Notes on "camp" update.

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I was watching The Simpsons episode with John Walters and on his commentary he mentioned Susan Sontag's Notes on 'Camp', which had passed me by until then. As some of you will no doubt be aware she suggests the following random examples of camp...

Zuleika Dobson
Tiffany lamps
Scopitone films
The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Aubrey Beardsley drawings
Swan Lake
Bellini's operas
Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards
Schoedsack's King Kong
the Cuban pop singer La Lupe
Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man
the old Flash Gordon comics
women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)
the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett
stag movies seen without lust

So are these still camp? Were they ever? And - more to the point - what is 'camp' now? Anything? Everything?

― Ned Trifle II, Sunday, 8 April 2007 17:01 (eighteen years ago)

I probably should have made this a 'Most camp thing' poll.

― Ned Trifle II, Sunday, 8 April 2007 17:21 (eighteen years ago)

And what's the difference between camp and kitsch?

I'd have said that some of these are kitsch, as in knowingly tacky over over-ornate - but that camp brings in an element of reference to sexuality, often an effiminate gay aspect.

― Bob Six, Sunday, 8 April 2007 18:58 (eighteen years ago)

which was anna nicole?

― get bent, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:02 (eighteen years ago)

Camp historical events:

Franco-Prussian war
signing of Magna Carta
Bubonic Plague
The Diet of Worms
Armenian Genocide

― Frogman Henry, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:09 (eighteen years ago)

camp is more of a reading/performance strategy, where kitsch tends to be used more as a descriptive for specific objects (you don't really view things through a "kitsch lens," but there's still some overlap between the two)

― impudent harlot, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:19 (eighteen years ago)

I've seen some camp objects in my time.

― Bob Six, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:35 (eighteen years ago)

(but then I do hang out at the Vauxhall Tavern and the Retro Bar a lot).

― Bob Six, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:38 (eighteen years ago)

Beardsley? I don't get that one., 'cept maybe the ones w/ridiculous phalluses?

― Abbott, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:42 (eighteen years ago)

hence the "still some overlap" qualifier. i think it's more of a common practice to refer to those objects as "kitsch", though. also how many kitsch objects are "knowingly" so?

― impudent harlot, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:47 (eighteen years ago)

er,xpost

― impudent harlot, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:48 (eighteen years ago)

Sometimes-ILXor Doug Wolk wrote a Believer article on The Apple that went through and updated Sontag's list -- don't think it's anywhere on the web, though.

― nabisco, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:52 (eighteen years ago)

Camp historical events

Camp in what way?

― fife, Sunday, 8 April 2007 19:54 (eighteen years ago)

To be honest I don't really understand the list. I can go for La Lupe and Flash Gordon but Ivy Compton-Burnett? It's all a bit too random.

― Ned Trifle II, Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:18 (eighteen years ago)

call me dumb* but this has got to be one of the biggest wastes of brainpower of the 20th century.

* or whatever adjective

― lfam, Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:25 (eighteen years ago)

thanks susan sontag

― lfam, Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:26 (eighteen years ago)

I don't think La Lupe is strictly a camp pleasure. It depends on which material you're talking about. Her boleros, in particular, can be enjoyed on a pretty straight level once you get used to the highly emotional idiom.

― Rockist Scientist, Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:27 (eighteen years ago)

not this thread clearly, but all of the critical energy that went into talking about camp and kitsch

― lfam, Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:28 (eighteen years ago)

I'll take camp over semiotics.

― Eric H., Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:29 (eighteen years ago)

(Though I guess that might not be strictly 20th C.)

― Eric H., Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:30 (eighteen years ago)

(And I was just thinking about La Lupe a few minutes ago, because of this: http://learning-latin.blogspot.com/)

― Rockist Scientist, Sunday, 8 April 2007 22:31 (eighteen years ago)

Exaggerating a bit, it strikes me as typical Sontag: spot a trend, work up a bit of ill-thought-out theory, realise it doesn't hang together, so call it 'Notes On..'

I'm curious what Tuomas thinks of her.

― Bob Six, Monday, 9 April 2007 08:59 (eighteen years ago)

When the topic is a vague, emerging sensibility that's inevitably going to be impossible to pin down, I think a general "notes on" approach is probably the best one you could take, actually.

A lot of the Sontag that's the most dear or interesting to me consists of that stuff -- not the focused reading, but stuff like this or that fascism one I love, which circle their way around larger aesthetics and sensibilities without really pretending they can be absolutely codified. Those larger sensibilities strike me as the most important and fascinating things in aesthetics and criticism, and they don't often get addressed directly, pretty much because of the response you're having -- they can never be absolutely and non-embarrassingly pinned down, so someone needs to have the confidence to grope after them a bit.

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 16:37 (eighteen years ago)

That's the beauty of the essay form--it's an essay, a try, an attempt at understanding a subject that probably cannot be frozen and discussed as a single, static thing. The book I'm plowing through now, Ross Posnock's Philip Roth's Rude Truth talks a bit about this, invoking Musil's A Man Without Qualities and Adorno's The Essay as Form. Adorno liked the essay because it was like a type of protest, a form of resistance to strict definitions, excessive rationalism, and reductionism.

― G00blar, Monday, 9 April 2007 17:04 (eighteen years ago)

Surely no list of camp historical events can be complete without the Camp David Accords.

― jaymc, Monday, 9 April 2007 17:05 (eighteen years ago)

'Adorno liked the essay' --obvs not referring to Sontag's essay, but to the essay form in general. xpost

― G00blar, Monday, 9 April 2007 17:05 (eighteen years ago)

A lot of the Sontag that's the most dear or interesting to me consists of that stuff -- not the focused reading, but stuff like this or that fascism one I love, which circle their way around larger aesthetics and sensibilities without really pretending they can be absolutely codified.

Quite OTM. See also: "Style"; her second book on photography.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Monday, 9 April 2007 17:05 (eighteen years ago)

I would recommend Sontag's On Photography to all those who find Marshall McLuhan useful. It will at least briefly recalibrate your perception. "Notes On Camp", I think, is her only other work I've read, but it made little impression. It seemed like a excursion along a not very significant vein, the sort of thing writers do to keep themselves in practice.

Philip Reiff, her ex-husband, may have attacked the more significant themes of postwar America. I haven't yet read him. Here's an interview from shortly before his death a year or so ago.

― fife, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:32 (eighteen years ago)

I doubt any of us these days can really have a clear line on what "Notes on Camp" felt or read like when it was written, since the notion of camp has been so codified and modified since then.

Sidenote: last year I kept finding myself in discussions about the Sontag life plan, which like half the women I know seem to think would be ideal. (This sequence, which was presumably not so much a "plan" for Sontag, would boil down to "have a child while young and divorce later, so your kid's mostly grown by the time you do your career busting-out, and then you can be all awesome and date other women and you've already had your child-rearing experience," etc.)

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:42 (eighteen years ago)

I was surprised when I finally read it, because its reputation had long preceded it.

It seemed like a excursion along a not very significant vein, the sort of thing writers do to keep themselves in practice.

This is otm. It's the sort of thing that you might find in any weekend (non-tabloid) newspaper. Everyone's a cultural commentator these days.

― Bob Six, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:52 (eighteen years ago)

the notion of camp has been so codified and modified since then.

I almost added that it's only interesting to the extent that camp, as a kind of mockery of taste and seriousness, has become normative in pop culture. In Sontag's time it was consumed with warring against the highbrow and middlebrow. Camp, at least in mass culture, has triumphed.

Paris Hilton: the Jesus of camp.

― fife, Monday, 9 April 2007 21:56 (eighteen years ago)

Well, there's definitely a worthwhile Phd thesis in the transition of camp to mainstream culture.

Has it really been codified? I think that it's still difficult to pin down.

What's interested me in the last few year is gay critics of gay culture (such as Paul Burston, Mark Simpson) who see wide-spread adoption of camp as a kind of cultural poverty/monoculture.

― Bob Six, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:12 (eighteen years ago)

Codified might be the wrong word, but I think pretty much everyone now has some personal understanding of what camp entails (however vague or inchoate), whereas Sontag seemed to be writing from a position of not assuming that was the case.

Hahaha a modern music-geek way of putting this might be that her writing was along the lines of doing "Notes on Emo" in 2003, rather than like "Notes on Goth" in 2003.

― nabisco, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:16 (eighteen years ago)

Sontag's list is dated, but her portable definition ("failed seriousness") is not.

Different generations relate to the archive of previous culture in ways that keep revising what shows up as camp-worthy. (I'm thinking here of Benjamin's remark in the Arcades that there's nothing less erotically charged than the recent past; it takes a certain historical distance for some camp energy to build up).

Maybe it's worth remembering that queers used "camp" as a verb: camp-ing was something that you *did* among friends as a response to mass culture (Charles Pierce "camped" Bette Davis, etc.). Maybe the concept doesn't feel as necessary now because the most flagrantly campy things going right now (American Idol and America's Next Top Model) already camp themselves, they don't really require a parasitic/critical reflection. They're fully aware of their own constructed-ness, there's no phony grasp towards an authenticity for anybody to both to snicker at because they don't conceal their staged-ness, they revel in it. As targets for camp mockery they're both too slippery *and* too easy.

― Drew Daniel, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:25 (eighteen years ago)

oops weird syntax there sorry

― Drew Daniel, Monday, 9 April 2007 22:26 (eighteen years ago)

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