by Susan Sontag
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Jap [Jasper Johns’s nickname]: “I’m all for the future.”
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Machines (computers) at Univ[ersities] of Illinois + Toronto
Morton Feldman: “I’m 39—the rest of my life is redundant.”
Duchamp: “I don’t care what my paintings (etc.) look like—I care about the idea that is expressed.”
Christian Wolff—teaches Greek at Harvard, now about 30—son of Kurt Wolff, the publisher—is Cage’s only “student”
12/28/65
Gance’s Napoleon the Mt. Everest of films. Full of “devices”: symbolism, triple-screen, superimposition, color and black-and-white, different rhythms, different textures of film stock.
The direction of innovation in film has been fairly linear—the problem of “cutting”—i.e. of ellipsis. Development of greater + more sophisticated ellipses.
The other possibilities have been mostly ignored. E.g. why use same type of film stock throughout a given film (because a film is “one thing”?)
Exceptions: first scene in [Ingmar Bergman’s] Naked Night; Dr. Strangelove
Problem of point of view in film—
One film that has film-making as its subject: Peeping Tom
The one “modern” architect: Buckminster Fuller
Is there such a unitary thing as “modernist” painting? So that one could say of someone (as [the art critic and historian Michael ] Fried says of Duchamp): he is “a failed modernist.”
Jasper says no—
Cage & [Gertrude] Stein
Annette: “modern” music, three elements, a progression:
Destiny (“musical destiny”—forms)—Beethoven to Wagner Will—Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez
Chance—Cage
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George [Lichtheim]: German romanticism is the only full-blown romanticism. [It] was anti-liberal, anti-modern, anti-urban, anti-democratic (anti-individualist, anti-Jewish)
[It] gave rise to the best in German + Central European culture—that is to say, modern culture at its most advanced, experimental, + theoretical.
To Germany philosophy, German music, sociology, philosophy of culture, Marx, Freud, Schoenberg, Kafka, [Max] Weber, [Wilhelm] Dilthey, Hegel, Wagner, Nietzsche, etc.
+ also—mediated by Nietzsche + [Oswald] Spengler—when it took a political turn, the worst: Nazism
Compare German romanticism (Hölderlin, Novalis, [Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph] Schelling) with Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand!
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1966
1/3/66
Three stages in making a w-o-a [work of art] or a written argument:
Conceiving it
Doing it
2a) Understanding it
Defending it
People take all three for granted—but I don’t see the point of this third, posthumous, stage.
Should be: getting rid of it
One is always somewhere else when one has finished—than where one was when one started.
Why sh[oul]d one remain locked?—which one w[oul]d have to be in order to be in a position to defend (justify, explicate w[ith] conviction) what one has done—
This stage is stupid—
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My intellectual formation:
Knopf + Modern Library
PR [Partisan Review] ([Lionel] Trilling, [Philip] Rahv, [Leslie] Fiedler, [Richard] Chase)
University of Chicago [—] P&A via [Joseph] Schwab–[Richard] McKeon, [Kenneth] Burke
Central European “sociology”—the German Jewish refugee intellectuals ([Leo] Strauss, [Hannah] Arendt, [Gershom] Scholem, [Herbert] Marcuse, [Aron] Gurwitsch, [Jacob] Taubes, etc … .)
Harvard—Wittgenstein
The French—Artaud, Barthes, [the twentieth-century Romanian aphorist and philosopher E. M.] Cioran, Sartre
More history of religion
Mailer—anti-intellectualism
Art, art-history—Jasper, Cage, Burroughs
End result: Franco-Jewish-Cageian?
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The sweetness of David’s cheek
I couldn’t react to Joe [Chaikin’s] news today—that he would shortly have a very dangerous heart operation followed by six-months’ convalescence. I couldn’t feel, I couldn’t concentrate—even while he was talking. I mustered solicitude mechanically, but it was hard (harder than it used to be? Has this always been happening?). My mind kept drifting to trivial observations + reportage about today.
I was dead—the sound of his voice kept fading—I told myself to be concerned—but I kept forgetting what he had just told me, it kept slipping out of my head
I started to feel anxious, depressed, restless. But not about him. About me: Where was I? Why couldn’t I lay hands on my feelings?
1/4/66
The situation in painting is tight: like science. Everyone conscious of “problems,” what needs to be worked on. Each artist by his recent work issuing “white papers,” on this or that problem, + the critics judging whether their chosen problems are interesting or trivial. (The [American art critic] Barbara Rose approach.) Thus, [the American art critic] Rosalind Krauss judges Jasper’s flashlight, ale cans, to be the exploration / solution to a peripheral (trivial) problem of sculpture now: what to do with the pedestal (vs the object), Jasper’s solution being to make it sculptural—etc. While Frank Stella’s work is thought to be very interesting because it is a solution to central problems. W[ith]-o[ut] a knowledge of recent art history + its “problems” who w[oul]d be interested in Frank Stella?
Artists working hip to hip—very tight—everything changing each six months, as more “work” from the diff[erent] academies comes in. One has to keep up, have a very keen radar. (To be relevant, to be interesting.)
While in literature everything is so loose textured. One could make a parachute jump blindfolded—anywhere you land, if you push it hard enough, you’re bound to find interesting unexplored valuable terrain. All the options are lying about, barely used, hardly thought about or discussed by writers or critics.
Think of the legacy of Joyce—[it has] hardly begun to be used, apart from Beckett + Burroughs. Or the possible conscious use of cinematic narrative devices in literary narrative. Apart from some Faulkner, and, again, Burroughs. A dozen other problems.
Only in France has there been any systematic exploration of one particular problem (in the “nouveau roman” of Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, etc.), only one, in the manner in which painters + sculptors all work today.
Jasper is good for me. (But only for a while.) He makes it feel natural + good + right to be crazy. And mute. To question everything. Because he is crazy.
Cage’s writings are impossible w[ith]o[ut] Stein. In fact, he’s the only American successor to Stein. But more eclectic, less rigorous. (All that [D. T.] Suzuki + [Alan] Watts—a “soft” influence.) A much less rigorous + independent mind. Essentially an impressionistic synthesis.
Wisdom. A great writer has wisdom. Where does his authority come from? Because he lives what he extols? It’s not that simple. Why has no one bothered to learn that DH L[awrence] was a scrawny man with a squeaky voice who had a hard time getting it up + reviled + tormented Frieda for what he considered her blatant sexuality, and not bothered to find [the American radical social theorist] Norman Brown a thin-mouthed college professor? One gives Brown the benefit of the doubt: he is Moses, who doesn’t enter the promised land. Lawrence is faking. Because there’s something suspect in Lawrence’s writings to begin with—forced, sentimental, strident, inconsistent.
I’m attracted to demons, to the demonic in people. Only that? Ultimately, yes. Madness, but high-temperature anti-mainstream madness: People with their own generators. Philip [SS’s ex-husband] was mad, and Irene and Jasper—and that girl from the Living Theatre, Diane Gregory, at Joe [Chaikin’s] workshop last night. Her big hot black eyes + parted mouth, + floor-length quilted dress. Sallie’s [the American literary critic Sallie Sears, a friend of SS’s] madness was repellent—
because her sensibility is so limiting + tame, + because it took the form of dependence.
Mad people = people who stand alone + burn. I’m attracted to them because they give me permission to do the same.
David isn’t as precocious or creative as I was as a child, + this bothers him. He compares me at age nine with him at nine; me age thirteen with him now. I tell him he doesn’t have to be as bright. He has other satisfactions.
I’m not ambitious because I’m complacent. At five, I announced to Mabel (?) [the housekeeper when SS was a small child in New York and New Jersey; she did not accompany the family when they moved to Arizona] I was going to win the Nobel Prize. I knew I w[oul]d be recognized. Life was an escalator, not a ladder. And I also knew—as the years went on—that I wasn’t smart enough to be Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Sartre or Simone Weil. I aimed to be in their company, as a disciple; to work on their level. I had, I knew—I have—a good mind, even a powerful one. I’m good at understanding things—+ ordering them—+ using them. (My cartographic mind.) But I’m not a genius. I’ve always known that.
My mind isn’t good enough, isn’t really first rate. And my character, my sensibility is ultimately too conventional. (I was too much infected by the Rosie-Mother-Judith-Nat [SS’s stepfather ] drivel; just to hear all that for fifteen years ruined me). I’m not mad enough, not obsessed enough.
Do I resent not being a genius? Am I sad about it? Would I be willing to pay the price for that? I think the price is solitude, inhuman life such as I now lead, hoping it to be temporary. Even now—I know my mind has gone a step forward by virtue of being alone the last 21/2 years w[ith]o[ut] I[rene], don’t have to package + dilute my responses because I share them with another person. (Inevitably, with Philip + with I[rene], they were reduced to the common denominator, the consensus.) The impact Jasper has made on me—the new intellectual thing in my life this past year—w[oul]d not have been possible if I were still with I[rene].
But why do I want—+ what good is it—to go on pushing my sensibility further + further, honing my mind. Becoming more unique, eccentric.
Spiritual ambition? Vanity? Because I’ve given up on human satisfactions (except for David)?
I’ve got this thing—my mind. It gets bigger, its appetite is insatiable.
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1/8/66
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We need a new idea. It will probably be a primitive one (will we be able to recognize it?). All useful ideas, for some time, have been very sophisticated.
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[On the first page of a notebook dated simply “1966–67,” SS lists her travels over those two years. It was something she was in the habit of doing in the 1960s and 1970s. Reproduced here is the part of the list covering the summer of 1966 as a representative sample.]
1966
June 3 left NY (Air France), arrived in London
June 3–15: London. Imperial Hotel. June 15: flew to Paris
June 15–July 8: Paris
July 8: flew to Prague, then Karlovy-Vary [Czechoslovakia]
July 8–19: Karlovy-Vary (“Hotel Otava”)
July 19: drove (with Elliott [Stein], [Jií] Mucha [son of the Czech Art Nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha], Marti [?] to Prague
July 19–25: Prague (“Hotel Ambassador”)
July 25–26: train journey from Prague to Paris
July 26–Aug. 1: Paris
Aug. 1: flew to London
Aug. 1–6: London (18 Earls Terrace, S.W. 7)
Aug. 6: train to Folkestone, train back to London
Aug—London (153 Gloucester Rd., S.W. 7)
Aug. 11—flew to Paris
Aug. 29—train (“Le Mistral”) to Antibes
Sept. 4—train to Venice
Sept. 5—arrived in Venice—first night “Gritti Palace
[Hotel],” next three nights at the “Hotel Luna”
Sept. 10—train (1:35 am) to Antibes; arrived 4.00 pm
Sept. 11—Antibes
Sept. 12: train (“Le Mistral”) to Paris
Sept. 12–21: Paris
Sept. 21: flew (Air France) to NY
6/26/66 Paris
Morbidity: The aestheticizing of death. Cf. the ossuary of the catacombs of Paris (which David + I visited this morning). Death is “arranged” for the spectator. Mottoes, reflections, admonitions, stone plaques on the walls between the huge packages of stacked bones. No single interpretation of death or message to the spectator—but an anthology of contradictory sentiments. (Vergil, Genesis, [Alphonse de] Lamartine, Rousseau, NT [New Testament], Horace, Racine, Marcus Aurelius.)
The pleasant white-haired old lady who was the guide said, as the tour crossed from the long tunnel into the actual “empire de la mort,”—“Think. There must be several geniuses here, among the seven or eight million people interred here.”
On the origins of aesthetic feeling: What Elliott said when (the other night) he saw me playing with the “piranha” or “crocodile” clip he had on a continuity script he was carrying. “They’re good for attaching to the nipple. Or the loose skin of the balls.” I tested it by clamping it on the joint of my left index finger—the clip is very taut + even there began to be very uncomfortable in a few seconds. “But it must be agony on the nipples or the balls,” I said.
“But someone looks so beautiful,” he said, “naked, with a lot of those stuck on different parts of his body.”
Horror films—compare their themes with those inventoried in [Mario] Praz’s Romantic Agony.
The doubling of the self in dreams.
The doubling of the self in art.
The nightmare is that there are two worlds
The nightmare is that there is only one world, this one
Foucault [from Madness and Civilization, translated by Richard Howard]: “Madness is no longer the space of indecision through which it was possible to glimpse the original truth of the work of art, but the decision beyond which this truth ceases irrevocably … Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art; it draws the exterior edge, the line of dissolution, the contour against the void.”
Novels with cinematic structure:
Hemingway, In Our Time
Faulkner,
[Horace] McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don’ t They?
Robbe-Grillet, Les Gommes [The Erasers] his first novel, + the most cinematic—a decoupage
[Georges] Bernanos, M. Ouine
I[vy] Compton-Burnett,
V Woolf, Between the Acts
Philip Toynbee, Tea with Mrs. Goodman
des Forêts, Les Mendiants his first novel—multiple pov [points of view]
[Barnes,] Nightwood
Reverzy, Le Passage
Burroughs,
[John] Dos Passos,
Firbank, Caprice; Vainglory; and [Inclinations] (trilogy)
Jap[anese] writer [Yasunari Kawabata] (N.B. visual sense, suppleness of changing scenes)—Snow Country, etc.
Dickens (cf. Eisenstein)—
There are people who thought with camera eye (a unified p-o-v that displaces itself) before the camera
N[athanael] West,
Blechman
“new novelists”:
Claude Simon, Le Palace
Claude Ollier, La Mise-en-Scène
(all based on organization of a décor (No[rth] Africa)
read Claude-Edmonde Magny’s book on Am[erican] lit[erature] [L’Age du Roman Américan (1948)]
Dreams > science fiction
Name: Walter Patriarca
“The double” means the self-as-an-object.
The inhuman presence of objects.
Obsession:
To possess
Jealousy
Haunted city—
Vast squares—stone perspectives—park
Imported classicism—river, the bridges—
Students rioting outside the cathedral—