Camp is school by other means. Whether the kids love camp or hate it, parents crave the structured time. And the potholders.
Charlie Hailey has written a smart, fresh, and eminently packable guidebook to camp architecture — perfect for reading on the beach at Guantanamo Bay.
Entitled Camps: A Guide to 21st Century Space, the book floats the simple premise that camps define the temporary landscapes of globalization and mobilization. (Build quickly, travel light, and keep moving.) Meanwhile, “Camp” itself is a Big Tent Term that zones the the dream of self-discovery by means of marshmallows alongside the dark disciplinary barracks of ethnic cleansing, environmental catastrophe, and the war on terror. Bambi goes to Buchenwald.
This MIT production is attractively designed by Emily Gutheinz to evoke the field guides of yore. The volume bears a a Kraft paper jacket, an exposed binding, and small reference-style photos and drawings throughout.
Gutheinz handles the theming with a light touch, like a Girl Scout earning her Grunge badge. And Charlie Hailey approaches theory the same way, writing about Giorgio Agamben with the scurrying style of a kid penning a postcard from the “periodic autonomous zone” of a neo-Marxist computer camp.
The summer destination of choice in my household has been Camp Gilboa, part of a socialist-Zionist youth movement whose roots go back to the founding of the state of Israel, a nation whose history could be defined as a long and bitter engagement with the challenges of encampment (from Exodus to Gaza). My daughter Lucy, age 9,when gently inducted into the facts of the Holocaust, replied, “Jewish children go to nicer camps now, don’t they?” Mine certainly do.
FOOTNOTE: I first read about the book in the LA Times.
— Julia Lupton · 2009-06-26
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THE BOOK