Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag

Set in the Great Depression, Sibyl Kempson’s "Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag" is an irrational musical contemplation of the ethical pitfalls of poetic journalism. When difficult subjects - like abject poverty - are articulated to the wider public through high art, aesthetics and ethics collide in a way that can erase our ethical response. The reports are moving, but too beautiful to move us to action. This piece is an irrational response to that collision and its limits, with help from the journals of Symbolist painter Odilon Redon, The NEW American Machinists Handbook, and ancient Assyrian mythology, and a couple of Broadway musicals.