You can find Castle's piece here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/cast01_.html
Sample quotes:
‘Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right – they are the greatest of musical masterpieces’
'... I almost came a cropper when I confessed I had never listened to Janácek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek. She gave me a surprised look, then explained, somewhat loftily, that I owed it to myself, as a 'cultivated person', to become acquainted with it. ('I adore Janácek’s sound world.') A recording of the opera appeared soon after in the mail – so I knew I’d been forgiven – but after listening to it once I couldn’t really get anywhere with it. (It tends to go on a bit – in the same somewhat exhausting Eastern European way I now associate with Sontag herself.)'
Simon
> > From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> To: lbo-talk <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 12:58:32 -0500
> Subject: [lbo-talk] dishing Sontag
>
> New York Post [Page Six] - March 14, 2005
>
> MEOW, MEOW
>
> CERTAIN members of the cognoscenti are buzzing about
> Terry Castle's
> recent essay in the London Review of Books
> ridiculing her former
> friend, the late Susan Sontag. Castle cattily
> portrays her 10-year
> friendship with the skunk- maned intellectual as a
> tedious affair in
> which she was reduced to being a "sidekick" to the
> pompous,
> self-important scribe who treated her like a
> chauffeur and personal
> assistant. Castle relays some embarassing [sic - DH]
> anecdotes of
> Sontag's strange behavior, like when Sontag
> described evading sniper
> fire in Yugoslavia, then began "dashing in a
> feverish crouch from one
> boutique doorway to the next . . . bobbed zanily in
> and out, ducking
> her head, pointing at imaginary gunmen on rooftops
> and gesticulating
> wildly" and frightening passers-by. The two later
> had a falling out
> when Castle made a joke about how bad Virginia
> Woolf's "Orlando" was,
> sending Sontag into a rage. Still, in the end,
> Castle tries to take
> the high road. "Susan Sontag was a troubled and
> brilliant American .
> . . Judge her by her best work, not by her worst."
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