by Susan Sontag
Jane [Bowles] + Sherifa [Bowles’s Moroccan lover]:
“She’s crazy. Isn’t she crazy, Paul?”
“She doesn’t ever shut up!”
“She doesn’t want to be treated as a servant.”
“How old is she, Paul?”
“If she moves any closer to me I’ll scream.”
“She’s a primitive, you know.”
“Don’t you think she’s ugly?”
“She’s very excited by you, by your being here. Any woman excites her.”
“They’re like monkeys, aren’t they?” (Sherifa + Mohammed)
Paul + his “friend” (Sent him down to see if the taxi had come).
Gordon [Sager]: “Should I give him money?”
Paul: “Don’t. You’ll spoil him.”
The Bowleses
Alfred + Driss
Ira Cohen + Rosalind
Targisti—Brion Gysin
Bob Faulkner (with Jane B. + John Latouche, one the bright young things of th[ei]r mid-thirties)
Gordon Sager
Alan Ansen
Alec Waugh + Earl of Jermyn, “Irving” from NY via Havana
Liz + Dale
Charles Wright + elderly lush
(past: Stein, Djuna Barnes, Bowles, [Allen] Ginsberg, [Gregory] Corso, Harold Norse, Irving Rosenthal)
S-M-L:
Opium—morphine—heroin
Peyote—mescaline—LSD
The world of [Evelyn Waugh’s] Decline + Fall + [Ronald] Firbank + [James Purdy’s] Malcolm + [Jane Bowles’s] Two Serious Ladies is a real world! People like that exist, live those lives! Here (The Bowleses, Alan Ansen, Gordon Sager, Bob Faulkner, etc., etc.)! And I thought it was all a joke—that obsessiveness, that heartlessness, that cruelty. The international homosexual style—God, how mad + humanly ugly + unhappy it is.
[The American writer] Alan Ansen will make a pun in classical Greek on a line of Sophocles to a shoe-shine boy in Athens. 300 books, records for his summer in Tangier which must be carted back. The Athens–Tangier circuit (for “boys”)
Is [the [Anglo-American] poet W. H.] Auden the only writer of this world who, partly, transcended it (spiritually)?
9/5/65 Tangier, Tetouan
Burning incense (holding a stick betw[een] thumb + forefinger) in the cab all the way to Tetouan. (Ira Cohen, Rosalind, me.)
Make an opera out of the story of Gilles de Rais [medieval Breton knight infamous for the serial murder of children]
The Arab flipper-case sitting in a tea-shop howling with laughter at a picture of the Venus de Milo someone had shown him.
Brocaded (silver + gold threads) silk “kaftans”—long (to the floor), cut wide, long full sleeves
Kif melts the brain; dexemyl sharpens the edges. (Kif makes you drift—makes you forget what someone said a minute before—hard to follow a long story or joke, makes you react less to other people (one isn’t “considerate,” i.e. you don’t anticipate people’s reactions)—
Younger Moroccans are turning away from kif (“people who smoke kif never do anything”—aren’t successful, ambitious) to alcohol. (Just the reverse!)
Many jokes about Corsican laziness, which is proverbial. Man getting on another’s shoulders to screw in light bulb. “Now Turn.”
Burroughs also involved in erudition (as “the fantastic”), like Borges.
Insanity: proliferating + melting of thought. Like wax. (T Faulk’s images)
Alfred symptoms:
Electricity image
“I’m wired wrong”
“The wiring is wrong”
“I feel I’m radioactive”
“The car is wired—everybody’s listening”
Obsession with memory (anything he can’t remember seems terribly important), numbers, coincidences, people having same name, etc.
Belief in magic, telepathy [e.g.] Paul Bowles wrote [Chester’s] book, some connection with Truman Capote book.
Lapses of memory: forgetting what was said 5 minutes earlier
Paranoid: afraid of police car behind[;] “everyone looking at me”; “why are there so many cars?” “why is everything we say being broadcast?”
Theme of the changeling (Alfred: “I’m not human” (because of hair): “I’m a changeling.”)
…
Kif = “grass”
High = “stoned”
Hashish = “hash”
Eating in a soup-kitchen at 7 am in the Medina. With your hands—afterwards, you wash (proprietor pours water in a small plastic container over your hands into a tin pail + then offers you the lower part of the apron he’s wearing to dry them on).
Walls blackened by smoke—
One pattern of tiles on floor, another for walls (a “dream machine”) windows opening out from rooms onto central court—
Read The Arabian Nights in the Burton translation.
Purity. Leading a pure life. No mail, phone; don’t ask, wait; don’t publish everything you write (Noël cited the example of des Forêts)
Tetouan: the long narrow garden in the Spanish part of the city. Many different kinds of trees. (Gaudí garden in Barcelona). Esp[ecially] one kind, light grey bark, very tall—the trunk + branches not round or tubular but indented like an arm with two tibias or two fibulas. And the roots drip, melt over the wall—reach across + join with the roots of the next tree.
…
Consciousness of other countries through radio. Can get all the Spanish stations (Sevilla, etc.) perfectly clearly on a small transistor in Tangier.
…
Scholastic definition of time as the actualization of possibilities.
There is a kif mentality which I have encountered many times + never identified (because I hadn’t experienced it myself). Joe Chaikin is one version, Ira + Rosalind two others. Slowed down. Easy-going. All things are equally important, nothing is very important. Trivial connections, coincidences seem remarkable. Feeling of being protected: everything will turn out for you. Other people come in + out of focus. Hard to stay with one subject very long talking—the mind drifts. Big oral appetite, often hungry. Powerful languor—want to sit or lie down, Very easy to change your plans, go with the moment. Cotton in your head—everything is “beautiful”—you glide toward it, away from it.
This is what the beat generation is about—from Kerouac to the Living Theatre: all the “attitudes” are easy—they’re not gestures of revolt—but natural products of the drugged state-of-mind. But anyone who is with them (or reads them) who isn’t stoned naturally interprets them as people with the same mind you have—only insisting on different things. You don’t realize they’re somewhere else.
I would never work—write—if I took a lot of kif. I feel a loss of energy, And I feel isolated, lonely (though not more unhappily so)—
Noël?
9/6/65 Tangier
For a year (age 13) carried the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius always with me in my pocket. I was so afraid of dying—+ only that book gave me some consolation, some fortitude. I wanted to have it on me, to be able to touch it, at the moment of my death.
Tell Kemeny of my great decision—the conscious decision I took when I was 11, entering Mansfield [Junior High School in Tucson, Arizona]. Never to have another catastrophe like Catalina [Junior High in Tucson]. ([SS’s childhood friend] Arvell Lidikay etc.) “I will be popular.” And again, more capably, at NHHS [North Hollywood High School]
I understood the difference between the outside + the inside. No point in trying to teach 6-year-olds that the collar-bone was called the clavicle, or [SS’s sister] Judith the 48 capitals of the 48 states (me age 12, the bunk beds).
I was Gulliver in Lilliput + in Brobdingnag at the same time. They were too strong for me and I was too strong for them. I would protect them from me. I was from Krypton, but I would be meek, mild-mannered Clark Kent. I would smile, I would be “nice” … And politics came into it—was that a supporting cause, or a product of the unhappy consciousness? I felt guilty because I was mor
e “fortunate” than others (Becky: the ditch digger ex–high school classmate I spotted on the canyon as I was driving to UCLA in Mother’s Pontiac).
Annette decided to be illegible to the others, the little folk. (The accent, the manner, the displayed erudition). I didn’t insist. I became legible.
Well, what’s wrong with projects of self-reformation?
The four senior living writers:
Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Genet
His mind is perforated.
“Informal painting.”
Jasper [Johns on Duchamp]: “painting of precision + beauty of indifference”
Is photography an art? Or just a bastard, an abortion of cinema. Noël says when he looks at a beautiful photograph, he thinks: Damn you, why don’t you move?
Photography
Painting ^ ^ Cinema
(Lewis Carroll) ([Henri] Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank)
Maybe the only photography that is satisfying is the painterly, posed, artificial kind. (Like Lewis Carroll in the 19th C.)
Is it a defect of a film when it seems to be a series of photographs, of “belles images” [“pretty pictures”]? (As Harriet said of [Sergei Eisenstein’s 1927 film] October in East Berlin in 1958)
Cf. Blanchot’s essay on “The Athenaeum”
…
Novalis … saw that the new art was not the total book but the fragment. The art of the fragment—a demand for a fragmentary speech, not to hinder communication but to make it absolute. (Hence, the past, ruins become available to us.)
…
Alfred:
Every thing goes blank in the middle of a sentence—
“there’s nothing”
“I feel the whole world is listening to everything I say”
“Susan, what’s happening? There’s something very strange going on.”
“You’re hiding something from me.”
“I think I have syphilis. Or cancer.”
“Susan, you look so sad. I’ve never seen you look so sad.”
Tangier:
Rif mountain country in skirt [of] red + white striped cotton, white cotton over it on the top—a broad-brimmed straw hat with four braids coming out to brim from the top—brown leggings of skin
[You] can hear cocks crowing at dawn in Tangier—donkeys (burros) all over town, camels just outside.
The municipal hospital in the Medina—at the wall overlooking the sea. Must have been a fort: there are huge rusty cannons in the courtyard.
Beni Makada—the city mental hospital: [they] give everybody electric shock treatment.
Orson Welles of his 9-year-old daughter: she might become a professional; she’s a very nice girl, she has very good manners. Professionalism is a kind of good manners …
…
[Alan Ansen said that] in Naked Lunch, a substructure of narrative, characterization + place description fades into “routines”—heightened fantastic projections of people, places, + actions, on the one hand, + into learned footnotes on drugs, diseases + folkways on the other.
What makes fantasy pleasurable
bearable
for most people is that, usually, one doesn’t want—really—for the fantasy to come true. (Sex, dreams of glory, etc.) I find fantasies—of love, warmth, sex—unbearably painful because I’m always aware it[’s] “just” a fantasy. I want—I turn up the wanting—but it isn’t going to happen. I want, too much.
[Vladimir Nizhy,] Lessons with Eisenstein (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962)
Tangier:
Old man in white turban with long bright orange beard (henna)
The banyan tree + the old cannons (ca. 1620s) in the garden off the Socco Grande
Water-carrier selling pure spring water which she pours in a glass—then drops a few shiny laurel leaves for taste
Hamid—Driss’ brother—emaciated—sitting in striped pajamas—legs hanging over bed in hospital ward—moustache—one foot, with gangrene, in a sock—henna on all the nails of one hand—his mother + sister, Fatima, have brought him bread
Eating in common out of a huge bowl or skillet—with one’s hands—each with a piece of bread to dip in
Indian movies (spectacles) dubbed in Arabic, European movies dubbed in French + Spanish (Ciné Lux, Ciné Alcázar, Ciné Rif, Ciné Vox, Ciné Goya, Ciné Mauretania, etc.)
A Municipal Casino off the Boulevard Pasteur
9/7/65 Tangier
high = “stoned,” “bombed out”
Alfred: Has decided not to eat any meals outside his house (fear of being poisoned), wouldn’t take coffee from Driss the other night; is going to sell his car; thinks he doesn’t have a valid passport anymore (the photo); broke Driss’ watch because he thought there was a microphone concealed in it—
[“Shitan”] = Arab word for the devil (cf. Satan)—comes to you in dreams, prevents you from crying out
…
Country people on donkeys leaving Tangier late Sunday afternoon—have come in for market—down the street that leads from the Medina to the Avenida de Espana at the port
…
Waiter in rest[aurant] sprinkling rose water on people to whom he’s just served mint tea—then in the tea
“nana” = mint
“attay” = tea
b’salemma = goodbye (shalom)
…
sprinkle cinammon + sugar (separate) on couscous
Alfred thinks he’s a hermaphrodite.
Last year, when he had his “flip-out,” he sent 50 copies of his book of stories to his family + neighbors—“so they should know me, because I’d always been hiding because I’m so ugly; I wanted to expose myself further”—incl[uding] to his father (c[are] o[f] his lawyer) who died when he was 14
“I guess I’m a failure as a writer. My books don’t sell. I’m not as good a writer as I thought.”
“You know, nobody writes a book alone. All books are a collaboration.”
“I thought, ‘I deserve to die. I’ve betrayed the Jews.’ And then the next evening, Absalom (works at the Lion + Lizard) offered me a glass of Malaga wine.”
…
Visitors to Tangier: Samuel Pepys, (cf. diary), Alexandre Dumas, Pierre Loti, [Nikolai] Rimsky-Korsakov, [Camille] Saint-Saëns, Eugène Delacroix, [André] Gide > Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Tennessee Williams, (Socco Chico in Camino Real), Paul Bowles, etc. etc.
Portuguese occupation of Tangier (1471–1662)—expelled by English fleet of the Earl of Sandwich + troops of Count Peterborough in 1662. English, after destroying most of the city, left in 1684—chased away by army of Ali ben Abdallah—remained governed by his family until 1844, i.e. was “Moroccan”
[Alan Ansen on] Burroughs—
The Soft Machine: the entire work takes place at action stations (its ideology runs past us on its way to expendability). Briefly, original vitality is seized on by writers of life-scripts, who impose on lively organisms deathical [sic] patterns (though it is possible to downgrade a life-script, even the best life-script is inhibiting and so inimical) for the purpose of self-aggrandizement. The victims revolt by talking out of turn + throwing the word + image back
Ian Sommerville’s Flicker Machine
Brion Gysin’s Dream Machine
Place on a turntable with a lighted electric bulb at its center a perforated cylinder (some or all the perforations may be covered by diaphanous material of diff[erent] colors) + start the turntable revolving. Watch the cylinder intently
The result sh[oul]d be a fragmentation of the image track equivalent to the fragmentation of the sound-track achieved in cut-up. (Another “control,” suggestive rather than minutely regulatory, is an early consideration of the interconnection of sound + image tracks—Rimbaud’s sonnet on the vowels.)
