Kael & Sontag, Sontag & Kael

I noted earlier that I was reading Craig Seligman's excellent book Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, about critics Susan Sontag and Pauline Kael, and that I was thinking of writing my next Strange Horizons column about those two writers and Seligman's book. I followed through on that idea, and completed a draft of the column yesterday, but while I was writing I realized that what I really wanted to do most, after spending a week reading almost nothing but their work, was quote Kael and Sontag a lot, and that the column didn't allow me the space to do so. Therefore, between now and the time the column is posted, I'll be putting various short excerpts from each writer's work up here for you to enjoy or be infuriated by.

Before I do that, here are some links to various online things by and about the two writers that I found while doing research for the column:

• The first chapter of Sontag & Kael
  
  
• Wikipedia articles on Sontag and Kael
  
  
• Essays by Sontag: "Fascinating Fascism" (about Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazis, and sadomasochism), "Notes on 'Camp'", "Against Interpretation". Speech: "Literature is Freedom".
  
  
• Kael's review of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange
  
  
• Sarah Kerr review of Sontag & Kael for BookForum
  
  
• Louis Menand on Kael
  
  
• A Boston Review interview with Sontag
  
  
• Part 1 and Part 2 of a long interview with Kael shortly before her death, later published as Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael.
  
  
• Interview with Sontag by Evans Chan, July 2000
  
  
• NPR interviews with and remembrances of Pauline Kael. One of the pieces has short excerpts from some of her 1950s reviews for KPFA radio -- I had only read them before, and liked them very much, but her voice when she read them oozes so much smugness I found it painful to listen to. The 1995 interview, though, is quite wonderful.
  
  
• Numerous articles by and about Sontag at the NY Times and The New York Review of Books
  
  
• A useful collection of Kael links
  
  
• Scott McLemee on Sontag: On Regarding the Pain of Others and On Where the Stress Falls