Fascinating Fascism

[Mark Kohut]

Yes, Susan Sontag read the book. I admired
her critical judgment a lot and she maintained
that GR did not rise about good sci-fi...

That judgment bothered me but I'm over it.

She told this at least to an artist whose work
has gone around here on the guitar some
of whose work is Pynchon-inspired. Not 
Zak Smith....Can't remember name.

This essay you cite was published before
GR as you must know but maybe not
all reading this do...


----- Original Message ----
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, November 4, 2010 9:37:06 PM
Subject: Re: Fascinating Fascism

"The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty,
the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is
death."

not a bad summary of GR in one sentence, eh? wonder if SS ever read the book

rich

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Want, have time, to say more, rich?
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
> To: "“pynchon-l at waste.org“" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, November 4, 2010 1:22:21 PM
> Subject: Fascinating Fascism
>
> essay by Susan Sontag on Leni Riefenstahl (1975)
>
> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1975/feb/06/fascinating-fascism/
>
> lots of Pynchonian echoes
>
>
> These ideals are vivid and moving to many people, and it is
> dishonest—and tautological—to say that one is affected by Triumph of
> the Will and Olympiad because they were made by a film maker of
> genius. Riefenstahl’s films are still effective because, among other
> reasons, their longings are still felt, because their content is a
> romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached, and which is
> expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda
> for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy,
> Laing’s antipsychiatry, Third World camp-following, and belief in
> gurus and the occult. The exaltation of community does not preclude
> the search for absolute leadership; on the contrary, it may inevitably
> lead to it. (Not surprisingly, a fair number of the young people now
> prostrating themselves before gurus and submitting to the most
> grotesquely autocratic discipline are former anti-authoritarians and
> anti-elitists of the 1960s.) And Riefenstahl’s devotion to the Nuba, a
> tribe not ruled by one supreme chief or shaman, does not mean she has
> lost her eye for the seducer-performer—even if she has to settle for a
> nonpolitician. Since she finished her work on the Nuba some years ago,
> one of her main projects has been photographing Mick Jagger.
>
> rich
>
>
>
>
>