journal

back to the world, Boulevard World. . .

I'm wearing the reason why we had to go back, an NZD20 Egyptian gellabaya. . . so for the shopping. . . but also the embrace of what at first was easy to reject, the kitsch, which is easy to dismiss as failed camp, camp not yet recognised to be, what is it now? . . . I was thinking over these past few days about talk.

how to explain . . . Shirley Whirly now dead. . . (see what do you want to say, Shirley*). . . then Jan and Fee visiting, Jan who remembers Stagetruck. . . these references mean nothing to you reading, but consider the life of conversation around our dinner table such that visitors were dumbstruck, what could they say? the tutelary figure of Beanie (see a small requiem for Beanie) . . . the wordgames. . . if only Wittgenstein had meant something Wittig! and the over-the-bar chitterchat at Brazil (see piece for Dave) . . . yes, theatrical conversation has a lot in common with camp, with the coded speech of erotic minorities in theatre, recalling Foucault and the motley and rejection of theatrical people, and I also think of László Krasznahorkai and a highfalutin irony but such that I can't stand since it's a tropical flower masquerading in faded crepe for a desert world . . . what was talk unless it amused? Noise. And redundancy, leading me once, also at Brazil, to tell Scot that communication is 90% redundancy.

To be: amused not by its being intrinsically amusing—or terribly amusing—the tyranny of "Say something funny!" in a stand-up comedy world (which is incompatible with Boulevard World. . . in fact, Boulevard World suggests an incomparably sophisticated sense of humour); but amused by its playfulness on the continuum between Sebastian Flight's 'soup bubbles' of evanescent in-sincerity and Anthony Blanche's dire intellectual archness in sincerity. Amused by its conscious and wilful distortion, which in Flight is affectation and in Blanche the art of conversation, for effect, the one artistic the other sentimental or—the art of the ingenu. The bending of consciousness to reality. Where to be amused also by talk's bold adherence to the facts can be hair-raising (never the bald facts). And wit is really will: so that the mirror being held up to the world (of the boulevard) is really scintillating.

I was listening, why the taste category of camp comes up in this connection, to Moral Minority with A.V. Marraccini discussing Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp," an odd experience, both because I think Sontag gets camp wrong (not at all in the camp way of getting it right) and because host and guest boldly deferred to 'out-in-the-world' definitions of such issues which are intrinsic to camp as sexuality, identity, whether a fluid or solid, and, hence, public morality, as well as to that of camp by Sontag. By their bold deference they put themselves out in the world too, without either the qualms of there being dire consequences, as in Blanche, or inconsequential ones, as in Flight, for their bold confidences. So, what was all the talk in the end for?

As for Sontag's view, rather than the polymathic erudition she is accused of, her notes seem to fall short of the simple substitution Deleuze (and Guattari, thereby coming closer to the aesthetic ethos of the whole 20th C.) makes for to be of to have. Camp has to do with a having and possessing as a wilful and reflective act over and (according to the logic of inversion) in priority to a being, for example my having a very nice gellabaya from Boulevard World (I am wearing, in it sipping a very good Pelago gin & tonic, while I write) now takes possession of the writer and where the gellabaya stops and Pelago gin starts is hard to discern. As for my identity, or sexuality, and, perhaps why I love this item of clothing, public morality, . . . I am reminded of his Excellency kissing the cheek of his host, Fahd, turning to Miles and I, guests of the same, and elucidating: It is traditional for friends to kiss; it doesn't mean we are queer. And I cannot forgive Sontag for ignoring, for the general ignorance around, what Thomas Carlyle calls, in Sartor Resartus, 1834, the dandiacal that these taste groups reflect on and tailor themselves after, the Beau, whose concision predates Wilde's genius, on being laid low by the gout afflicting one leg saying But it was my favourite leg! (You can read Nihilism, Cosmetics and Audacity, for more.)

Anyway, I was regretting the loss of this fun in talk and visiting Boulevard World is nothing if not fun. . . but it has to be active, you see. Not passive, it's not a guilty pleasure. Have fun.

There we find ourselves again, going around the lagoon around which the whole world turns, at Boulevard World.