Intellectual whimsy is a widely shared attitude, at least among a certain segment of youngish writers and creative types. It is, as Susan Sontag once wrote of camp, a common sensibility, a brand of taste that unites those who have it against the norm. If, in Sontag's words, ''the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural', the essence of whimsy is its flirtation with the insignificant and random. Flirtation, though, not love, because unlike, say, Dada, whimsy triumphs when the import of the apparently insignificant and the relevance of the random are discovered.

With thanks to Charlotte Taylor