Joe's View

Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be ending 2008 with a major literary event — the publication of the first of three volumes of journals and notebooks by the late great Susan Sontag.
The essayist, novelist and filmmaker died four years ago, after three battles with cancer.
Her incredible wide-ranging interests included photography, European literature, movies and history, all of which she wrote about with peerless insight and style.
I’ve been reading an uncorrected proof of volume one of the journals — “Reborn,” covering the years 1947 to 1963 — over the past few days and have been appreciative of the way the notes take us into the earliest stages of Sontag’s life and career as a thinker.
The first two lines in the book, written on Nov. 23, 1947 are very strong:
“I believe:
(a) That there is no personal god or life after death.”
Sontag may be gone in a physical sense, but her “life” as a writer will continue with indelible books such as “On Photography” and “Illness as Metaphor.”
“Reborn” starts with a remarkable introductory essay by Sontag’s son, David Rieff, who has edited the three books despite some personal reservations about the project.
“I have always thought that one of the stupidest things the living say about the dead is the phrase ‘so-and-so would have wanted it this way’ At best it is guesswork; most often it is hubris, no matter how well intended. You simply cannot know,” Rieff begins.
“Reborn” is “not the book she would have produced” Rieff says of his mother: “— and that assumes she would have decided to publish these diaries in the first place.”
Rieff says he wishes he did not have to become involved with the project, but that Sontag died without leaving any instructions as to what should be done with her papers. Before her death, Sontag did sell her papers to the University of California at Los Angeles library, without any restictions on access to her papers.
“I soon came to feel that the decision had been made for me,” Rieff writes of deciding to edit the three volumes. ““Either I would organize them or someone else would. It seemed better to go forward.”
Few editors have ever been as honest about their work as Rieff is in the introduction: “My misgivings remain. To say that these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement…One of the principal dilemmas in all this has been that, at least in her later life, my mother was not in any way a self-revealing person. In particular, she avoided to the extent she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality or any acknowledgment of her own ambition. So my decision certainly violates her privacy. There is no other way of describing it fairly.”
I think Rieff is a bit too hard on himself. The entries in volume one are very frank about Sontag’s early confusion over her sexuality, but she never delves into this side of her life in a salacious manner.
In her “public” writing, Sontag seemed willing to analyze and question almost any facet of life — she was pilloried for writing one of the very few challenging essays to appear in the immediate wake of 9/11.
The journal writing seems of a piece with Sontag’s other ruthlessly direct work — I doubt that she would have passed the material along to UCLA if she felt it went beyond the bounds of her own character and morality as a writer.
Who knows, perhaps Sontag decided to preserve the material so that she could write about sexuality in a more direct manner if she had been given another few years of life.

To hear media futurists tell it, print newspapers and magazines are going the way of such other extinct 20th century fixtures as phone booths and drive-in movie theaters.
But how do those doom-and-gloomers explain the lethal-weapon-sized September issue of Vogue?
And, what’s up with “Fantastic Man,” the fashion and arts magazine that keeps getting bigger and glossier with each new issue?
Issue number eight landed on my desk last week and it is nearly 100 pages fatter than the last issue.
The magazine is the brainchild of Dutch writer-entrepreneurs Jop Van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers whose earlier magazine, “Butt,” has attracted an international cult following for its combination of Q&As with important filmmakers and artists like Gus Van Sant and Marc Jacobs, and near-pornographic photo spreads and reader confessions.
Despite the rawness of their product, Jop and Gert began attracting high-end fashion advertisers willing to take a walk on the wild side — including Tom Ford and Calvin Klein — but the launch of the much more conservative “Fantastic Man” has opened an advertising floodgate.
Issue Eight has ads from high-end brands like Gucci and Prada along with an outrageous two-page ad spread from Marc Jacobs with a partially nude photo of Thomas Koerfer by Juergen Teller that would not not pass muster at GQ or Men’s Vogue.
The deadpan profiles are a riot including the one on cover boy Francesco Vezzoli, the Italian filmmaker/performance artist who has a genius for getting all sorts of celebrities to appear in his short films. His “Trailer for a remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula’” (above) included appearances by Helen Mirren, Courtney Love, and Benicio Del Toro, and was shown in museums all over the world.
The 36-year-old artist is a master at issuing over-the-top quotes of the sort that have made the careers of jet set fashionistas such as Karl Lagerfeld.
“I smell like an 85-year-old lady on Park Avenue in the ’60s. I love old ladies’ perfumes on me,” Vezzoli tells interviewer Tim Blanks (the scent in question is Olene by Diptyque).
“I am sexually very curious but not very active,” the artist says. “Being active sexually implies danger, and I’m not risking my life for sex.”
“Fashion is one of the greatest languages, like cinema or theatre. And it’s unashamedly part of the entertainment industry unlike art, which is embarrassed by it,” Vezzoli says of his personal alliances with Miuccia Prada and Donatella Versace (the latter made the costumes for his mock “Caligula” trailer).
“…there are all these people that belong to the art world who are embarrassed by their ambitions for visibility. It makes their intellectual attitude so crippled, and in the end their work suffers.”
“Fantastic Man” is a print product that wouldn’t be possible without the Internet. Jop and Gert have forged links with ad reps, readers and writers all over the world. In a biographical note on contributing photographer Jeanne Detallante, we are told, “There is not much we know of Ms. Detallante since we have never met her, nor have we spoken with her on the telephone. We did exchange electronic mail for the production of the glorious ‘Mountain Views’ series on page 96…”

Have you seen the postage stamp issued in honor of Bette Davis on Sept. 18?
The United States Postal Service recognized the greatness of the screen legend and longtime resident of Westport with a weirdly photo-shopped still (right) from “All About Eve” in which Margo Channing’s signature cigarette was removed (leaving a hand gesture that makes little sense).
Movie buffs used to joke that the elimination of tobacco use from public spaces in this country might lead to a crackdown on Bette Davis movies since the lifelong smoker used those little coffin nails as a major prop for much of her career.
Indeed, most nightclub and TV comic impressions of the star always included the distinctive way Davis gestured with cigarettes in most of her roles.
Well, the censoring of Miss Davis’s screen persona has begun.
It’s one thing to shift away from cigarette smoking in modern films — both on the grounds of our growing awareness of the health hazard represented by smoking and as a realistic representation of the way cigarettes are no longer seen in hotel lobbies and restaurants and bars — but to go back and tamper with pop cultural history is unsettling and dangerous.
Cable czar Ted Turner caused a big stink 20 years ago when he decided to add color to some of the black-and-white movies he acquired in the purchase of the MGM and Warner Bros. film libraries. Ted said he wanted to bring those “old-fashioned” pictures of the 1930s and 1940s up to date.
Do you think someone is working on a new cable TV version of “All About Eve” in which Margo holds carrot sticks instead of cigs?