Der Zuschauer

It is with great sadness and all due respect that we note the translation of Leszek Kolakowski out of this material life.

Max Klinger et al.

We are pleased to announce that a considerable section of Trotsky’s writing on women and the family has been added, along with a montage of ripened female intellectuals, to the It is I, Ekaterina Degot page, entitled Breeder Reactors, or, the Knocking Shop. We trust you will take due note. Our Best to you.

Degot, Grabbe, and Shadewell

Dr. Johnson, in his Rasselas, has Imlac say “To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire, is the business of a scholar.”

“I am alive..I am beautiful…what else is there?” The first volume (1947-1963) of an intended 3 volume set of Susan Sontag’s Journals and Noetbooks certainly gives reason to pause, and then, to get excited all over again. Revealing much about her sexual and intellectual experiences in her formative years, some of us startled and then delighted to learn she was bisexual, or perhaps, more to the point, a lesbian wiho also slept with men throughout her life–as many of us are want to do.
After her first experience with another woman she writes, “And what am I now, as I write this? My concept of sexuality is altered–Thank God!–bisexuality as the expression of a fullness of an individual–and an honest rejection of the–yes–perversion which limits sexual experience, attempts to de-physicalize it, in such concepts as the idealization of chastity until the ‘right person’ comes along–the whole ban on pure physical senation without love, on promiscuity.”

One of the preeminent American intellectuals of her time she was the author of Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography, and Illness as Metaphor.

“I know what to do with my life, all of this being so simple, but so difficult for me in the past to know. I want to sleep with many people–I want to live and hate to die–I will not teach, or get a master’s after I get my B.A.”

Although she went on to get a PhD, the agenda remains clear: “I don’t intend to let my intellect dominate me. I intend to do ev erything…to have one way of evaluating experience–does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful–I shall anticipate pleasure
everywhere and find it, too, for it is everyhere.

Sontag was 16 when she wrote the above. Other striking remarks: “I am proud of being Jewish. Of what?”

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor for it is an institution committed to the dulling of feelings.”

There appears to have been a menage in Paris between Sontag, the woman “H,” and the tedious, self-regarding Cuban-American playwright, Maria Irene Fornes. No one can be perfect. She also writes:

“The orgasm focuses…I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego.”

Of some of her influences and interests, such as Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, we can say little positive. Still her abiding interest in such writers as Conrad, Dosteyevsky, Hesse, Hopkins, Henry James, Kafka, Mann, Tolstoy and others more than makes up for the dubious Frogs.

“My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality…I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.”

On the same day she writes: “I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable. It increases my desire to hide, to be invisible.”

One remember in the title essay of Against Interpretation she had written “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

So say we all on Guam Island. It is a heady, exciting book the editors can reccomend with unreserved enthusiam.

“I am alive…I am beautiful…What else matters?”

Clearly, as you will find upon reading the book, there was a great deal more. We write in earnest.

The Editors, Ekaterina Degot, et al.

“”If this villainy [Kingdoms without Justice] wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralized that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of Kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity.”

Augustine of Hippo

“Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a larger scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? A gang is a group of men under the command of a leader, bound by a compact of association, in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention.”

From Book IV, Chapter 5 of Augustine of Hippo’s The City of God against the Pagans.

We have received a report, involving spontaneous combustion, regarding our Northeast Corridor correspondent, Stanley Richardson. It seems he was noticed by various of our spies reading through copies of The Examiner and taking notes on the opera criticism of Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, et al, when he disapeared in a cloud of white smoke. This was in the Tisch Library at Tufts University. His books, notes, and writing remained, but no sight of this young man we call Hothead or Roman Candle Red. Why has he left us? Where did he go? Opera is not worth a candle to our rueful amazement and concern. Let us know, Dear Readers, if you have learned anything.

The Editors, Der Zuschauer

Didn’t you think about this all summer long on Long Island, and didn’t you let your hair down, as they say, down on the Cape? I didn’t; we didn’t; who did? But Trotsky, of course, had to flee Siberia twice before the Russian Civil War; there is his essay, Flight from Siberia, and perhaps he often experienced Yurt Like Conditions. If he did in fact recover in that filthy Mexico City hospital, perphaps he fled across the Pacific, and through the Problems of the Chinese Revolution, ended up in Ulan Blator, and writng his Diaries in Exile, various volumes. We think his writings On the Labor Party in the United States, and On the Paris Commune significant. Moreover, Whither France? and Where is Britain Going? And the immortal writings regarding Women and the Family. Thank God, Dear Readers, we will not be seeing you soon in the Ukraine.

Our Best to you. Grabbe, Here.

“Man’s life so little worth,
do we fear to take or lose it?
No ill companion on a journey, Death
lays his purse on the table and opens the wine.”