modelling

 Susan Sontag:

I think the most natural things is to assimilate something very strongly when you’re young because it is so much part of you -- one is so much more receptive at that point because you don’t know anything, and you’re so passionate to have a model. But I don’t think it’s any kind of Freudian thing the way Harold Bloom describes it, as if there’s some sort of a murderous impulse to destroy your influences. I think you can just use influences up that are no longer useful to you, and that there’s a natural impulse to contradict your influences and to try the alternatives. But if the kind of prose now that makes me salivate is by Elizabeth Hardwick and WIlliam Gass, it’s precisely because twenty years ago I wouldn’t have responded in that way. Twenty years ago I was responding to Kafka like that, but I think that I’ve learned everything I can learn from Kafka. It’s exciting to me to subscribe to something that’s foreign to my earlier taste -- not in an unfriendly spirit with respect to the earlier work -- but just because I need new blood and new nourishment and new inspiration. And because I like what I’m not, I like to try to learn what isn’t me or what I don’t know. I’m curious.

Modelling:

(1) 16 Beaver link
(2) GSA MFA link
(3) Platyplus link