by Susan Sontag
little emphasis on the plasticity of the emotions.
[In the margin:] Cf. [Aristotle’s] Nic[omachean] Ethics
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2/20/77
Two experiences yesterday—lunch with [the English–West Indian writer V. S.] Naipaul and reading [the Russian formalist Boris] Eikhenbaum’s The Young Tolstoy—remind me of how undisciplined and demoralized I am.
Starting tomorrow—if not today:
I will get up every morning no later than eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)
I will have lunch only with Roger [Straus]. (“No, I don’t go out for lunch.” Can break this rule once every two weeks.)
I will write in the Notebook every day. (Model: Lichtenberg’s Waste Books.)
I will tell people not to call in the morning, or not answer the phone.
I will try to confine my reading to the evening. (I read too much—as an escape from writing.)
I will answer letters once a week. (Friday?—I have to go to the hospital anyway.)
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2/21/77
Things I like: fires, Venice, tequila, sunsets, babies, silent films, heights, coarse salt, top hats, large long-haired dogs, ship models, cinnamon, goose down quilts, pocket watches, the smell of newly mown grass, linen, Bach, Louis XIII furniture, sushi, microscopes, large rooms, ups, boots, drinking water, maple sugar candy.
Things I dislike: sleeping in an apartment alone, cold weather, couples, football games, swimming, anchovies, mustaches, cats, umbrellas, being photographed, the taste of licorice, washing my hair (or having it washed), wearing a wristwatch, giving a lecture, cigars, writing letters, taking showers, Robert Frost, German food.
Things I like: ivory, sweaters, architectural drawings, urinating, pizza (the Roman bread), staying in hotels, paper clips, the color blue, leather belts, making lists, Wagon-Lits, paying bills, caves, watching ice-skating, asking questions, taking taxis, Benin art, green apples, office furniture, Jews, eucalyptus trees, pen knives, aphorisms, hands.
Things I dislike: Television, baked beans, hirsute men, paperback books, standing, card games, dirty or disorderly apartments, flat pillows, being in the sun, Ezra Pound, freckles, violence in movies, having drops put in my eyes, meatloaf, painted nails, suicide, licking envelopes, ketchup, traversins [“bolsters”], nose drops, Coca-Cola, alcoholics, taking photographs.
Things I like: drums, carnations, socks, raw peas, chewing on sugar cane, bridges, Dürer, escalators, hot weather, sturgeon, tall people, deserts, white walls, horses, electric typewriters, cherries, wicker / rattan furniture, sitting cross-legged, stripes, large windows, fresh dill, reading aloud, going to bookstores, under-furnished rooms, dancing, Ariadne auf Naxos.
2/22/77
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I’m polite to too many people because I’m not angry enough. I’m not angry enough because I don’t push my ideas far enough. The comfortable refuge of “pluralism,” “dialogue,” etc.
My refusal of intransigence. I lose energy thereby—every day.
The great intransigent arguments—SW [Simone Weil], Artaud, Adorno (in The Philosophy of Modern Music). I don’t think I’m obliged to agree or disagree. They’re my amphetamine, my points “de rigueur.” I work in relation to those extremes, but, by self-definition—my own views are not extreme.
Too easy a way out? I’m not exerting myself.
The great question of pleasure. How “serious” a view is one to have of it? To what extent do moral criteria apply? Nobody wants to be known as a puritan, and yet …
Cf. Adorno’s denunciation of pleasure in music as morally corrupt, historically reactionary
Didn’t I feel this about [the American theater director Robert Wilson’s opera] Einstein on the Beach—And yet I was pleased (glad) to be able to enjoy it.
Remember that Adorno is writing in 1940–41 (the awareness of Nazi horrors—and those unresolved; he is a refugee). The author of The Philosophy of Modern Music is the same person who wrote (in 1947) that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz. He would have said that in consumer society of Europe of the 60s.
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For “aesthetic way of looking at the world”—see Hugo Ball’s Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary …
2/23/77
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Story Irene told me about being robbed + raped four years ago. In her building: as she was returning home about 1 a.m. getting into the elevator, a black man forced it open. She screamed. “If you scream again, I’ll kill you.” Took her to the eighth (top) floor, then halfway up stairs leading to the roof. Then blindfolded her.
I asked, “Did you get excited sexually?” She said yes—then said I was the first person she’d ever told that story to who’d asked her that. “But it’s such an obvious question,” I said.
The next day (today) I called her. “I was saying how stupid your friends are,” I said, “but I was thinking now that it was because you told me it happened four years ago—+ you obviously were OK, not traumatized, talked about it so coolly—that it was easy to ask that.”
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2/25/77
University of Chicago education: no idea of “the modern.” Texts, ideas, arguments—exist in a timeless dialogue. The basic themes or questions are those stated by Plato and Aristotle (relation of theory and practice; one or many sciences; relation of virtue and knowledge, etc. etc.) and the moderns are interesting, valuable so far as they too discuss those themes. (We read Bentham, Mill, Dewey, [Rudolf] Carnap.)
The most radical opposite to the timeless, which starts with the category of “the modern.” The basic themes or questions are those stated at the beginning of the modern era (by Rousseau; Hegel) and previous thinkers are interesting, valuable so far as they contrast with the moderns.
With historicist approach, you ask different questions. (Historicism changes the questions—and destroys the themes.) As N[ietzsche] saw, historicism is a fundamentally destructive pov [point of view]. For example, Foucault: the very subject of the human sciences (“man”) is destroyed.
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[Undated, March]
[The following is a series of notes on kitsch, dating from the mid- to late 1970s. Because of their interest, I have included them here, but I cannot be certain when SS wrote them.]
A word that has the power to hurt—e.g. kitsch—is still alive
Kitsch not just a quality of things—also a process
Things “become” kitsch
Kitsch as a historical category: when category of “authentic” becomes imp[ortant]—in 19th century
Japan as a theater of kitsch (Terry)
W B[enjamin]’s “aura” is a kitsch image.
Kitsch is not a stylistic but a meta-stylistic category
Relation of Russian “Poshlost” to “kitsch”
Is there a necessary role of kitsch in democratic politics / epistemology?
Cf. Tocqueville (easy to criticize totalitarian kitsch)
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[Walter] Kaufmann: Kitsch is innocent
Bad art is not the same as kitsch—e.g. acres of bad paintings in Italian 15th + 16th c[enturies].
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Pol[itical] religion is the natural world of kitsch
2 types
1. May Day parade ([Milan] Kundera)—“Long Live Life.”
2. Burial of Horst Wessel ([Nazi] SA activist killed in a brawl with a Communist pimp in Hamburg [sic]; lay for a month dying in hospital: agony—Goebbels visited him every day (described by the American historian [Charles] Beard in journal article)
Burial at Berlin Nickolay cemetery depicted in Hans Westmar (Nazi movie of early 1930s)
Myth invented by Goebbels
Myth of resurrection + return
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Disneyland + Nuremberg rallies are 2 diff[erent] types of kitsch
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3/6/77
Essay to do: on Marxist (moralist) approach to art. (Complement to essay on “the aesthetic view of the world”)
Texts:
[The Italian writer, politician, philosopher, and linguist Antonio] Gramsci
[The British Marxist art critic Christopher] Cauldwell (Stalinist, philistine)
Benjamin
4/19/77
Clear = what one already knows
Obscure = a meaning one doesn’t want to attend to
Copying out ten pages from [Proust’s] Le Temps Retrouvé (to imprint them—like books one reads before the age of fifteen):
Proust didn’t know he was writing the greatest novel ever written. (Neither did his contemporaries, even the most admiring, like Rivière.) And it wouldn’t have done him any good if he had. But he did want to write something great.
I want to write something great.
I’m not ambitious enough. (It’s not just a question of becoming truly intransigent.) I want to be good, liked, etc. I’m afraid of allowing real feeling, real arrogance, selfishness.
I want to sing.
I said it already, in the first thing I wrote for PR [Partisan Review] on [the Yiddish- language writer Isaac Bashevis] Singer. To hell with modern catatonia.
I have more than enough intelligence, learning, vision. The obstacle is character: boldness.
Ruthlessness
Duchamp: too smart to be a painter, like Leonardo; but destroys, parodies—instead of constructs. Leonardo, the great constructor; Duchamp, the great de-constructor. Same fascination with machines, but Duchamp’s is entirely playful, nihilistic …
[Undated, July]
“The adjective is the enemy of the noun.”—Flaubert
7/12/77
Project: convert my photographer’s eye (mute) into a poet’s eye, which hears—words. I see concretely; I write abstractly. The project: to have access, as a writer, to that concreteness. The clot of light on Bob S.’s [Robert Silvers] nose at dinner tonight in the Indian restaurant.
7/19/77
Story about a sorcerer (female)
What is most American about me (Emerson, etc.) is my faith in the possibility of radical change.
Joseph [Brodsky] said that when he began writing he consciously competed with other poets. Now I’ll write a poem that will be better (more profound) than [Boris] Pasternak (or [Anna] Akhmatova—or Frost—or Yeats—or Lowell, etc.) And now? I asked. “Now I’m arguing with angels.”
The importance of being envious, competitive. I don’t try hard enough.
After THE LAST PHONE CALL FROM NICOLE, tonight
Let it hurt, let it hurt.
So this isn’t my front door any longer. Then walk away.
Remember: this could be my one chance, and the last, to be a first-rate writer.
One can never be alone enough to write. To see better.
In a sense—in one sense—I was wasting my time the last three years w[ith] Nicole. I knew that—still wanted to do it. Now that that possibility is no longer available to me, though …
7/20/77
To be noble-minded. To be profound. Never to be “nice.”
Stories (to write):
[Frank O’Hara’s poem] [sic]
“Portrait of the Historian”
“Speed”
“Arguing with Angels”
“And Mondays with Mahatma Gandhi.”
DURCHHALTEN (hold fast)—D[avid] left me a note beside my bed
… The huge enrichment of the imagination and hence of language that comes with solitude.
8/4/77
Each cultural moment has zones of mystery:
—the island
—the scientist’s laboratory
8/11/77
“Mais je t’aime” = “je ne veux pas te perdre complètement”
[“But I love you” = “I don’ t want to lose you completely”]
To say something is interesting—to postpone having to pass a more definite judgment: say that it’s good or bad
A term that has its widest currency in the Duchamp-influenced art world. Cage, etc.
Or to make judgment irrelevant
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8/21/77
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Dinner w[ith] [the American photographer Richard] Avedon: “The past is completely unreal to me. I live only in the present + the future. Is that why I look young?”
Dorian Gay [sic]
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9/8/77
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4-page weekly newspaper I wrote and published (Hectograph) and sold for 5¢ a copy when I was 9, 10, 11 years old.
Fear of—irritation with—images in conversation. I’m already thinking, visualizing one thing; abruptly, I’m made to see something else. [The American writer] Walker Percy telling me how to get to his house from New Orleans. “Take the Pontchartrain Bridge—26 miles—straight as a string.” I’m visualizing the bridge, the plantation house, the bayou, the moss-covered trees. Suddenly there’s this damned string … Paul [Thek] today, talking about sexual attitudes. “And that’s the bottom card.” Later, slumping down, his arms dangling. “They cut my strings.” (More strings!)
9/17/77
CONTEMPT, not indignation
“There is only one thing I dread; not to be worthy of my sufferings.”
—Dostoyevsky
“There is only one thing I dread; that my sufferings will not be worthy of me.”
—Sontag
Bresson, in Notes on Cinematography, quotes Leonardo as saying: in an artistic context all that matters is the end.
Athletes, dancers—having a romance with their bodies
Apollinaire compares Eiffel Tower + Paris roofs to a shepherd + sheep. Image that reduces things to their geography.
The cave of the self.
Emily Dickinson said that “Art is a house that tries to be haunted.”
Now it doesn’t have to try.
So it’s a question of time—when the image comes. It should precede or be simultaneous w[ith] the picture. Otherwise, it’s distracting.
9/20/77
Alcohol: to reverse a feeling.
Cal’s [Robert Lowell’s] poetry. How sad it is. All about loss. He was born old.
I, plus shell: child, adolescent, adult
“Let’s see if I can produce a little theory.”
Thoreau on his death bed—on being asked what were his feelings about the next world: “One world at a time.”
There is no first-rate poet now writing in English.
The Russians didn’t have an 18th century.
Joseph [Brodsky]:
His great love, the mother of his son: Marina (Marianne) [Basmanova]
He read Beckett when?
“Each time you find the line you’re looking for it makes it harder next time.”
Glory, glory, glory.
He likes prose writers who are failed poets. E.g. Nabokov
“If I look at anything longer than two seconds, it becomes absurd.”
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