The Notebooks of Susan Sontag have recently come out. Aside from being the outpourings of a really, really annoying person, they remind me that she (along with James Joyce, and, every so often, William Burroughs), was one of the very first high-flown intellectuals to examine crap and crap culture. She wrote her Notes on Camp in 1964, isolating just a small chunk of that terra incognita: garbage. I looked through the essay today and was struck by how she just dives right into it, never mentioning that camp was already a very developed gay sensibility.
Well, she wouldn't, would she? Things were different then, so why risk getting your ass kicked? I remember that Notes on Camp made a big stir, mostly a big angry bee-like stir. At the time, a very sharp division existed between a serious intellectual life and cultural crap. Teachers and parents warned that if you read comic books, went to horror movies, watched TV all the time, and listened to rock n' roll, YOUR BRAIN WOULD ROT. Then Pop artists started doing paintings using cartoons as a direct subject matter, rock n' roll made it onto the college campuses, and Terry Southern got a few things published. All this was good news to those of us who had been busily reading, viewing, and listening to crap all along.
I was in art school at the time, and remember the long, sad looks on my teachers' faces as they warned us that the barbarians were at the gate. God only knew where this crap-acceptance would end up. Well, it ended up right here: With Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I, for one, kind of, sort of welcome it. If I sound lukewarm, it's because this sweaty cultural embrace of crap has also given us Real Housewives of Orange County, a translation of the Bible into LOLCat-speak, and a female desire for tattoos and really huge lips. And, as the Hag-Mags continually demonstrate, no one has any taste at all.
But, hey, it's fun. And that's the whole point.
Or so I'm told.
Well, she wouldn't, would she? Things were different then, so why risk getting your ass kicked? I remember that Notes on Camp made a big stir, mostly a big angry bee-like stir. At the time, a very sharp division existed between a serious intellectual life and cultural crap. Teachers and parents warned that if you read comic books, went to horror movies, watched TV all the time, and listened to rock n' roll, YOUR BRAIN WOULD ROT. Then Pop artists started doing paintings using cartoons as a direct subject matter, rock n' roll made it onto the college campuses, and Terry Southern got a few things published. All this was good news to those of us who had been busily reading, viewing, and listening to crap all along.
I was in art school at the time, and remember the long, sad looks on my teachers' faces as they warned us that the barbarians were at the gate. God only knew where this crap-acceptance would end up. Well, it ended up right here: With Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I, for one, kind of, sort of welcome it. If I sound lukewarm, it's because this sweaty cultural embrace of crap has also given us Real Housewives of Orange County, a translation of the Bible into LOLCat-speak, and a female desire for tattoos and really huge lips. And, as the Hag-Mags continually demonstrate, no one has any taste at all.
But, hey, it's fun. And that's the whole point.
Or so I'm told.
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