In short, camp mocks bad taste; kitsch exploits it. Camp arouses our sense of the ridiculous and we respond with amused tolerance.... When we see Bette Davis or Ruth Gordon, fine if sometimes flamboyant performers, relax their self-discipline and overextend their acting technique in a superfluity of ineffective gestures--finger-twitching and hip-switching, hand-rubbing or hip-protruding--we label the sum total as camp. Mae West, whose nasally provocative delivery, eye-rolling, lip-pursing, and pelvic tics parody the conventional invitation to dalliance, is never out of control and is camp, pure and simple.... Camp was also the stock-in-trade of Carmen Miranda, whose retina-searing Technicolor get-ups, skyscraper headdresses bearing a season's fruit harvest, clomping platform shoes and garbled English projected in a voice that could be heard on Mars all came together beautifully in her campy personification of Exaggeration. Had we been blessed with the Brazilian Bombshell's own blazing interpretation of Joan of Arc, the grotesque, if fascinating, result would surely have been kitsch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"... Ain't it a caution to us not to fix No limits to what rose in rubbing sticks... On fire to scare away the pterodix When man first lived in caves along the creeks?" "Marvelous world in nineteen-twenty-six."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How do we know, then, when a code's been cracked? ... when we are right? ... when do we know if we have even received a message? W...hy, naturally, when, upon one set of substitutions, sense emerges like the outline under a rubbing; when a single tentative construal leads to several; when all the sullen letters of the code cry TEAM! after YEA! has been, by several hands, uncovered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is not enough exercise in this way of life. I try to make up by active gymnastics before I dress when I get up, by walking r...apidly in the lower hall and the greenhouse after each meal for perhaps five to ten minutes, and a good hand rubbing before going to bed. I eat moderately; drink one cup of coffee at breakfast and one cup of tea at lunch and no other stimulant. My health is now, and usually, excellent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men often compete with one another until the day they die; comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Under the spell of moonlight, music, flowers or the cut and smell of good tweeds, I sometimes feel the divine urge for an hour, a ...day or maybe a week. Then it is gone an my interest returns to corn pone and mustard greens, or rubbing a paragraph with a soft cloth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In states of perplexity men will rub their chins with their hand, or tug at the lobes of their ears, or rub their foreheads or che...eks or back of the neck. Women have very different gestures in such states. They will either put a finger on their lower front teeth with the mouth slightly open or pose a finger under the chin. Other masculine gestures in states of perplexity are: rubbing one's nose, placing the flexed fingers over the mouth, rubbing the side of the neck, rubbing the infraorbital part of the face, rubbing the closed eyes, and picking the nose. These are all masculine gestures; so is rubbing the back of the hand or the front of the thigh, and pursing of the lips.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What struck him most was the fact that from Monday on he would be Luzhin. His father--the real Luzhin, the elderly Luzhin, the wri...ter of books--left the nursery with a smile, rubbing his hands (already smeared for the night with transparent cold cream), and with his suede-slippered evening gait padded back to his bedroom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »