Re: Patti & Nietzsche per Sontag & "The Din in the Head"

[Helen Graves <javelina>]

Dennis, the Newsday obit (a reprint from the Los Angeles Times) has 
your clue - Steve Wasserman cites a Rolling Stone interview in which 
Susan Sontag linked her passions - in this case Nietzsche and Patti Smith:

Sontag recoiled at what she regarded as the artificial boundaries 
separating one subject, or one art form, from another.
"I love to read the way people love to watch television," she told 
Rolling Stone. For her, culture was a vast smorgasbord, a movable 
feast. The point, she often said, quoting Goethe, was "to know everything."
"So when I go to a Patti Smith concert, I enjoy, participate, 
appreciate and am tuned in better because I've read Nietzsche. The 
main reason I read is that I enjoy it. There's no incompatibility 
between observing the world and being tuned into an electronic, 
multimedia, multi-tracked, McLuhanite world and enjoying what can be 
enjoyed about rock 'n' roll."

So yes, Cynthia Ozick is being sloppy.  Ozick, a talented writer but 
one who is willing to operate only in a very particular universe, one 
that is shrinking, never got this side of Sontag.  Ozick would never, 
ever have read the Rolling Stone piece.  She WOULD have read the 
Wasserman obituary.  At the time he wrote it, he was editor of the 
Los Angeles Times Book Review.  (A side note - interestingly, Steve 
Wasserman, a longtime friend of Sontag's, was given much grief during 
his time in L.A. for supposedly featuring obscure writers and not 
highlighting the pop culture of Los Angeles.  I would bet he 
published reviews of Cynthia Ozick's books ... )

On the same topic of "Let's go after Susan now, she's dead so she 
can't flail us" - There's another new book out that's about Sontag 
and her circle, very gossipy and nasty, which I saw at Barnes & Noble 
a couple of days ago, glanced at, and was really sickened by - the 
writer seemed to me like a maggot going after a corpse's flesh.  And 
I know several of his "scandalous" revelations to be lies.  If he 
wanted to take her on, he should have done so when she was alive.

I was at the Bowery Ballroom a few years back when Sontag was alive 
and Patti dedicated "Because the Night" to her - as the song began 
she was just arriving from a Schoenberg concert at Lincoln Center.


At 12:08 PM 5/28/2006, Dennis Moore wrote:
>"...Sontag was "a central figure in the aesthetic bouleversement of
>that period: the absorption of pop culture into high culture, the
>abandonment of classical form for modernist fracture, the enthronement
>of the shattered consciousness in place of realism and morals and
>beginning-middle-end." The New York Times remarked that Sontag for
>all that "the life of the mind was for her something both rigorous and
>passionate"could nevertheless link Patti Smith and Nietzsche. Under
>the old eternity, no one would dream of linking Patti Smith and
>Nietzsche. Under the new dispensation, the old eternity evaporated,
>differentiation was dust, high culture was porous and always open to
>Patti Smith." [snip]
>
>http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?textType=excerpt&titleNumber=689435
>
>see also:
>
>http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl-bk-birkerts28may28,0,5000195.story?coll=cl-books-utility-right
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/books/28cnd-sont.html?ei=5090&en=f88d1db2e18c3c3b&ex=1261976400&pagewanted=all&position=
>
>http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/la-122804sontag_lat,0,2157061.story?page=2&coll=ny-entertainment-headlines
>
>I can't locate an article cited by Ozack:
>
>""The New York Times remarked that Sontag for all that "the life of
>the mind was for her something both rigorous and passionate"could
>nevertheless link Patti Smith and Nietzsche."
>
>Can you?  Perhaps the foreward author is being sloppy here and
>referring to the nyt article above and another Sontag article in the
>same sentence?