"THE DECLINE OF DECADENCE": I wish I had seen Damsels in Distress before its closing night here in DC, so I could tell you all to go see it! It was terrific--funnier and more wide-ranging in its satire than Metropolitan, I thought. In When Sisterhood Was in Flower, Florence King's obvious love for the '70s feminism she satirized made the satire itself sharper and brighter. WSWIF:70's feminism::Damsels:"Beauty will save the world."

“Have you seen the listening snake?”
bramble clutches for his bride,
Lately she was by his side,
Woodbine, with her gummy hands.

In the ground the mottled snake
Listens for the dawn of day;
Listens, listening death away,
Till the day burst winter’s bands.
--from John Gray, "The Vines--To Andre Chevrillon," whole thing here

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Camp is to my mind extremely valuable as a specifically queer mode of expression, a potentially subversive mode of humor but also a backhanded mode of worship. Camp is not the same as parody. Even Susan Sontag, in her famous essay on the subject, recognized in camp a paradoxically genuine devotion for the institution that is ostensibly ridiculed. Just as drag queens adore the tragic divas that they travesty, so ecclesiastical camp springs to the defense of the one true Church.
--Decadence and Catholicism

JESUS CAMP: So, a few scattered thoughts on Decadence and Catholicism, now that I've finally finished it.

If you're interested in its subject, you should read it! I enjoyed Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture more, partly b/c Roden quotes more than Hanson does and therefore gets out of the way more, and partly b/c I just think e.g. Gerard Hopkins and Eliza Kearney are more talented than John Gray and--yeah, I'll say it--Verlaine. Although I do want to read Ronald Firbank now. Anyway yeah, there's a lot of good stuff in this book.

It does have its deficiencies. Hanson is often overly abstract for my taste. Quote more, bubbitz less. I disagree with some of his interpretations of Wilde's work, and think he's being overly defensive in response to (what I agree are) overly Catholic-apologetic readings of Wilde.

Hanson sometimes writes like two specific kinds of undergraduate: the Objectivist who thinks people only ever act out of self-interest (in Hanson's case, "pleasure"), and the *~*edgy*~* pomo for whom pursuit of truth is only interesting if it can be cast as an especially complex form of lying. Both of those stances allow Hanson to achieve some real insights, about e.g. the pleasures of shame or sacrifice and the ways in which confessions can serve to conceal the self as much as reveal it, but when he gets too insistent I find I have limited patience. If shame is only another shade of self-indulgence then personal choice and pleasure are valorized to an extent I find banal. ...Also, the epilogue is intermittently petulant. I'm sorry John Paul II was more popular than you.

But I didn't expect an orthodox perspective when I opened this book, so really, I got exactly what I came for, and I'm grateful for that. Again, if you're interested in the decadents or in the erotics of Catholicism, you should read this.

To be 1890 in 1890 might be considered almost normal. To be 1890 in 1922 might be considered almost queer.
--Carl Van Vechten, quoted in Decadence and Catholicism

EVERY DAY IS SELF-PARODY DAY. So far in Decadence and Catholicism we have had three, count 'em three, figure skaters! Two young men for whom various people conceived homoerotic passions, and also Huysmans's hagiography of St. Lydwina, skating's patroness. I don't even know anymore. My life is just a series of bad rhymes at this point.

Through its incitement to androgyny and to the performance of gender roles presumed to be inappropriate to one's anatomical sex, inversion is also figured [in Huysmans] as a subversion of nature in favor of text.
--Decadence and Catholicism

Interesting in itself; and also, forcing a separation of nature and text in this way seems to me to be the opposite approach from e.g. the theology of the body/"language of the body" approach. See also here.

In the nineteenth century, an era steeped in the language of religious and Platonic eros, two men or--even less suspiciously--two women could sustain such a sexually ambiguous relationship with impunity. They might even regard the relationship as more intense because more pure, so to speak. Thus we find Edmond Lepelletier pointing to Letinois as evidence of Verlaine's elevated affection for other men, rather than of his homosexuality. He even tries to desexualize Verlaine's love for Rimbaud, but with no great persuasiveness. Modern biographers, however, are loath to believe that such a homosexual desire can exist happily, and this disbelief strikes me as homophobic. Even today, the figure of the homosexual is so saturated with sexuality in the popular imagination that the very possibility of religious faith or chaste devotion in gay men is held to be highly improbable. Like everyone else, homosexuals eroticize religion, eroticize fatherhood, eroticize friendship, and eroticize aesthetics, but only through the utmost discretion are they allowed to get away with it. Gay men as a rule are not permitted to sublimate.
--Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, yes I'm finally reading it

ROMOPHOBIA--THE WORST DISEASE: Speaking of things I haven't read yet, the Cigarette Smoking Blogger has posted her senior essay: "Decadence, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." I've been putting it off for fear that reading it will cause me to explode from sheer awesome.

(Was a bit conflicted whether this post title was the best possible punk reference; would also entertain nominations of, "When Two Heavens Clash." 1877, and we are going mad....)