__I__t was his skepticism of academic and mainstream cultural criticism that drove Joshua Glenn to create a zine that gives a voice to indie intellectual thought. Hermenaut - which calls itself "The Digest of Heady Philosophy" - is a scholarly journal minus the university, a sounding board for thinking folk who operate outside the ivory tower.
As if to underscore his point, Glenn offers his noncredentials: Not only is there no PhD after his name, but titles accumulated during the years he's been publishing include bartender, carpenter, substitute teacher, and zine-plugging review editor at Utne Reader (a job he later quit because "it was still, after all, Utne Reader").
Produced while Glenn was living in a mountain cabin, double issue #11/12 is all about camp. The claim - that distinctions between camp and related aesthetic categories get mismatched by the mainstream culture critics so anathema to Hermenaut - is enforced in this issue by a boatload of embarrassing examples. To elucidate just what's being confused here, four similar, but discrete, categories of aesthetic are defined: There's the engaged irony of camp (a Dolly Parton-impersonating drag queen), kitsch (the faux-classiness of Liberace), cheese (feigned love of the polyestered Brady Bunch), and trash (any John Waters film). In 186-plus pages of discourse, Hermenaut makes clear why wiggers and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are culturally insulting at best; how camp was killed by Valerie Solanas, the feminist writer who failed to assassinate Andy Warhol; and how the philosophy behind Oscar Wilde's life and writing is most exquisite High Camp.
And what is a hermenaut, exactly? Glenn says his coinage is a combination of hermeneutics and astronaut, or "someone who adventurously makes meaning and engages in philosophical inquiry in a highly unusual manner outside of the academy." Word.
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