by Susan Sontag
At PR office in Union Square—Wm. Phillips opens metal locker + takes out Elémire Zolla’s The Eclipse of the Intellectual
Me (thumbing through book): “It doesn’t look very good, but one could review the title.”
WP: “Oh. You’re smart.”
Lenny [Leonard] Michaels is a sprinter, Pynchon is a marathon runner.
Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness”
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There is no word for hypocrisy in Japanese
[The nineteenth-century Italian writer Giacomo] Leopardi—anguish of solitude, obsession with transience + mortality, life-time obsession with “noia” (metaphysical tedium, boredom)
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[Undated, March]
… In 19th C. novelists knew about science:
—George Eliot … cf. medical ideas in Middlemarch
—Balzac: cf. preface to Human Comedy—theory of types: see macrocosm (society) in micro (individual)—indiv[idual] adapts Balzac, Les Chouans
Last novelist to be influenced by, knowledgeable about science was [Aldous] Huxley
One reason [there are] no more novels—There are no exciting theories of relation of society to self (soc[iological], historical, philosophical)
Not SO—no one is doing it, that’s all
Series of phenomenological essays:
—crying
—swoonng
—blushing
[The nineteeth-century French scientist] Claude Bernard: theory of internal milieu
Crying:
Notion of “brimming”
Body as vessel of fluids
Tears in early 18th C. erotic literature
Tears as proof of feeling
Not to be able to cry = to be emotionally frigid
Swooning:
Reaction to emotional shock (good or bad news)
When did it stop?
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“Every life is the defense of a form.” Hölderlin > Nietzsche > Webern
[In the margin:] Europhoria
There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work
Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time, divorce! divorce!—W. C. [William Carlos] Williams
3/10/79 Navarro [in California]
I am here to blast through my “block.” One practice that might help is to try, even at the early stage of an essay, to write complete sentences. An idea in the form of a rubric often proves to be sterile.
To write one must wear blinkers. I’ve lost my blinkers.
Don’t be afraid to be concise!
4/13/79 (plane from LA to Tokyo)
Reply to jealousy: “Don’t. It (she, he) wasn’t anything. I just enjoyed her, him.”
[The English singer and songwriter] Graham Parker last night at the Roxy. The sarcasm of British rock.—
Spiritual aloofness. Don’t encourage so much.
The arts of sarcasm.
High, pinched, monotonous voice—separating inflection from meaning
Cerebral jogging
The spavined old theory
[Undated, April]
Japan notes
Bowing—
The deer, begging for food in the park in Nara; someone standing with a red public phone on the street, saying good-bye over the phone; the white-gloved women operating the elevators of big department stores
Sovereign iconoclasm
Skittering + dithering
Forsworn
Scrappy
6/1/79
To [the American photographer] Star Black, worrying at the beginning of their affair, D[avid] says: “Relax. There’s no shortcut to tragedy.”
6/14/79 Paris
“Vox Clamantis (in deserto)”—ref[erence] to St. John the Baptist—“a voice crying (in the wilderness)”
Succulent + nervous style
Wastrel
Simple words, with their little life, their magic “pop”: deftly, indolent, infection, churn, dainty
The noble brigand (Robin Hood)
Moral terrorism
7/19/79 New York
A failure of nerve. About writing. (And about my life—but never mind.) I must write myself out of it.
If I am not able to write because I’m afraid of being a bad writer, then I must be a bad writer. At least I’ll be writing.
Then something else will happen. It always does.
I must write every day. Anything. Everything. Carry a notebook with me at all times, etc.
I read my bad reviews. I want to go to the bottom of it—this failure of nerve.
Why I think mainly of schemas.
7/22/79
Sly, spidery 79-year-old
To have a project: to create a world.
I’ve become passive. I don’t invent, I don’t yearn. I manage, I cope.
7/25/79
Story about [the twentieth-century English writer J. R.] Ackerley-figure—see Spender essay [in] NYRB [The New York Review of Books].
God may forgive, but He rarely exonerates.
New “revolutionary” regimes replacing the old dictatorships (Shah [of Iran] > Khomeini …)—new blends of cruelty and hypocrisy
[Marina] Tsvetayeva, Mandelstam—accelerated poets.
Someone said to condemn Lizzie’s prose: “It’s as if she left out every other line.” A good idea.
Joseph told me yesterday that he was trying to beat Vergil (the Bucolics). Also that [the Russian writer Vladimir] Buk-ovsky told him in Cambridge recently that there are CIA agents in Amnesty [International]. (Not Whitney Ellsworth, new president of American Amnesty.) If it’s infiltrated by the CIA, then there are also KGB agents, too.
Joseph’s image for the Coliseum: Argus’s skull
…
“To discuss one’s spiritual life journalistically is impossible.”
Re-read [Broch’s] The Death of Virgil
Donald Carne-Ross, “Classics + the Intellectual Community,” Arion,” spring, 1973
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Maritime traditions: punctuality and candor
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11/2/79 NYC
Two good days of work on the story, much material, vivid associations, crowds of details. But the writing doesn’t pour. It’s too laborious, too constructed.
Who is talking? Is the problem (for me) that I’m writing in the third person—with interspersed scraps of dialogue?
Wring the naïveté out of it. Go faster.
Lizzie: “Well, it’s curtains for him, or, as my students would say, drapes.”
Resigning from Barnard: “I can’t stand it another minute, those horrible little girls coming in with their horrible little stories, and I say to them, ‘The word you’re looking for is curtains, not drapes.’”
Plus ça change:
1728: Robert Walpole, Prime Minister, applauded John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera from his theatre box when they sang lyrics accusing him of bribery + vice. He even called for an encore, after which the audience applauded him.
[Plato’s] Republic: “[In a democracy, the father] accustoms himself to become like his child and to fear his sons … Metic [resident alien] is like citizen and citizen like metic, and stranger like both [in the margin: (Ernst) Rhys] … The schoolmasters fears and flatters his pupils … The young act like their seniors, and compete with them in speech and action, while the old men condescend to the young and become triumphs of versatility and wit, imitating their juniors in order to avoid the appearance of being sour or despotic.”
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Old project: Story about the Female Messiah ([the French philosopher Charles] Fourier, [the French social reformer Barthélemy-Prosper] Enfantin, etc.)
The visual supermarket
The Puritan concern with fashion
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West Coast slang: “clones” (homo[sexual] men) and breeders (hetero[exual]s)
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11/28/79
I am mad, quite mad—and perhaps one can write about that.
No one has noticed. My prowess in disguising it. I wander about the apartment, slyly rummaging … No place is the right place for my feet. Time is speeded-up. I lie down, I get up, I pace, I lie down, I sleep, I get up, and so on.
Movies seen in Berkeley (Pacific Film Archive, No. 29 + 30)
**** Bruce Conner, A Movie
Kidlat Tahimik, Perfumed Nightmare
**** Rossellini, Europa 51
Bruce Conner, Cosmic Ray
Yves Allégret, Une si jolie petite plage
(1949—Gérard Philipe, Jean Servais …)
Boris Barnet, Okraina (1933)
[Andrei] Konchalovsky, Uncle Vanya
Bruce Conner, Report
* Douglas Sirk, Written on the Wind (Rock Hudson …)
" ", Tarnished Angels
" ", There’s Always Tomorrow
(starring Fred MacMurray)
Syberberg, Die Grafen Pocci
12/4/79
God had to shrink Himself, as they say, in order to create. The writer?
Contemporary distrust of the masterpiece, that is distrust of the afterlife of great art …
The difficulty of writing the Syberberg essay: every item of description must have an idea between its teeth
…
Art is the production of mental events in / as a concrete sensuous form.
The ands implore
Drivel “at miser’s full tilt” (Pasternak)
Aghast
What is not talked about: the small pathological impulse(s) behind many of the dogmas of modernism (modernist aesthetics). For example: the fascination with grids and repression, rigidification. [—]Mondrian
12/14/79
Struggling through the Syberberg labyrinth, I have an idea for a novel. A great idea—I mean an idea for an ambitious, big book
[In the margin:] novel about melancholy. It is, after all, my subject. So I am being coherent. And something about which I can be lyrical + passionate.
Fresco, picaresque, Everything.
Re-read Panofsky—and [Günter] Grass.
Reading [Döblin’s novel] Berlin Alexanderplatz—it’s wonderful. He was a Jew. Sirk directed his only play around 1936—got in trouble for it
Sirk [whom SS had met; this is presumably a reference to something he told her] spoke of a poem from Goethe’s West–East Divan that Kafka liked to recite.
…
12/15/79
My first novel is a portrait of Melancholy. I discover re-reading Panofsky’s essay “Symbolism + Dürer’s ‘Melencolia’”
“The melancholy humor … was supposed to be coessential with earth + to be dry and cold; it was related to the rough Boreas, to autumn, evening, and an age of about sixty.”
Not for nothing was I born under The Sign of Saturn: without knowing, I knew. At 27, I was drawn to describe someone of sixty + to pick for an epigraph: “Maintenant, j’ai tou-ché l’automne des idées” [“Now I have arrived at the autumn of ideas / thought.”—Baudelaire]
Now?
From grandmother’s gefilte fish + glass of tea to granddaughter’s menu of recreational chemicals.
Abdul Hamid—deposed 1909; last powerful Sultan of Turkey; paranoid—built fantasy city
1980
1/24/80
A story called “Fear of War”
Lunch with [the American writer] Joyce Carol Oates, her husband Ray Smith, + Stephen K[och]. Stephen speaks of his psychological weather—there’s always the weather, he says. Not true, say I. But there’s always the sky, says Stephen. Who goes out? I reply. Not I. I don’t have weather. I have central heating. My central heating is Western civilization—my books + pictures + records.
Joyce writes all the time. She can meditate while writing. She says she has no feelings. What’s the point of feeling anxiety? “I’ll probably go to my death as on a conveyor belt,” she said. Stephen said she had a mystical experience at 30—in London: it lasted twenty minutes …
One could write about her.
Interview w[ith] Oates in [Joe David] Bellamy book [The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, including SS]. Her humility.
Dinner last night with Wm. Burroughs (+ [the British writer] Victor Bokris, [the American poet, photographer, and filmmaker ] Gerard Malanga). Bokris asked us, Burroughs and me, about our “legendary” meeting with Beckett two years ago in Berlin. “Very decorous,” Burroughs said. Later he said: “Beckett doesn’t need any input. It’s all inside.”
J. C. Oates’ method of composing:—sentences or paragraphs. Then cut them out—then number the scraps + lay them out …
Joseph said: if it moves, it can’t be art. Ballet? Superior entertainment. Take that Misha [Brodksy’s friend and patron, the dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov]
I am a militant feminist but not a feminist militant. (D[avid])
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[In the margin:] Aesthetic: can be many spaces + many times simultaneously
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2/3/80
Syberberg—
… From Caligari to Hitler to [Syberberg’s] Hitler—what S. aspires to. (Hyperbolic cinephilia: he starts as a film—now he ends as a film.)
S. thinks he has rescued Wagner from Hitler. True?
S. takes the eschatology of Nazism seriously.
Events have spiritual weight that has nothing to do with the weight of history
2/14/80
D[avid]’s idea: a Tristram Shandy–like story about a pathological liar. Confidential tone—Changes the story of his life in each chapter
2/28/80
Raimonda says of C[arlotta]: “She has a very detached relation to life. The good result of this is that she’s never vulgar, never cheap. The bad part is her connection w[ith] the others.”
Theme in 19th c Am[erican] lit. (Melville, James): the innocent who causes destructive impulses to be unleashed—by being innocent.
(Culture as crisis)
3/10/80
Döblin’s wonderful essay on photography + death—written as preface to Sander’s book: Benjamin + a poet’s sensibility.
Symbolist works: [Roussel’s] Locus Solus, [Duchamp’s] The Large Glass, [Buñuel’s] L’Age d’Or
I’ve listened to [Leoš Janáek’s opera] The Makropulos Case ten times in the last three days. I want to direct it, I know how—like Come tu mi vuoi [Pirandello’s play As You Desire Me, which SS had directed at the Teatro Stabile di Torino].
The reading is getting out of hand. I’m an addict—I need to be disintoxicated … It’s a substitute for writing. No wonder I’m so anxious these days.
