by Susan Sontag
I come each night around 2.00 or 3.00. The NY Times is my lover.
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Trick: Ask what would this mean if I were doing it. (In other words: would I have to, most likely, have a mean or hostile feeling toward someone to do or say that?)
I take words literally—as if they were written. Not as if they were being said by someone with a motive or a feeling about me behind them. I feel that would be presumptuous—hence my chronic “esprit de l’escalier”
Cause
fear of acknowledging the wrongness of Mother’s demands + behavior (then I would have to be hostile, reject her, + where would I be?)
reinforced by my discovery of books—impersonal communication, words not addressed to me
cultivation of objectivity > critical bias: text is independent of the author
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Duchamp: “Install air meters. If anyone refuses to pay, turn the air off.”
Jasper: “What if the street sign said RUN, or RUN FOR YOUR LIFE.” (A woman walking across the street when the sign flashes WALK.)
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11/25/65
My “ability” to absorb information; my need to orient myself in terms of facts
Where am I? I’m in Tangier, a city of 300,000 in Morocco (King Hassan II) that used to be part of Spanish Morocco + was then a free city until 1956, etc., etc.
False appeasement of anxiety—
Where am I?
Great unmade works of art: Eisenstein’s An American Tragedy
Movies I saw as a child, when they came out:
NY
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
Penny Serenade
Blossoms in the Dust
The White Cliffs of Dover
Fantasia (1940)
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
A Woman’s Face
Strawberry Blonde
[Education] for Death
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Corsican Brothers
Snow White + the 7 Dwarfs
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Rebecca
The Wizard of Oz
Watch on the Rhine
In This Our Life (1942) sisters—[Bette] Davis
Shadow of a Doubt
Sahara
Citizen Kane (1941)
The Great Dictator
My Friend Flicka (1943)
The Thief of Bagdad
Pride of the Yankees
That Hamilton Woman
North Star
Mrs. Miniver
Young Tom Edison (1940)
The Atchison, Topeka, + Santa Fe [SS is referring to the title of a song from The Harvey Girls (1946)]
1943–46 (Tucson + summer of ’45 in LA)
Devotion Ida Lupino
Wuthering Heights
Mildred Pierce
A Stolen Life [—Bette] Davis
Spellbound
The Best Years of Our Lives
Duel in the Sun
Brief Encounter
Notorious
The Rising Sun [aka Sunrise]—Sylvia Sidney
Wilson
To Each His Own
A Song to Remember—Cornel Wilde, Merle Oberon (George Sand played by Merle Oberon)
The Song of Bernadette
Jane Eyre
The Maltese Falcon
Jamaica Inn—Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara
Gaslight
Reap the Wild Wind
Casablanca
30 Seconds Over Tokyo
11/26/65
The Benefactor as a meditation on Descartes. I’d forgotten that! Until Bert Dreyfus [a friend of SS’s] mentioned it today—because I’ve spent the last 7 years of my life with illiterates, and gotten so used to never even mentioning anything that depends on book knowledge.
I find [psycho]analysis humiliating (among other things); I’m embarrassed by my own banality. I feel reduced. That’s one reason I’m preoccupied with its being a “professional” rather than a “personal” relationship.
Knowing has to do with an embodied consciousness (not just a consciousness)—this is the great neglected issue in phenomenology from Descartes + Kant through Husserl + Heidegger—Sartre + [the twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice] Merleau-Ponty have begun to take it up.
What is a body (human?)—it has a front + a back, an up + a down, a right + a left—is functionally asymmetrical in that it moves forward in space.
Relationship of the body to buildings. (What satisfies body consciousness—e.g. no obstruction, debris that impedes forward movement). Cf. last chapter of Geoffrey Scott’s Architecture of Humanism.
11/29/65
Weekend with Jasper [with whom SS had become involved earlier that year]
Nothing that’s said is true (though one can be the truth).
Long silences. Words weigh more, become palpable. I feel my physical presence in a given space when I talk less.
Of everything that’s said, one can ask: why? (including: why sh[oul]d I say that?)
Everything becomes mysterious with Jasper. I think—I don’t just either opine or give (or solicit) information.
Intelligence is not necessarily a good thing, something to value or cultivate. It’s more like a fifth wheel—necessary or desirable when things break down. When things go well, it’s better to be stupid … Stupidity is as much a value as intelligence.
Don’t generalize. Not: I always or usually do this or that, but: I did then. Also: don’t predict your future behavior. You don’t know what you’re going to do or feel in that situation (or: what that situation will be like). And don’t, don’t invite other people to generalize about themselves.
Good question: what is that man doing? (now) Do you (now) want it? etc.
The unpleasantness of the feedback—other people’s reactions to my work, admiring or adverse. I don’t want to react to that. I’m critical enough (+ I know better what’s wrong).
The good thing about saying “it’s beautiful” of a work of art is that when you say that you aren’t saying anything.
I like to feel dumb. That’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.
What does it mean to say: Please go over there. Where?
Because you stink
Because I want to take your picture
Because I want to play ball with you
Because I want that beam to fall on your head
Jasper doesn’t like things to be decided. ([The American critic Max] Kozloff’s article: Duchamp is this, he’s that; Duchamp is this, he’s that). It closes things off.
If you decide they’re not closed, they’re not.
From G[ertrude] Stein—
It is the destiny of a work of art to become a classic. The principal characteristic of a classic is that it’s beautiful.
But it’s also the destiny of a work of art to become dead.
“Art” (+ “work of art”) are categories as arbitrary + artificial as “nature”—a painting + a novel have little in common—no more than a mountain + a running brook.
Bionics (new science that attempts to equate animal behavior + senses w[ith] instrumental or technological counterparts)
Bioluminescence (in plants + animals)
12/3/65
Movies in the last week:
Von Sternberg’s, Thunderbolt[—]George Bancroft
**** [Jacques] Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
[Gregory Ratoff,] Oscar Wilde
[Kenneth G. Crane,] Monster from Green Hell
[Kenneth G. Crane and Ishirô Honda,] Half Human [The Story of the Abominable Snowman]—Toho [Japanese production company]
[Carl] Dreyer, Ordet
Bresson, Procès de Jeanne D’Arc
Riccardo Freda, Theodora, Empress of Slaves (1954) (—[aka Robert] Hampton)
Pre-Raphaelite sets and costumes
[Herschel Gordon Lewis,] Blood Feast
*********David Lean, Great Expectations
********* John Ford, The Informer
Winchester Mystery House (San Jose, Calif[ornia])
Lola Montez’ grave in Brooklyn
Klimt paintings in public buildings + houses in Vienna
Florida Everglades + Sanibel Island
Salt mine near Cracow, Poland [the Wieliczka salt mine near Kraków]—runs 80 miles underground, been in existence 1000 years
New Amsterdam Theatre—42nd Street—Art Nouveau frescoes + relief (1906)
Police Academy—NY—tour every Wed[nesday] aft[ernoon]
Rainbow Room—top of RCA Bldg—30s ocean liner
Tiffany Tennis Court—NYC Art Nouveau
Musée Grevin (Paris)—esp[ecially] Théâtre des Miracles
Watts Tower—LA—house near cathedral in Chartres like Watts Tower [La Maison Picassiette]
…
Art is a “situation”
Art is the biggest antique business going. Art as cultural souvenirs.
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Is beauty important? Maybe, sometimes, it’s boring. Maybe what’s more important is “the interesting”—+ everything that’s interesting eventually seems beautiful.
Cf. John Cage (Zen) text on the boring: If it’s boring once, do it twice; if it’s still boring, do it four times; if …
Read Melville’s Typee—theory of language + communication
Device of multiple narrators (cf. movies)
Difference in art between:
Representation, presentation
Behavior
One of the elements that makes the difference is duration (“durée”).
Thus, Andy Warhol’s Kiss (or Eat)—but not Empire State Building. It’s “real” time or duration. But only certain materials, like the erotic, are open to this treatment or transformation; not a building
Every aesthetic position now is a kind of radicalism. My question is: What is my radicalism, the one given by my temperament?
The Benefactor is the least radical book I shall ever write.
Cage, happenings, etc.
Synaesthesis: many kinds of behavior going on at the same time (sound, dance, film, words, etc. etc.) creating a vast behavioral magma—
I like the Cageian aesthetic because it’s not mine. He marks a boundary or horizon that I don’t want to approach but find valuable to be able to have continuously in sight. He occupies a certain position to which I, in another position, relate myself.
The only good things on theory of film: Eisenstein—esp[ecially the] essay on Dickens, Balzac, [the German art historian Erwin] Panofsky
If I ever write any more essays, I want to do one apiece on Breton + Cage
Meaning of “drag”—French “travestie” (disguise—+, secondarily transvestite disguise) > in art cf. [Gautier’s novel] Mlle. de Maupin
Function of masks, masquerade (cf. Halloween—children disguise themselves in order to be destructive)
Story about [the sculptor Constantin] Brancusi told to me by Annette: B. lived next door to friends who were giving a July 14th party
—[he had] helped [with the] preparations. The hour of the party arrives [and an] American girl with a Negro escort comes. Brancusi says, “Did you invite him? I can’t possibly go.” Hostess horrified; “I’m sorry, cher maître.” Hour later Brancusi calls. “I have the solution. I’ll come ‘en travestie.’” Came—in sheets—had a great time. (He “sent himself” to the party!)
Other sexual motifs in art:
Voyeurism
s-m
12/5/65 [SS’s friend the film critic] Elliott [Stein’s] birthday
Many 19th C. arts are leading towards cinema:
The family photo album
The wax museum (Musée Grevin, etc.)
The camera obscura
The novel (?)
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Elliott says voyeurs are usually stupid, + often almost impotent.
Peeping Tom isn’t about a voyeur—he’s a sadist.
“The morbid.” T. Faulk is fascinated with that.
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12/12/65
Dressing > good (means leisure vs work)
bad (means for others vs for oneself)
For me, to dress is to “dress up,” play the grown-ups’ game. When I’m myself, I’m sloppy.
The Jesuit device (one of many) for promoting concentration in prayer + meditation: “composition of place.” You think closely about where an edifying event (say, the Crucifixion) took place—weather, flora + fauna, colors, etc.—+ thus understand its deeper meaning more easily.
“I don’t like remembering things.”—Ezra Pound
12/15/65
Evil cannot coexist with evil; it feeds on itself, if it cannot feed on the good. (meaning of Laclos [Les Liaisons Dangereuses])
The difference between the Laclos novel + the new Mailer [An American Dream] is not that one is moral (because evil is punished) + the other not, but that one tells the truth about life + the other doesn’t.
The SW [Simone Weil] side of my temperament.
The attraction of absolute selflessness
The gaucheness in personal relations that leads to solitariness
The obsession with cruelty
On 3): look at the plot of the new novel!
I am haunted. All my dreams are nightmares.
Work: trudging across endless sand-flats
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12/17/65
[Each of the following three entries has two large question marks in the margin.]
Genet is “sub-moral”? Moral problem arises at the point when one acknowledges (+ prefers) adult consciousness as opposed to the childlike consciousness.
For children, the feelings of others aren’t real. (Hence, the pleasure in fantasies of destruction.) It is the child in us that can go do this—as when we enjoy destruction in sci-fi films.
It’s childlike of Genet to subordinate a cruel act to the concept of what gives him sexual pleasure.
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[The twentieth-century American composer] Morton Feldman: music just over the threshold of audibility
Does p[sychoanalysis] damage writing?
No—it helps build a sane room (in which to live) next to the mad room (in which one writes)—
No need to have a house with only one room.
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12/19/65
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Jasper: I shun statement—want the experience of the spectator to be as individual as possible.
12/21/65
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Relation between Breton’s Le cadavre exquis + Burroughs’–Gysin’s cut-up method: No transitions (cf. Firbank)
Read [the Armenian-born teacher and mystic George] Gurdjieff + [the Indian philosopher Jiddu] Krishnamurti
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12/22/65
[Fritz] Lang, Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924)—Klimt, [Aubrey] Beardsley, Eisenstein
Exorcizing the ghost. What was, no longer is. Being in touch with my own feelings.
I made a rule when I was thirteen: no daydreaming.
The ultimate fantasy: the recovery of the irrecoverable past. But if I could daydream about an invented happy future …
12/25/65
Jasper someone who finds everything “curious” or “difficult.” “I have difficulty dealing with that situation.”
Favorite words: “situation,” “information,” “fantastic,” “activity,” “interesting,” “lively”