Notes on Camp

But not everything can be seen as Camp. It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.

It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.

These notes are for Oscar Wilde.

‘One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.’

– Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young

There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself.

I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it.

To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it.

And Camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described.

BETTY FRIEDAN · The Problem that Has No Name
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA · The Dialogue of Two Snails
YUKO TSUSHIMA · Of Dogs and Walls
JAVIER MARÍAS · Madame du Deffand and the Idiots
CARSON MCCULLERS · The Haunted Boy
JORGE LUIS BORGES · The Garden of Forking Paths
ANDY WARHOL · Fame
PRIMO LEVI · The Survivor
VLADIMIR NABOKOV · Lance
WENDELL BERRY · Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer

CHINUA ACHEBE · Africa’s Tarnished Name
SUSAN SONTAG · Notes on ‘Camp’
JOHN BERGER · The Red Tenda of Bologna
FRANÇOISE SAGAN · The Gigolo
CYPRIAN EKWENSI · Glittering City
JACK KEROUAC · Piers of the Homeless Night
HANS FALLADA · Why Do You Wear a Cheap Watch?
TRUMAN CAPOTE · The Duke in His Domain
SAUL BELLOW · Leaving the Yellow House
KATHERINE ANNE PORTER · The Cracked Looking-Glass
JAMES BALDWIN · Dark Days
GEORGES SIMENON · Letter to My Mother
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS · Death the Barber