by Susan Sontag
Spiritual chemistry …
Effect irradiates into other zones …
Cut the dialogue into panels and make a great screen of …
10/3/64
Flaming Creatures is sexual, sexually stimulating (not just a spoof on sex) in the same sense that sex is also silly, grotesque, awkward, ugly.
One man thinks before he acts. Another man thinks after he acts. Each is of the opinion that the other thinks too much.
A murder: like a flashbulb (panoramic photo) going off in a dark forest, lighting up all the obscure, frightened woodland life. (Dallas—Nov. 1963)
Subject: the second birth of the self
Through the mad “project”
Shedding the past—exile—aborting the self
Principle of redundancy
(e.g. traffic lights)
red < > green
up < > down
stop < > go
Get more precise communication
English is so precise because it’s so redundant … > cf. [the twentieth-century English literary critic and poet William] Empson on complex words: words have resonances, halos, vibrations. Literary work is strung on them. “E.g. “fool,” “honest”
Vs. a telegram
Redundancy necessary to convey info—but what is the connection with beauty, the non-utilitarian
Mathematicians say of a certain equation “it’s beautiful” because it is so simple, so non-redundant.
Connection between style (stylishness) and redundancy [—] e.g. films of von Sternberg
Connection between redundancy and “the replicate.”
Women are “politically transparent” in the 19th century.
We have all the elements—just have to bolt them down, then attack the warhead—then launch it.
Seep
Catenary curve
So much in modern life that can be enjoyed, once one gets over the nausea of the replicate.
Moralists like [the twentieth-century American writer on urbanism Lewis] Mumford vs. aesthetes like [the contemporary American architect] Philip Johnson.
Seriousness—the highest form is the same as irony.
11/1/64
I was afraid of my mother, physically afraid. Not afraid of her anger, afraid of her decreasing the little emotional nourishment she supplied me, but afraid of her. Afraid of Rosie [SS’s nanny, Rose McNulty], too.
Mother slapped me across the face—for talking back, for contradicting her.
I’ve always made excuses for her. I’ve never allowed my anger, my outrage.
If I can’t bring judgment against the world, I must bring it against myself.
I’m learning to bring judgment against the world.
As a writer, I tolerate error, poor performance, failure. So what if I fail some of the time, if a story or an essay is no good? Sometimes things do go well, the work is good. And that’s enough.
It’s just this attitude I don’t have about sex. I don’t tolerate error, failure—therefore I’m anxious from the start, and therefore I’m more likely to fail. Because I don’t have the confidence that some of the time (without my forcing anything) it will be good.
If only I could feel about sex as I do about writing! That I’m the vehicle, the medium, the instrument of some force beyond myself.
I experience the writing as given to me—sometimes, almost, as dictated. I let it come, try not to interfere with it. I respect it, because it’s me and yet more than me. It’s personal and transpersonal, both.
I would like to feel that way about sex, too. As if “nature” or “life” used me. And I trust that, and let myself be used.
An attitude of surrender to oneself, to life. Prayer. Let it be, whatever it will be. I give myself to it.
Prayer: peace and voluptuousness.
In this, no room for shame and anxiety as to how the little old self rates in the light of some objective standard of performance.
One must be devout about sex. Then, one won’t dare to be anxious. Anxiety will never be revealed for what it is—spiritual meanness, pettiness, small-mindedness.
Q: Do you succeed always?
A: Yes, I succeed thirty percent of the time.
Q: Then you don’t succeed always.
A: Yes I do. To succeed 30% of the time is always.
Aristocratic Clowning
Cynic Cynic
(George Sanders, Vincent Price) (Zero Mostel, Sydney Greenstreet, Charles Laughton)
In style of personality breaks moral law, but observes aesthetic one Breaks moral and aesthetic law
Elegant Farts in your face, always handling you, poking in your guts
One fears him—fears being thought clumsy, ill-bred, low-class (that’s his power) One believes he knows the secret of fun—doesn’t want to be thought a bore by him
Admits he’s evil Hurts you—then makes you laugh. Shameless, but denies his own evil. Acts like a naughty, adorable child.
Check:
Article by Lévi-Strauss on Christmas in The New Society (mag[azine])
[Marcel] Proust, “About Flaubert’s Style,” in Pleasures and Days, ed[ited by the American literary critic F. W.] Dupee (Anchor [Books])
Hermes—new French mag[azine] on mysticism ([Mircea] Eliade, [Alan] Watts, [Henry] Corbin, etc.)
[The contemporary French writer Michel] Butor, The Four Seasons, New World Writing (Rothko—soft Mondrians)
[SS marked an X in the margin:] Any trans[lation] in English of Louis-René des Forêts ([published by John] Calder in London)
Science fiction—
Popular mythology for contemporary negative imagination about the impersonal
Otherworld creatures = the it, what takes over
Essay: style, silence, repetition.
Kurt Goldstein, Language and Language Disturbances (Grune & Stratton, 1960)—
aphasia read
Noble feelings / ignoble feelings
Dignity
Respect
Loyalty to oneself
…
Comparison between [Paul] Klee + Valéry
Theory + art
[The Russian-born American constructivist sculptor Naum] Gabo: negative space
To “construct” something is to carve the space out of it (to disclose the space).
[Gabo:] “We deny volume as an expression of space … We reject solid mass as an element of plasticity.” (1920)
Gabo: Must see the sculpture from all sides—it’s three dimensional.
Innovations: Use of new materials—plastic, celluloid, wire; + making sculpture move (either to see it / or because the movement is the subject) > e.g. Kinetic Construction (1920)
Bring sculpture close to architecture.
[Marcel] Duchamp: Readymades as not art, but a philosophical point
Style:
Circular style ([Gertrude] Stein) > read Donald Sutherland’s book [the American critic, playwright, and librettist, who, in 1951, wrote Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work]
Cf. [Jean-Paul] Sartre on “the white style” of [Albert] Camus’s L’Étranger [The Stranger]
…
W[illiam] James acknowledged that “morbid-mindedness”—defined it, rather—as ranging over “a wider scale of experience” than healthy-mindedness
—the “value” in what is evil or lunatic
[Erik] Satie’s “furniture music”—background, not meant to be listened to with all one[’s] attention
Andy Warhol’s films
Read [the contemporary American literary critic J.] Hillis Miller book
Art is a form of consciousness
…
One difference between naming a feeling (“I feel terrible”) and expressing it (“Ohh … .”) is the response you get: “Why?” or “What’s the matter?” By naming a feeling in order to give vent to it—a practice very much promoted by psychoanalysis—you make a co-reasoner out of your consoler.
Use of markings on a roll of film (the “leader”) as part of the cont
ent of the film: Bruce Conner’s A Movie (like exposing the structure of a building, or—Brecht—the mechanism of the set)
Cross-cutting between old film quote + event in film:
Godard, Vivre Sa Vie [featuring] Renée Falconetti + Anna Karina
[The American experimental filmmaker Kenneth] Anger, Scorpio Rising [where he crosscuts between material from Cecil B.] DeMille’s King of Kings + motorcyclist’s orgy (sound track: “Going to a Party” [actually “Party Lights”])
[The Spanish director Luis] Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or [with its] use of Christ to illustrate De Sade episode
Paul Ricoeur, “Structure et herméneutique,” in Esprit, Nov. 1963
3 other essays on Lévi-Strauss in same issue, plus interview
…
18th century the great period of camp—distributed through whole culture
[Alexander] Pope—Spurious passage in “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot”: “ … And he himself one vile Antithesis.”
[William] Congreve—Symmetrical (like billiards): passion A, passion B
Molière?
…
18th century drama: no development—whole character there—instant feelings summed up in an epigram—love born or dies
…
Characteristics of art nouveau paintings + drawings:
Symmetrical composition, attenuated curves, spare use of color, slender bodies.
Le Rouget’s restaurant—Art Nouveau décor near Gare Montparnasse
…
Pornography
De Sade, Andrea de Nerciat, Restif de la Bretonne >>> triumvirate of 18th-century French libertines
Earl of Rochester [John Wilmot], John Cleland >>> English (N.B. [Laurence] Sterne, John Wilkes, + Robert Burns all belonged to erotic secret societies. Wilkes the Medmenham Monks, Burns the Caledonian Muses)
18th century—no guilt; atheism; more philosophical, polemical
19th century—guilt, horror
Andrea de Nerciat—career officer in French army (father was Italian); got to be colonel:
Two great philosophical works:
[Radiguet’s novel] Le Diable au Corps (3 vols.)—alternates between narrative + dialogue; starts with countess (slut) + marquise (the heroine—like [Proust’s character] Duchesse de Guermantes—beautiful, worldly, rich; everyone curries her favor)
Affair between the two—+ contesse tells stories.
Sex never condemned, always pleasurable
A lot of social satire
[Andrea de Nerciat’s novel] Les Aphrodites (3 vols.)—a secret sexual society; tells stories.
Also a novel, Monrose; and Félicia (best known book—erotic but gallant, not pornographic)
…
Death = being completely inside one’s own head
Life = the world
…
11/4/64
Proust, in a letter:
“What’s more, ever since Hervieu, Hermant, etc., snobbish has been so frequently represented from the outside that I wanted to try to show it inside the person, like a wonderful kind of imagination …”
Like camp
One criticizes in others what one recognizes + despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.
Underneath the depression, I found my anxiety.
History of film
This is the first generation of directors who are aware of film history; cinema now entering era of self-consciousness
Nostalgia
[The German film scholar and writer Siegfried] Kracauer: movies—anti-art; anti-auteur
…
Femininity = weakness (or being strong through weakness)
No image of strong woman who is just strong, + takes the consequences
…
11/17/64
Conceiving all relationships as between a master and a slave …
In each case, which was I to be? I found more gratification as a slave; I was more nourished. But—master or slave, one is equally unfree. One cannot step away, get out of character.
A relationship of equals is one not tied to “roles.”
Where I detected envy, I forbore to criticize—lest my motives be impure, and my judgment less than impartial. I was benevolent. I was malicious only about strangers, people who were indifferent.
It seems noble.
But, thereby, I rescued my “superiors,” those I admired, from my dislike, my aggression. Criticism was reserved only for those “beneath” me, whom I didn’t respect … I used my power of criticism to confirm the status quo.
Wayne Andrews, [Architecture, Ambition and Americans: A Social History of ] American Architecture
John Cage, Silence
Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond
Daisy Ashford, The Young Visitors
11/22/64
Read Max Beerbohm, “Savonarola Brown,” [Ronald Firbank’s 1926 novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of] Cardinal Pirelli, Diary of Nijinsky
Soft-focus thinking (as in the 4 lectures) whose virtue is aliveness, being improvised, being contemporary to the situation in which it’s uttered;———vs sharp-focus thinking (writing) which is more accurate, complex, unrepetitive, but has to be prepared in advance—like a Greek statue with blank eyes
Say I have a dreary feeling (Z) which I want to combat—a feeling which gives rise to something I repeatedly do or say that I wish I didn’t.
If I merely suppress the behavior (if that’s even possible) I recharge the feeling behind it.
Recipe for killing the feeling: Act it out in an exaggerated form.
The chagrin one feels then is far more memorable and therapeutic.
“depends where I get flung off …”
read [the Austrian-British art historian Ernst] Gombrich, Wilhelm Meister [Goethe’s second novel, The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister, published in 1795]
Injured, scarred in the face
Marked Woman [1937 Hollywood film directed by Lloyd Bacon and Michael Curtiz and starring Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, and Lola Lane]
Bette Davis—M.
• smoking at beginning (sign of independence from boss—Johnny Vanning / blows smoke in his face).
Nietzsche: “no facts, only interpretations.”
Art is never a photograph.
Mimetic theory of art: art < > reality
Plato: measures art by the standard of truth
Aristotle: emotional effect of lying.
Social facts > “fact”
Psychological facts > “imagination”
Many different relations between art + fact
