You may remember that I began to write about this issue at the beginning of May, and I didn't get all that far into what Susan Sontag had to say about Camp and its role in cultural history because I thought it would be a lot easier to do than it was. We ended up with a consideration of Note #10 because that's how far I was able to get before it got to be half an hour before that published:
I can see this will take up most of the month for me [a lot more than a month, as it turned out]. Skipping #9 for the time being, we'll close with Note #10 today: Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater. Being-as Playing-a-Role. And you wonder why Camp is at the center of pre-Stonewall gay "knowing." Could this really be any more obvious? It's about gay sensibility as it was when she wrote the essay. So we proceed into the essay, and we'll see how far we get THIS time.After a word from our sponsor.
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