Author: David Schwarm

Well we all need someone we can dream on.

Madness is the punishment of a disorderly and useless science.

We have onto to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it.

Today we are going to Disneyland for Kates birthday – we will be meeting some of her friends and having lunch at Ariels Grotto, which has been renamed the princess kitchen or something.

Kate is so excited – she has learned to sing the happy birthday song (with the cha-cha-cha ending). Jack is also really looking forward to it.

As a vegan, breakfast is likely the worst of the meals – and eating anything at the magic kingdom is always an issue, but I am sure that we will have a great time.

I had come to New York at the start of the e1960’s, eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer” Someone interested in “everything.” I had always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation of a writer in this way. And reasonable to suppose that such fervency would find more scope in a great metropolis that in any variant of provincial life, including the excellent university I had attended. The only surprise was that there weren’t more people like me.

America is a land of masking jokers.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletions. Our oppressive sense of the transience of everything is more acute since cameras gave us the means to “fix” the fleeting moment. We consume images at an ever faster rate and, as Balzac suspected cameras used up layers of the body, images consume reality. Cameras are the antidote and the disease, a means of appropriating reality and a means of making it obsolete.

The policy of equivocating about the nature of their disease with cancer patients reflects the conviction that dying people are best spared the news that they are dying, and that the good death is the sudden one, best of all if it happens while we’re unconscious or asleep. Yet the modern denial of death does not explain the extent of the lying and with the to be lied to; it does not touch the deepest dread. Someone who has had a coronary is at least as likely to die of another one within a few years, as someone with cancer is likely to die soon from cancer. But no one thinks of concealing the truth from the cardiac patient: there is nothing shameful about a hear attack. Cancer patients are lied to, not just because the disease is (is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene –0- in the original meaning of that word: ill-omened, abominable, repugnant to the senses. Cardiac disease implies a weakness, trouble, failure that is mechanical; there is no disgrace, nothing of the taboo that once surrounded people afflicted with TB and still surrounds those who have cancer.

I am strongly drawn to camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it’ he can only, whatever his intention exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw it contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Though I am speaking about sensibility only – and about sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous – these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free – as opposed to rote – human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotions – and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

Having one’s sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one’s ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one’s sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily the commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is the that they are hard to look at or to read, that they are “boring/” But the charge of boredom is really hypocritical. There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom. Boredom is only another name for a certain species of frustration. And the new languages which the interesting art of our time speaks are frustrating to the sensibilities of most educated people.

But the purpose of art is always, ultimately, to give pleasure – though our sensibilities may take time to catch up with the forms of pleasure that art in a given time may offer. And, one can also say that, balancing the ostensible anti-hedonism of serious contemporary art, the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever.