanlmccarthy | E-mail this post

REMEMBERING SUSAN SONTAG: We should remember Susan Sontag. Which reminds me of the need to remember the cultural critics who came before us (and by us, I mean you and I). Which makes me wonder if Sontag had an opinion on blogs. Which reminds me, too, of an intriguing piece last month in The New Yorker about plagiarism, and how the arts differentiate between writing "inspired by" previous material and writing that "is stolen from" previous material, and how we place an entirely different set of standards on journalists and authors than we do on musicians, playwrights and screenwriters.