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.