Full post here.

A few positives:

—Paglia is intellectually deep, and someone of broad aesthetic understanding and experience.  She also enjoys good poems.  She has tirelessly criticized the professionalization of poetry and its move into academia (largely doing so from outside of academia).  In particular, she’s attacked the effects continental philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida have had on American Universities (though I don’t know how well literateurs ever understand philosophers and I don’t know if I would class Foucault and Derrida entirely as philosophers).

A few negatives:

—Her reasoning is not always sound, and like the metaphysics of the artists she reads closely, many of her ideas are unfounded and logically inconsistent.  Her Nietzschean influence also carries a lot of baggage (often dangerous) with it especially when taken from the aesthetic realm (though like H.L. Mencken demonstrates, that depth can translate into useful, trenchant and wickedly funny social criticism).

All told, I think Break, Blow, Burn rather successfully makes poetry accessible to millions of people to whom it wouldn’t otherwise be.  A lot of this success is acheived by something many other poetry popularizers are currently missing:  the potential of good art to transcend politics and current intellectual trends.

And perhaps more importantly in Paglia’s case:  the potential that good art criticism has to illuminate the many current social, political and intellectual trends that try and hold good art aloft for their own reasons…and maybe Paglia’s reasons as well.

Addition:  Is Paglia intellectually deep?  What is she doing with Nietzsche anyways?  Please see the comments for a deeper discussion.

See Also:  A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection…Camille Paglia Answers Reader Letters: Democratic Ideology…Highbrow Timewaster…Dinesh D’Souza And Daniel Dennett at Tufts University: Nietzsche’s Prophesy

WOODSTOCK
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me
I’m going on down to Yasgur’s farm
I’m going to join in a rock ‘n’ roll band
I’m going to camp out on the land
I’m going to try an’ get my soul free

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it’s the time of man
I don’t know who I am
But you know life is for learning

We are stardust
We are golden
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration
And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden

© Siquomb Publishing Company

ROAD TO WOODSTOCK by JONI MITCHELL. 1969

‘The Road To Woostock’ is a two-edged drawing; it can be viewed with the road leading towards the top or the road leading out sideways. It was a shorthand of the moment when Jane Lurie, my road manager at the time, and I were on the way to Woodstock. There was a one-way sign leading into this Esso station, both those signs are in there and I ordered a Coke, so there’s a Coca-Cola in the side of Janie’s face. In front of us at the gas pumps was a van so from one angle it’s a van and from another it’s a mountain The drawing was finished before the gas tank filled up, then I colored it later.

- Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell at Big Sur, California, 1969

© Robert Altman

Few lyrics, stripped of their melody, make a successful transition to the printed page. Joni MItchell’s ‘Woodstock’ is an exception. This is an important modern poem — possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy.’

- Camille Paglia

I’m so excited for break, for no other reason than the fantastic opportunity to be numbed into submission by brilliant authors. I have been ebaying for the past weeks, and stroke a couple of amazing deals on Camille Paglia, Françoise Sagan and James Joyce. I was recently told about Finnegan’s Wake and am partly terrified partly elated at the prospect of reading it. Here’s the first page from the Joycean masterpiece, along with Paglia’s Sex, Art and American Culture and Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse.

This is the transcript of an interview between Cristina Hoff Sommers, Camille Paglia, and Ben Wattenberg, on the subject of feminism and its misandry. The conversation is marked by the question, “Has feminism gone too far?” Throughout the discussion, many example are brought up by these two feminist scholars, as to how modern feminists have brought sexism, slander, hysteria, and misdirection into the women’s movement. Decide for yourself, dear readers.

The original can be seen here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Guests:
Camille Paglia & Christina Hoff Sommers

Think Tank™ With Ben Wattenberg
Airdate: November 4, 1994

Christina Hoff Sommers is the author of Who Stole Feminism? : How Women Have Betrayed Women. (order on-line) Camille Paglia is the author of Sexual Personae, (order on-line) Sex, Art, and American Culture : Essays, andVamps and Tramps (order on-line)

Ben Wattenberg

ANNOUNCER: “Think Tank” has been made possible by Amgen, a recipient of the Presidential National Medal of Technology. Amgen, bringing better, healthier lives to people worldwide through biotechnology.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the William H. Donner Foundation, the Randolph Foundation, and the JM Foundation.

MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. There are many feminists and scholars who contend that America is still a patriarchal place where women are victims and adversaries of men. We will hear that point of view in a future program. But for the next half-hour we will hear a different idea from two prominent and controversial feminists: Camille Paglia and Christina Sommers.

The topic before this house: Has feminism gone too far? This week on Think Tank.

Joining us on this special edition of Think Tank are two authors who have made themselves unpopular with much of the modern feminist movement. Camille Paglia is professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and best-selling author most recently of “Vamps and Tramps.” Her criticisms of modern feminism caused one author to refer to her as the spokeswoman for the anti-feminist backlash.

Our other guest, Christina Sommers, is an associate professor of philosophy at Clark University. In her recent book, “Who Stole Feminism,” she accuses activist women of betraying the women’s movement. She wrote the book, she says, because she is a feminist who does not like what feminism has become.

Christina Sommers, what has feminism become?

MS. SOMMERS: The orthodox feminists are so carried away with victimology, with a rhetoric of male-bashing that it’s full of female chauvinists, if you will. Also, women are quite eager to censor, to silence. And what concerns me most as a philosopher is it’s become very anti-intellectual, and I think it poses a serious risk to young women in the universities. Women’s studies classes are increasingly a kind of initiation into the most radical wing, the most intolerant wing, of the feminist movement. And I consider myself a whistle-blower. I’m from inside the campus. I teach philosophy. I’ve seen what’s been going on.

MR. WATTENBERG: Camille, what has feminism become?

MS. PAGLIA: Well, I have been an ardent feminist since the rebirth of the current feminist movement. I’m on the record as being — as rebelling against my gender-role, as being an open lesbian and so on. In the early 1960s I was researching Amelia Earhart, who for me symbolized the great period of feminism of the ’20s and ’30s just after women won the right to vote. When this phase of feminism kicked back in the late ’60s, it was very positive at first. Women drew the line against men and demanded equal rights. I am an equal opportunity feminist. But very soon it degenerated into a kind of totalitarian “group think” that we are only now rectifying 20 years later.

MR. WATTENBERG: Is this the distinction between equity feminism and gender feminism? Is that what we’re talking about?

MS. SOMMERS: That’s right. Yes.

MR. WATTENBERG: Could you sort of explain that so that we get our terms right?

MS. SOMMERS: An equity feminist — and Camille and I both are equity feminists –is you want for women what you want for everyone: fair treatment, no discrimination. A gender feminist, on the other hand, is someone like the current leaders in the feminist movement: Patricia Ireland and Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi and Eleanor Smeal. They believe that women are trapped in what they call a sex-gender system, a patriarchal hegemony; that contemporary American women are in the thrall to men, to male culture. And it’s so silly. It has no basis in American reality. No women have ever had more opportunities, more freedom, and more equality than contemporary American women. And at that moment the movement becomes more bitter and more angry. Why are they so angry?

MS. PAGLIA: Mmm-hmm. (In agreement.) This is correct. In other words, I think that the current feminist movement has taken credit for a lot of the enormous changes in women’s lives that my generation of the ’60s wrought. There were women in the mid ’60s when I was in college who did not go onto become feminists. They were baudy and feisty and robust. Barbra Streisand is a kind of example of a kind of pre-feminist woman that changed the modern world and so on.

Now, I think that again what we need to do now is to get rid of the totalitarians, get rid of the Kremlin mentality –

MR. WATTENBERG: Now, hang on, when you say –

MS. PAGLIA: Wait — and here are the aims of my program. We’ve got to get back to a pro-art, all right, pro-beauty, pro-men kind of feminism. And –

MS. SOMMERS: I think she’s right to call it a kind of totalitarianism. Many young women on campuses combine two very dangerous things: moral fervor and misinformation. On the campuses they’re fed a kind of catechism of oppression. They’re taught “one in four of you have been victims of rape or attempted rape; you’re earning 59 cents on the dollar; you’re suffering a massive loss of self-esteem; that you’re battered especially on Super Bowl Sunday.” All of these things are myths, grotesque exaggerations.

MR. WATTENBERG: Well, why don’t you go through some of those myths with some specificity?

MS. SOMMERS: Well, for example, a few years ago feminist activists held a news conference and announced that on Super Bowl Sunday battery against women increases 40 percent. And, in fact, NBC was moved to use a public service announcement to, you know, encourage men “remain calm during the game.” Well –

MR. WATTENBERG: How can you remain calm during the Super Bowl! (Laughter.)

MS. SOMMERS: Well, they might explode like mad linemen and attack their wives and so forth. The New York Times began to refer to it as the “day of dread.” One reporter, Ken Ringle at the Washington Post, did something very unusual in this roiling sea of media credulity. He checked the facts — and within a few hours discovered that it was a hoax. No such research, no — there’s no data about a 40-percent increase. And this is just one of so many myths. You’ll hear –

MR. WATTENBERG: Give me some others.

MS. SOMMERS: According to the March of Dimes, battery is the number — the leading cause of birth defects. Patricia Ireland repeats this. It was in Time magazine. It was in newspapers across the country. I called the March of Dimes and they said, “We’ve never seen this research before.” This is preposterous. There’s no such research. And yet this is being taught to young women in the colleges. They’re basically learning that they live in a kind of violent — almost a Bosnian rape camp.

Now, naturally, the more sensitive young women –

MR. WATTENBERG: What about rape? Is that exaggerated by the modern feminists?

MS. SOMMERS: Completely. This idea of one in four girls victims of rape or attempted rape? That’s preposterous! And there’s also a kind of gentrification of rape. You’re much more likely to be a victim of rape or attempted rape if you’re in a high crime neighborhood. The chances of being raped at Princeton are remote. Katie Roiphe talked about being at Princeton. She said she was more afraid — she would walk across a dark golf course and was more afraid of being attacked by wild geese than by a rapist. And yet the young women at Princeton have more programs and whistles are given out and blue lights. There’s more services to protect these young women from rape than for women in, you know, downtown Newark.

MR. WATTENBERG: Where do you come out on this?

MS. PAGLIA: Well, one of the things that got me pilloried from coast to coast was when I wrote a piece on date rape for Newsday in January of 1991. It got picked up by the wire services, and the torrent of abuse that poured in. I want women to fend for themselves. That essay that I wrote on rape begins with the line “Rape is an outrage that cannot be tolerated in civilized society.” I absolutely abhor this broadening of the idea of rape, which is an atrocity, to those things that go wrong on a date –acquaintances, you know, little things, miscommunications — on pampered elite college campuses. MS. SOMMERS: I interviewed a young women at the University of Pennsylvania who came in in a short skirt and she was in the Women’s Center, and I think she thought I was one of the sisterhood. And she said, “Oh, I just suffered a mini-rape.” And I said, “What happened?” And she said, “A boy walked by me and said, `Nice legs’.” You know? And that — and this young woman considers this a form of rape!

MS. PAGLIA: That’s right.

MR. WATTENBERG: What role in the development of this kind of thought that the idea of sexual harassment and whole Anita Hill thing have? Was that sort of a –

MS. PAGLIA: That’s fairly recent, actually. It was in the late ’80s that started. I mean, that was a late phase. I think probably the backlash against the excesses of sexual harassment have — you know, have really finally weakened the hold of PC. I believe, for example, in moderate sexual harassment guidelines. I lobbied for their adoption at my university in 1986. But I put into my proposal a strict penalty for false accusation. All right? I don’t like the situation where the word of any woman is weighed above the testimony of any man. And I was the only leading feminist that went out against Anita Hill. I think that that whole case was pile of crap.

MR. WATTENBERG: Why?

MS. PAGLIA: Well, I think it was absurd. First of all, again, totalitarian regime, okay, is where 10 years after the fact you’re nominated now for a top position in your country and you are being asked to reconstruct lunch conversations that you had with someone who never uttered a peep. Okay? This is to Anita Hill: “All right, when he started to talk again about this pornographic films at lunch in the government cafeteria, what did you do?” “I tried to change the subject.” Excuse me! I mean, that is ridiculous. I mean, so many of these cases –

MS. SOMMERS: He never touched her.

MS. PAGLIA: He never touched her. Okay? That was such a trumped-up case by the feminist establishment.

MR. WATTENBERG: Do you sign onto that?

MS. SOMMERS: Well, I’ve changed. I mean, initially I was just carried away with the media and thought, “Oh, Saint Anita.” And later I thought about it and actually learned from some experts on sexual harassment that her behavior was completely untypical. She did not act — the career lechers –usually a woman is repulsed and will not follow him from place to place, and usually there are many women who will come forward who have had the same experience. These things were not true in his case. It now seems to me quite likely that he was innocent of these charges.

MS. PAGLIA: Completely innocent. And I must say, as a teacher of 23 years, if someone offends you by speech, we must train women to defend themselves by speech. You cannot be always running to tribunals. Okay? Running to parent figures, authority figures, after the fact because you want to preserve your perfect, decorous, middle-class persona.

MR. WATTENBERG: This is Catherine MacKinnon, who says speech is rape?

MS. PAGLIA: Yes, I’m on the opposite wing. Catherine McKinnon is the anti-porn wing of feminism. I am on the radically pro-porn wing. I’m more radical than Christina. I –

MR. WATTENBERG: Are you pro-pornography?

MS. SOMMERS: For adults. I’m trying to be very careful about it for — you know, I feel in our society — for children. But I’m horrified at the puritanism and the sex phobia of feminism. How did that happen? I mean, feminism — it used to be fun to be a feminist, and it used to have a lot of — it attracted all sorts of lively women. Now you ask a group of young women on the college campus, “How many of you are feminists?” Very few will raise their hands because young women don’t want to be associated with it anymore because they know it means male-bashing, it means being a victim, and it means being bitter and angry. And young women are not naturally bitter and angry.

MS. PAGLIA: We had a case at Penn State where an English instructor who was assigned to teach in an arts building where there had been a print of Goya’s “Naked Maja,” a great classic artwork, on the wall for 40 years. All right? She demanded it be taken down because she felt sexually harassed by it, because the students in the classroom were looking at it instead of her. Okay? Now, this is ridiculous. This is part of the puritanism of our culture. I want a kind of feminism that is pro-beauty, pro-sensuality. Okay? That is not embarrassed and upset by a spectacle of the beauty of the human body!

MR. WATTENBERG: What about this argument that came up recently that girls in elementary and high school are neglected by their teachers? Is that — have either of you –

MS. PAGLIA: A bunch of crap.

MS. SOMMERS: It’s a hoax.

MS. PAGLIA: A bunch of crap.

MS. SOMMERS: I mean, it’s all — it’s really an incredible case of just junk science. The American Association of University Women hastily threw together a survey of 3,000 children and asked them about their sense of well-being and their self-esteem, and they never published it. It’a not — it hasn’t been replicated by scholars. Adolescents don’t see significant differences — the majority don’t see significant differences — between levels of self-esteem between young men and young women. Yet the AAUW said it was true. It’s an advocacy group. Their membership was drying up. They were losing, you know, several thousand members a year. They needed an issue. They brought in a new group and they got on the gender-bias bandwagon and basically struck gold. They now — you can call an 800 number. They have short-changing girls mugs and t-shirts. (Laughter.) And they were so positively reviewed in the media that they can use –

MS. PAGLIA: Oh, the media was utterly credulous. I couldn’t believe it when MacNeil/Lehrer totally — they fell for it like suckers that night.

MS. SOMMERS: Well, they would ask young men, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And boys would say things like rock star or sports star. And girls would say lawyer and doctor. So they declared a glamor gap and said that there’s a glamor gap, that girls don’t dream their dreams. Well, most children don’t have the talent to be rock stars. The sensible ones know this. So the way I would interpret those findings is that girls mature earlier and boys suffer a reality gap.

MS. PAGLIA: Right, right.

MS. SOMMERS: But this was the kind of question that was asked. Yet not one journalist that I’m aware of, except the Sacramento Bee, because they wrote to me and said, “We question this” — they didn’t do what Ken Ringle did at the Washington Post. They didn’t send away for the data. They relied on the glossy brochures.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me –

MS. PAGLIA: And the question of attention in the classroom, too. As experienced teachers, okay, this idea that you measure, okay, how much attention the teacher is paying to the boys and girls to determine how much that the student is valued, and it was discovered that the teacher was making more remarks to the boys. You’re keeping them in line! Okay? The boys you have to say, “Shut up, be quiet! Do this thing. Are you doing your homework?” Like this. The girls, all right, they do their homework. They’re very mature. And girls at that age are rather sensitive, and I as a teacher am very aware — as a teacher of freshmen, all right — that the girls are sitting there pleading with you with their eyes, “Don’t embarrass me in front of the entire class.” Okay? I’m very aware that I seem to be talking often to the boys. Tut that is just because they’re so — their egos are completely — I mean, they’re so unconflicted. Okay? They love attention. They’re like yapping puppies. You know what I mean? They don’t care about making fools of themselves once they start.

MR. WATTENBERG: The boys?

MS. PAGLIA: The boys make fools of themselves, blah, blah, blah, blah! Okay? The most intelligent students hang back. All right? I was very silent in class, myself. Okay? And so I — and I like to just take notes. All right?

MR. WATTENBERG: That sounds like you’re anti-male now. You’re saying, “Now I’m offended.”

MS. PAGLIA: No, no!

MS. SOMMERS: But they can be immature.

MS. PAGLIA: The boys are immature.

MS. SOMMERS: The AAUW would ask children: “I’m good at a lot of things.” And you could say, all the time, some of the time, usually, but you know — and a lot of little boys, the 11 to — would say, “All the time, I’m good at everything all the time.” And girls, being a little more reflective, will give a more nuanced answer. The AAUW counted everything except “always true” meaning that they were suffering from a dangerous lack of self-esteem. They declared an American tragedy. American girls don’t believe in themselves.

MS. PAGLIA: Right, and the girls’ are doing better in school.

MS. SOMMERS: Girls are getting better grades.

MS. PAGLIA: Right.

MS. SOMMERS: More go to college.

MS. PAGLIA: Right.

MS. SOMMERS: More boys drop out. More boys are getting into drugs and alcohol.

MR. WATTENBERG: And most of the teachers are women in any event –

MS. SOMMERS: Yes. And to add to that, it’s supposed to be unconscious –

(Cross talk.)

MR. WATTENBERG: — a point you made, I guess, in that.

MS. SOMMERS: Yeah.

MR. WATTENBERG: The — what about the argument — you hear less about it now, and perhaps the data has changed, but that women only make 59 cents for every dollar that –

MS. PAGLIA: First of all, what was omitted from that is what kind of jobs are women gravitating toward? I mean, Warren Farrell, in his book, “The Myth of Male Power,” has a lot of statistics that show men are taking the dangerous, dirty jobs like roofing, okay, the kind of gritty things that pay more — commissioned sales that are very unstable. Okay?

It appears that a lot of women — where the real biases occur, okay, those barriers must be removed. But this is an inadequate kind of a figure. It doesn’t allow for the fact that most women, in fact, in my experience, too, like nice clean, safe offices, nice predictable hours and so on, and they don’t want to, like, knock themselves out in that kind of way. I mean, every time I pass — after reading Warren Farrell’s book, every time I pass men doing that roofing tar, okay, breathing those toxic fumes and so on, okay, I have a renewed respect for the kind of sacrifices that men have made.

MR. WATTENBERG: That 59-cent number –

MS. SOMMERS: It hasn’t been for –

MR. WATTENBERG: — is now 71, but even that was –

MR. SOMMERS: It’s now 71 cents, and that is not correct because you have to control for age, length of time in the work place. And if you look at younger women now, the age — the wage gap is closed. It’s now — when they have children, it’s 90 cents. But if they don’t have children, it’s now closer to what –

MS. PAGLIA: It would be outrageous if people were doing exactly the same thing and being paid a different wage. Okay? But that is not at all the basis for this figure.

MR. WATTENBERG: Legalized abortion has come to be viewed as the central issue of the feminist movement. Is that an appropriate spot for it to be? That –

MS. SOMMERS: It’s an important issue. I believe, in choice, but I think there’s an obsession with feminists with that issue, which is — and it’s also very — it leaves a lot of women out of the movement. There should be a place in women’s studies, there should be a place in women’s scholarship for traditionally religious women. There are Christian — conservative Christian women who are scholars, Orthodox Jewish women who are scholars, Islamic women who are scholars. Why don’t — why isn’t there any place for them in women’s studies? Because there’s a litmus test –

MS. PAGLIA: Yes.

MS. SOMMERS: — and you have to be pro-choice or you need not apply.

MS. PAGLIA: I’m radically pro-choice, unrestricted right to abortion. However, I have respect for the pro-life side, and I am disgusted by the kind of rhetoric that I get. I support the abortion rights groups with money and so on, but I cannot stand the kind of stuff that comes in my mailbox, right, which stereotypes all pro-life people as being fanatics, misogynists, and so on, radical and far, you know, right and so on. I mean, it is

MS. SOMMERS: It is so condescending and so elitist.

MS. PAGLIA: It’s condescending. It’s insulting. It’s elitist. It’s anti-intellectual. It’s a deformed –

MS. SOMMERS: It’s very anti-intellectual. The arguments on abortion philosophically — and I teach applied ethics — if you really understand the issues, you have to have some questions, especially about second trimester abortions where you are quite likely dealing with an individual.

MR. WATTENBERG: What is your view today? How would the average American woman, if we could ever distill such a body, how does she view this new feminism?

MS. SOMMERS: Well, the average American women, first of all, is rather fond of men. Okay? She has a husband or a father or a brother or — you know? So the male-bashing is out of control right now. I mean — and if you look at a lot of the statistics that I deconstruct in my book. You know, that men are responsible for birth defects, that men — Naomi Wolff has a factoid she has since corrected, but she says 150,000 girls die every year starving themselves to death from anorexia. This was in Gloria Steinem’s book. It got into Ann Lander’s column. It’s in women’s studies textbooks. The correct figure, according to the Center for Disease Control, is closer to 100 deaths a year, not 150,000.

MS. PAGLIA: Three-thousand times exaggerated or something.

MS. SOMMERS: It’s, you know — so Naomi Wolff put is this way. She said young — it’s a holocaust against women’s bodies. We’re being starved not by nature, but by men. And –

MS. PAGLIA: They want to blame the media for anorexia, when in point of fact anorexia plays white middle-class households. It is a response to something incestuous going on within these nuclear families.

MS. SOMMERS: Mainly upper-middle-class –

MS. PAGLIA: Yes, right.

MS. SOMMERS: — overachieving white girls.

MS. PAGLIA: Yeah.

MS. SOMMERS: And by the way, if 150,000 of these girls where dying, you would need — it would be — you would need to have ambulances on hand at places where they gather like Wellesley College graduation and like you do at major sporting events. (Laughter.) But why didn’t anyone — it’s funny, but no one caught the error.

MS. PAGLIA: No one caught it. The media was totally servile! Every word that came out of Gloria Steinem’s mouth or Patricia Ireland’s mouth is treated as gospel truth. For 20 years the major media, when they want “what is the women’s view?” they turn to NOW. Okay? NOW does not speak for American women. It does not speak even for all feminists.

MR. WATTENBERG: NOW is the National Organization –

MS. PAGLIA: National Organization for Women, which –

MR. WATTENBERG: National Organization for Women.

MS. PAGLIA: — for Women, which Betty Friedan founded, but which soon expelled even her. Okay? They’ve been taken over by a certain kind of ideology. All right? I’m in constant war with them as a dissident feminist and so on, and — you know, and it’s taken me a long time, you know, to fight my way into the public eye.

MR. WATTENBERG: All right, let me ask this question: What are the policy implications of this idea of feminine dictumhood?

MS. SOMMERS: It’s a disaster. These women are — I will give them one thing. They’re brilliant work-shoppers, networkers, organizers, moving in, taking over infrastructure. They’re busybodies. There has never been a more effective, you know, army of busybodies. And they know how to work the system. So they will hastily throw together a study designed to show women are medically neglected or women have a massive loss of self-esteem — one in four. And then they move to key senators. Senator Biden seems to be especially vulnerable.

MS. PAGLIA: Oh! What a weak link. What a weak link.

MS. SOMMERS: Patricia Schroeder, Senator Kennedy. But it’s Republicans, too. They’re quite carried away. Congressman Ramstad from Minneapolis.

MR. WATTENBERG: Yeah, they’re afraid of the TV commercials running against them, which is –

MS. SOMMERS: That’s right.

MS. PAGLIA: Yeah, that’s right.

MS. SOMMERS: And then we’re getting — we now have a gender-bias bill that went through Congress that’s going to provide millions of dollars for gender-bias workshops. What the politicians don’t realize is that feminism is a multi-million dollar industry. The gender-bias industry is thriving. They’re the work-shoppers and the networkers out there.

MS. PAGLIA: The bureaucrats are really profitting –

MS. SOMMERS: Consultants and bureaucrats.

MS. PAGLIA: It’s a tremendous waste of money.

MS. SOMMERS: And it’s not based on truth.

MS. PAGLIA: It should go into education. That money should go directly into education to improve the system.

MS. SOMMERS: I spoke to a teacher yesterday who taught in Brooklyn, and there were no books to teach English.

MS. PAGLIA: Oh, pathetic!~

MS. SOMMERS: And yet there are going to be — there’s going to be $5 million now, plus a lot more from the education bill, for workshops on gender-bias in the classroom, which is a non-problem compared to far more serious problems. So I consider many feminists to be opportunists. They move in on real problems. There is a problem of violence in our schools. They’ll turn it into a problem of sexual harassment –

MS. PAGLIA: Yes.

MS. SOMMERS: — which is nothing compared to the problem of violence and instability. They’ll move into under-performance of our kids.

MS. PAGLIA: All this money should be going into keeping public libraries open so that the poor can go in and take out a book the way my immigrants, you know, parents were able to and the way I was able to. It’s outrageous that we have the closing-down of public libraries, and the conditions of inner-city schools is disgraceful. And all this money wasted going to bureaucrats?

MR. WATTENBERG: Camille, let me ask you this: Does the case you make undermine traditional family values? Would a conservative listening to what you are talking about in terms of sensuality and sexuality and pornography and so on, would they say you are undermining and corroding family values in America?

MS. PAGLIA: Probably they would, but my argument in all my books is rather large. I say that Western culture was formed as two great traditions — the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman — and they have contributed to each other and they’re in conflict with each other. And I — what I — my libertarian theory is of a public sphere/private sphere. Government must remain out of the private sphere for abortion and drug use and sodomy and so on. The public sphere is shared by both traditions. I have respect for the Judeo-Christian side. I’m calling in “The Activism in Feminism” for a renewed respect for religion, even though I’m an atheist. So I think that there is much in my thinking that I think would reassure people of traditional family values.

MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you this question to close of both of you: What should the 1990s equity feminist believe in and believe remains to be done for women?

MS. SOMMERS: The first thing, I think we have to save young women from the feminists. That’s at the top of my agenda. And I say that as a very committed feminist philosopher. I went into philosophy. It was a field traditionally dominated by males. I got my job as a professor to encourage more young women to enter this field, to be analytic thinkers, to be logicians and metaphyscians. And, instead, in feminist philosophy classes you’ll often have young women sitting around honoring emotions and denigrating the great thinkers instead of, you know, studying them, mastering them and benefitting from them.

MR. WATTENBERG: So you –

MS. SOMMERS: That’s one thing. The other thing, more traditional feminist issue, is probably the double-shift. As women, we’re doing a lot of things men traditionally did; they’re not doing what we traditionally did. And so women do bear more responsibility at home. But if we’re going to solve that problem, I think we have to approach men as friends –

MS. PAGLIA: We have to — yes –

MS. SOMMERS: — in a spirit of respect instead of calling them proto-rapists and harassers and –

MS. PAGLIA: The time for hostility to men is past. There was that moment. I was part of it. I have punched men, kicked men, hit them over the head with umbrellas. Okay? I am openly confrontational with men. As an open lesbian, I have been — you know, I express my anger to men directly. I don’t get in a group and whine about men. So, oddly, I give men a break and admit the greatness of male, you know, achievements and so on. What we have to do now is get over that anger toward men, all right, and we have to bring the sexes back together. Reconciliation between the sexes is the first order of business.

MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Thank you, Christina Sommers and Camille Paglia for your critique of modern feminism. We will be hearing an opposing view on a future program.

And thank you. We enjoy hearing from our audience. Please send comments and questions to: New River Media, 1150 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20036. Or we can be reached via e-mail at thinktv@aol.com.

For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg.

ANNOUNCER: This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely for its content.

Think Tank has been made possible by Amgen, unlocking the secrets of life through cellular and molecular biology. At Amgen, we produce medicines that improve people’s lives today and bring hope for tomorrow.

Additional funding is provided by the John M. Olin Foundation, the William H. Donner Foundation, the Randolph Foundation, and the JM Foundation.

OK so I’ve gone from alliterative puns to downright rude ones in my blog headers, but anyway my husband, The New Yorker magazine (joke courtesy Bookslut, whose boyfriend is the London Review of Books) has published Ariel Levy’s Feminist Reading List and I just couldn’t let that one go by without writing my own – be warned, it contains Camille Paglia!

1.Camille Paglia  – Sexual Personae. Yeah yeah, it contains the infamous line “if civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” but her argument for a more rigorous intellectual look at the tradition, history and future of feminism, her fascinating examination of sexuality through the ages and its role in the West plus her loathing of those drivelly French postmodern tossers won her this place on the list. I read Sexual Personae at 18 and it changed my life, mostly in a ‘wtf’ way, but in a good way. However I would hasten to add that she’s become a right wing nut job self parody since then and hasn’t come up with anything half decent since Break, Blow, Burn.

2. Elaine Showalter – A Jury of her Peers. Showalter’s fascinating look at US female writers throws up some long undiscovered or forgotten gems (Peyton Place!!) and reappraises well established ones. Great stuff that makes you want to build very long Amazon wish lists . Incidentally the Laura Miller piece I link to caused a bit of a kerfuffle at the time, mainly because of it’s awful headline …

3. Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique. Watch Mad Men? I’m damn sure the writers of the show have looked to this book for inspiration on gender mores in the late 50s and early 60s and why women deserved more than housewifery. One of the pioneering works on feminism and you should really own a copy.

Honorary mentions go to Natasha Walter’s the New Feminism and to Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism for making an excellent stab at an accessible, fun and mainstream guide to feminism.

Now hit me with yours!

In Western culture, Egypt seems to be the best place to trace lithe, high glamour, iconic posing, and so it seems fitting that a certain style of freeze frame dancing would be dubbed as “tutting” (as in “King Tut” or Pharoah Tutankhamen). But here’s something interesting and new: finger tutting.

Hmm:

I love Camille Paglia.

Okay, strike that. I Love Camille Paglia.

If she were decades younger and straight, you catch my drift? Nah, I wouldn’t. But still. Her Salon articles continue to amaze me in ways few feminist columnists can. Gail Collins may be the only other. Not Maureen Down, as she is a human molester.

Her feminist-professorism wit has no bounds, and while she only writes one column a month for Salon, she manages to get it all in there, always. Hatred of Hillary Clinton. Denying global warming. Making fun of “her” Democrats. Baselessly believing some radical conspiracy theory she heard on Rush Limbaugh — because she “respects” his opinion. She never has anything nice to say, yet everything she says is nice.

Ahhh….

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi scored a giant gain for feminism last weekend. In shoving her controversy-plagued healthcare reform bill to victory by a paper-thin margin, she conclusively demonstrated that a woman can be just as gritty, ruthless and arm-twisting in pursuing her agenda as anyone in the long line of fabled male speakers before her.

That’s okay. I get it. Pelosi passed that terrible bill, and yeah, she’s a chick. But here’s the kicker:

Whether or not her bill survives in the Senate is immaterial: Pelosi’s hard-won, trench-warfare win sets a new standard for U.S. women politicians and is certainly well beyond anything the posturing but ineffectual Hillary Clinton has ever achieved.

Were we talking about Hillary Clinton? At all? No. We weren’t. Nice jab, though.

Obama sure needed a lift and got it from Pelosi. The administration has seemed to be drifting lately. Obama has dithered for months about a strategy for Afghanistan — another rats’ nest we should pull our troops out of overnight. Then there was the bizarre disproportion in Obama’s flying to Denmark to flog a Chicago Olympics yet not having time to make it to Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall — which suggests a frivolous provincialism as well as ignorance of history among the president’s principal advisors. And Obama’s muted response to last week’s massacre at Fort Hood has exposed ambiguities and uncertainties in the U.S. government and military about how to respond to homegrown militant Islam. The presidency is a heavy burden — a prize that can become a curse.

She leaves the politics at that, and does what she does so well. Talks about NPR and Madonna.

Is it true, according to press rumors, that Madonna is vacationing with her boy toy Jesus Luz in a house in Bahia in the far northeast of Brazil? And that she is contemplating buying a house there? Is she planning to take tutorials from the queen of axe, Salvador da Bahia’s very own superstar, Daniela Mercury? Well, it’s kind of what I had in mind in my epic Salon column last year negatively comparing Madonna to Daniela. As a teacher, I will certainly take credit for this leap forward, if it occurs, in Madonna’s much-delayed self-education.

The beauty of Camille Paglia is that she can hate on everyone and everything in such a polite manner. And be so, “I’m on your side” about it. And at the same time, if I saw her on the street (she apparently lives in the Philly suburbs), I’d run. She’s not someone I would ever want to mess with, and I’ve been yelled at by old lesbians before. It’s not cool.

Short story: I went to see the Queers last summer at a small bar in Philadelphia. I was alone. Sitting at the bar, waiting for the Queers to go on, a corpulent rotting human (big/old) sat two seats away. She had short hair and she wore a Queers T-shirt I believe she actually bought at the show. Where did she change? I thought. What is she even doing here, and who is she with?

So, I move over a seat. Start talking. I think we talked about the Queers new album, maybe the city of Philadelphia as a whole — I’m not really sure. I was a few in, and, yeah. Anyway.

Later on, after the first opening band, the Coyletones (who rocked), I was back at the bar and saw her sitting by herself at a table, so I sat next down. Now she was nervous. Keep in mind I’m 25 at the time. No, I’m 24. She’s got to be at least 60. Probably older. Very likely a grandmother. It was a 21+ show, so I imagined she wasn’t chaperoning her grandkids. What was she doing there? This information I sought. Other things I wanted to know: How did you even hear about the Queers? Where do you live? What sort of lifestyle does a 60+ year-old woman at a Queers show — on a Thursday — live?

She wasn’t really all about giving that information out. I was pretty drunk, too. Not too much charm. Eventually she goes, “You know what, I think that’s a little private. I’m pretty disappointed you would ask me these questions!”

So, I got up.

Later on, she was standing against a brick wall while the band played, and I blocked a couple moshers who almost crashed into her. We made eye contact and she nodded. I did too. It was still awkward.

Today in Salon, Camille Paglia, an atheist who obviously hasn’t been paying much serious attention to the post 9/11 New Atheist movement, stumbled upon Richard Dawkins talking about religion on NPR, and having never heard his voice before, she thought he sounded a bit, well, ridiculous:  

I was recently flicking my car radio dial and heard an affected British voice tinkling out on NPR. I assumed it was some fussy, gossipy opera expert fresh from London. To my astonishment, it was Richard Dawkins, the thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists. I had never heard him speak, so it was a revelation. On science, Dawkins was spot on — lively and nimble. But on religion, his voice went “Psycho” weird (yes, Alfred Hitchcock) — as if he was channeling some old woman with whom he was in love-hate combat. I have no idea what ancient private dramas bubble beneath the surface there. As an atheist who respects and studies religion, I believe it is fair to ask what drives obsessive denigrators of religion. Neither extreme rationalism nor elite cynicism are adequate substitutes for faith, which fulfills a basic human need — which is why religion will continue to thrive in our war-torn world.

The thrice-married emperor of contemporary atheists? In Camille Paglia’s broadside of Dawkins I detect the distinctly catty suggestion that Dawkins’s religion bashing is psychosexual detritus from his wars and disappointments with ex-lovers. Not a nice innuendo, but I suppose that most religion obsessed atheists, however many times they’ve been married or discouraged in love, are, at bottom, brides left at the altar. God has disappointed and disillusioned them, and you never hear the end of it.

What we read while forgetting to vote:

• We would enjoy Jane Austen if she had written more about “foot-ball” or if Doonesbury were more appropriately referred to as the “Fiefdom of Metonymy.” And we also wonder what issues arise for a male author with the unfortunate last name of Paglia these days.

• We’ve made a little habit of writing defenses of things that were pretty popular to begin with (the designated hitter, grammar, Brüno, and of course, Barenaked Ladies, just to name a few). That’s why we’re a little upset two things we would defend on our site were covered by other ones. First, Slate explains why jaywalking gets a bad rap; second, Dissent Magazine gives its defense (from last summer) of the more or less irreproachable television series, The Wire. No dissent from us on that one.

• Our alternate video of the week is one sure to please both Yankee fans and haters alike.

• Now that Halloween’s over, it’s high time you start thinking about Christmas. Especially since these E-meters don’t last long.

• We’ve already linked to The Onion’s absurdist lampooning of the Jaguars from Week 1 last year, but the Jags (and their fans) are the focus of another scathing analysis from The Onion this week. But don’t worry: Those boos could have (should have?) been louder.

• Sign you’ve lost credibility as a network: Sesame Street mocks you, and doesn’t even try to be subtle about it.

David Lehman uses half his introduction to Best American Poetry 2009 to attack William Logan.

Now we know things are really out of hand.

Lehman creeps up on his prey by first alluding to negative criticism in general:

“The notion that the job of the critic is to find fault with the poetry — that the aims of criticism and of poetry are opposed — is still with us or, rather, has returned after a hiatus.”

But who would argue against the idea that one of the functions of criticism is to find fault with poetry?  Lehman implies that this “hiatus” was a good thing.   No finding fault with poetry!  Ever!

Even if Lehman is speaking of criticism rather than reviewing, why shouldn’t criticism be able to find fault?

“The critical essays of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden are continuous with their poems and teach us that criticism is a matter not of enforcing the “laws of aesthetics” or meting out sentences as a judge might pronounce them in court. Rather, the poet as critic engages with works of literature and enriches our understanding and enjoyment of them. Yet today more than a few commentators seem intent on punishing the authors they review. It has grown into a phenomenon.”

Lehman has obviously never read T.S. Eliot’s criticism of Edgar Poe (From Poe to Valery, 1949) in which Eliot “punishes” Poe severely.  Poe alone has been attacked by any number of critics: Yvor Winters, Aldous Huxley, Harold Bloom, T.S Eliot, Joseph Wood Krutch, and earlier this year in the New Yorker by a history professor at Harvard.  In fact, there has been no “hiatus” when the target is America’s greatest writer.   Negative reviewing was, of course, practiced by Poe, among other things, and Poe said it very explicitly: “A criticism is just that—a criticism.”

When Lehman says, “A critic engages with works of literature and enriches our understanding and enjoyment of them” he sounds like a person who wants to eat without chewing.   When did “enjoyment” of literature preclude honest opinion about it?    Does Lehman seriously believe that being “nice” to a poem is how we “enjoy” it?   What does he think we are?   Little kids?

Lehman, like Camille Paglia, is dismissive of ‘French Theory:’

“The characteristic badness of literary criticism in the 1980s was that it was heavily driven by theory and saddled with an unlovely vocabulary. T. S. Eliot, in “The Function of Criticism” (1923), says he “presumes” that “no exponent of criticism” has “ever made the preposterous assumption that criticism is an autotelic activity” — that is, an activity to be undertaken as an end in itself without connection to a work of literature. Eliot did not figure on post-structuralism and the critic’s declaration of independence from the text. If you wanted criticism “constantly to be confronted with examples of poetry,” as R. P. Blackmur recommends in “A Critic’s Job of Work,” you were in for a bad time in the 1980s.”

But even worse than critics off in a world of their own, according to Lehman, are critics who review poetry without being nice:

“Every critic knows it is easier (and more fun) to write a ruthless review rather than a measured one. As a reviewer, you’re not human if you don’t give vent to your outrage once or twice — if only to get the impulse out of you. If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you’ll injure not only your sensibility but your soul. Frank O’Hara felt he had no responsibility to respond to a bad poem. It’ll “slip into oblivion without my help,” he would say.”

Actually, it’s not “easier” to write a “ruthless” review–erudition and patience go into “ruthless” reviews all the time.  It’s easier to be funny, perhaps, when being ruthless; this, I will grant, but ruthless without humor falls flat; ruthless and humorous is devastating–the review every poet fears.

As for O’Hara’s remark–echoed by contemporary critic Stephen Burt: Isn’t the critic a philosopher?  And when would you ever tell a philosopher: ‘only write about the good stuff?’

Now Lehman goes after his real target–William Logan.

“William Logan typifies the bilious reviewer of our day. He has attacked, viciously, a great many American poets; I, too, have been the object of his scorn. Logan is the critic as O’Hara defined the species: “the assassin of my orchards.” You can rely on him to go for the most wounding gesture. Michael Palmer writes a “Baudelaire Series” of poems, for example, and Logan comments, “Baudelaire would have eaten Mr. Palmer for breakfast, with salt.” The poems of Australian poet Les Murray seem “badly translated out of Old Church Slavonic with only a Russian phrase book at hand.” Reviewing a book by Adrienne Rich is a task that Logan feels he could almost undertake in his sleep. Reading C. K. Williams is “like watching a dog eat its own vomit.”

For many years, Logan reserved his barbs for the poets of our time. More recently he has sneered at Emily Dickinson (“a bloodless recluse”) and condescended to Emerson (“a mediocre poet”).”

Oh Lehman, stop being such a big baby.  Emerson was a mediocre poet.  Logan has praised Dickinson’s work–calling her a ‘bloodless recluse’ is well…kinda…true.   Should there really be a law against giving Frank O’Hara or C.K. Williams or Hart Crane a bad review?

Far better poets have been far more vilified–and for political reasons, too.

Logan is merely expressing his taste.

Lehman, you shouldn’t take this so personally.

One person finds the weather too cold and goes indoors; another remains outside because they find the weather pleasant.

‘But,’ Lehman might reply, ‘ poets are not the weather, they create in order to please.’

All the more reason why there should be a wider divergence of opinion on poems than the weather.

Poems ask us to love them, and in ways far more nuanced than a breezy, foggy evening balanced between warm and cold.

There is nothing worse for poetry in general than telling people they have to like it.  Critics like Poe and Logan actually help the cake to rise.

Don’t you remember what Keats said about the talking primrose?  It tells us to like it.  So we don’t.

It goes without saying that I don’t agree with all of Logan’s judgments, but simple common sense impels this question:

Which statement is crazier?

I don’t like Hart Crane’s poetry.

or

Everyone has to like Hart Crane’s poetry.

I’m sad to admit Ryan’s text was more than a little over my head, but I refuse to take all of the blame for being confused. The author teaches us how to read her own academic narrative in the introduction, explaining her terminology to describe certain studies of narrative and media synergy. Then she seems to abandon her narrative map early on in the text: using “narrative” and “narratology” interchangably. Still, there was one quote in Chapter 3 on “Drawing and Transgressing Fictional Boundaries” that piqued my interest:

“Whereas truly fictional texts create their own world and constitute the only mode of access to it, nonfictional texts refer to a world that forms the potential target of many texts, because this world possesses a extratextual existence. Fictional worlds are automatically true of their reference world, but nonfiction texts must establish their truth in competition with other texts that describe the same world.”

…hence all the rivalries in academia over the depiction of history.

The most recent argument for context in historical narratives I could think of was the current war of words in the art world over Vermeer’s The Milkmaid. The painting’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City sparked a controversy when the written introduction accompanying Vermeer’s second most famous piece extensively covered several sexual implications in the painting’s various details (Ex: the open mouth of the milk jug, the footwarmer in the corner, the dangling bird and chicken impaled on a spit).

Walter Liedtke, the curator of the exhibition and author of the article cited historical perceptions from Vermeer’s home country of milkmaids and other female laborers as being “sexually available” to credit his analysis of the seventeenth-century painting. Other art historians like Victor Wiener, argued that Liedtke’s radical new reading of the painting was part of a sales ploy to drum up more visits for the Met. Opposing scholars have argued that Vermeer’s Milkmaid is a subject with a more innocent intent: according to E.H. Gombrich, she is “a simple figure employed in a simple task.”

The argument here is between two significantly different narratives stemming from the same source material without the benefit of the artist to clarify his original intent in composing the work. The subject of the painting is both fictional and historical and therefore held to a standard that doesn’t exist in the literary world apart from that of the literary novel or historical fiction. Ryan herself describes historical fictions as interpretations of the common world and interpretations of history as artificial as the fictions themselves. I’m inclined to believe this is true: that all visual art is a form of historical narrative and that any interpretations of the artist’s intent are fiction written by perceptions of both scholars and non-scholars.

At the same time, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t take Camille Paglia’s interpretation of Donatello’s David as a factual depiction of the artist’s appetites and intent in creating the piece. But like any other fictional narrative, it’s fun for me to imagine it.

Since Alan Cordle’s Foetry.com got major media attention and made Foetry a household word, a quiet revolution has taken place.   Publishing and prizes are no longer assumed to be pure.   The ‘Cred Game’ has been exposed.

Here’s a random example from the world of poetry bloggers: http://irasciblepoet.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-makes-me-want-to-vomit.html

From the list of 10 things that makes this poetry blogger “want to vomit:”

Vomit #4: I want to vomit when presses that are vanity exercises continue to publish their friends and exclude new voices.

We think it’s wonderful, thanks to Alan Cordle, that new understanding and outrage exists, but further education is needed.

What made Alan Cordle so dangerous and hated, was that he named names. He was not content to just bellyache.  Foetry.com named, and brought low, big names, because, as more and more realize today, “vanity” in po-biz goes all the way to the top.

Big names intimidate, allowing foetic practice to continue where ‘the gods’ play.

But not everyone is intimidated by big names.  And the word is getting out that Foetry did not begin with Jorie Graham.  The word is getting out that many of the icons of Modernism–which so many people worship because they learned about them in school–were foetic frauds.

It takes critical acumen to detect foetry in history, foetry in the canon, and foetry in contemporary big names.

This is what Scarriet is here for.

All that juicy and critically acute stuff.

The poetry blog which I quoted at random is called ‘The Irascible Poet,” with the following quote on its masthead:

“I Have Never Met a Poet Worth A Damn that was Not Irascible” –Ezra Pound

Here’s what we mean by education.  Our blogger needs to be educated.  The foetic Modernists really brought very little new to the table that was not merely crackpot. We really hate to keep going back to Poe, and making this an issue of Pound v. Poe, but this did fall into our lap.

Before Pound recommended “the irascible poet,” Poe wrote the following:

That poets, including artists in general, are a genus irritable is well understood, but the why seems not to be commonly seen. An artist is an artist only by dint of his exquisite sense of Beauty – a sense affording him rapturous enjoyment, but at the same time implying, or involving, an equally exquisite sense of Deformity or disproportion. Thus a wrong – an injustice – done a poet who is really a poet, excites him to a degree which, to ordinary apprehension, appears disproportionate with the wrong. Poets see injustice – never where it does not exist – but very often where the unpoetic see no injustice whatever. Thus the poetical irritability has no reference to “temper” in the vulgar sense, but merely to a more than usual clear-sightedness in respect to Wrong, this clearsightedness being nothing more than a corollary from the vivid perception of Right, of justice, of proportion. But one thing is clear -–that the man who is not “irritable” is no poet.

This is from Poe’s Marginalia.   Is it not a rapturous paean against foetry? And as we close this post, let us quote Poe again from his Marginalia, and this, too, could be a pledge against all foetic affliction.

Take heart, my friends!

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California. Talking of gold, and of the temptations at present held out to “poor-devil authors,” did it ever strike you that all which is really valuable to a man of letters, to a poet especially, is absolutely unpurchaseable? Love, fame, the dominion of intellect, the consciousness of power, the thrilling sense of beauty, the free air of Heaven, exercise of body and mind, with the physical and moral health which result, these and such as these are really all that a poet cares for. Then answer me this: why should he go to California?

WHAT HAPPENED TO CAMILLE PAGLIA?

ALL communication is a warning.

The more articulate a person, the more they are experiencing what they are warning us about.

All information presupposes danger.  The menu cries out against the horror of starvation–the diet warns of the menu.  The chef who starves cooks best.

Priests are unable to warn directly, since the more articulate the priest, the more that priest personally knows the very sin against which their sermon is a warning.

The dilemma of the articulate priest is at the heart of all moral philosophy and its intellectual, political, cultural, and pedagogical conflicts.

Loyalty is the quality which attempts to stave off this conflict.  Loyalty to group or tribe warns against the dilemma of the articulate priest.  The truly articulate priest disrupts loyalty and its certainties; this is why prophets are hated in their own land.

Camille Paglia is an articulate priest who smashes loyalites.  She offends all groups.  All have reason to despise her: Democrats, Republicans, independents, feminists, conservatives, gays, Catholics, and scholars.

Paglia is the Barren Mother and the Breeding Virgin of intellectual culture.

She is a lustful Socrates, whose questing, intellectual advocacy is centered on ecstatic pleasures and sexual beauty–hers is a warning against what she, personally, has secretly suffered: chastity.

Obviously it’s nobody’s business how much someone gets laid, but my thesis is based on a guess that during Paglia’s development as a young person, she didn’t get laid.  This was both her strength and her weakness.

Paglia fell in love at a very early age with Amelia Earhart’s lone flights—the poem “Alone” by Edgar Poe probably best sums up her soul.  Paglia was a virgin during the 60s and adopted the brazen lesbian role as a graduate student to hide the shame of her uncool virginity.

Paglia, the scholar of sex, shone, as the scholar, herself, remained virginal, or, if not virginal, deeply ashamed of losing out to more successful schmoozers in sex and career.

The virgin is alone more profoundly when surrounded, and not barred from, sexual activity.  For whatever reason, actual sex wasn’t a fit, so Paglia became an artistic fan of pornography—but not out of a feeling of deficiency, for she was an Amelia Earhart in her soul, flying above the boorish crowd.

We warn of what we know—the awed, hurting mind produces what the sensual, happy mind cannot.

Sexual Personae marked the start of a brilliant career.  Her gadfly presence in magazines and the lecture circuit, in the wake of the success of her historical treatise, was truly exciting.  But the promised second volume of Sexual Personae never arrived.  Then she began to write on politics, speaking of presidents and secretaries of state as if she were making snarky judgments at a high school dance.  It never quite rang true.

Paglia also boxed herself in as a hater of ‘French Theory;’ it was always obvious to me this prejudice of hers was linked to her mentor, Harold Bloom, who, like many academics, is explicitly pro-Emerson/anti-Poe, and this Anglophone school can never forgive the French for loving Poe.

Then she took five years to write Break, Blow, Burn, her book on poetry, a tepid close-reading exercise of some of her favorite poems.

How in the world did the author of Sexual Personae morph into Cleanth Brooks?

And five years…think of it.   That’s the writing career of Keats, the recording career of the Beatles (almost), the entire career of the Doors, to take a few dozen short poems, many loved and adored since childhood, and riff on them…this took five years?

Couldn’t most of us do this in a week?

Paglia still blogs on Salon and most readers hate her; the consensus of Salon readers seems to be, I HATE THIS B***, FIRE HER!!!

Which is great.   We at Scarriet understand.  But what happened to you, Camille?

Really?

HORROR, the genre, must be horrible because horror, the reality, stalks us daily;  the relief of laughter, and the relief of revery inspired by beauty, both exist partially as an antidote to anxiety.  Directly confronting fear (in a horror film, for instance) triggers a physical response which competes with laughter–a bodily response–and pleasurable swooning–also a physical response.  The comedic, the beautiful and the horrific are sisters.  Art deftly combines them, and the skill in combining these three marks the great artist. 

Fictional horror gives a crude psycho-physical pleasure in the use of contrast as it diminishes the banal horror of ordinary worries and anxiety–the less intense dread we feel in varying degrees in our own lives.    

The cure is the poison itself; fear in life seeks out more intense fear in stories; ironically, more palpable fear comes to us through fiction; the horror genre is a vaccine of ‘dead’ (fictive) horror for our ‘live’ (real) anxieties.     

But why does horror have to be horrible when it can be comedic and beautiful too–and not merely full of horror?  We can have our poem and eat it; the art that is beautiful and comedic and terrifying all at once  is the greatest gift art can give. 

Alfred Hitchcock won no Oscars, and the terrifying film “Bright Star” will win none, and Poe, who they say ‘is not really that scary’ (of course not! his genius was not merely out to scare) was the Hitchcock of his day, winning no ‘Oscars’ (Poe was shut out by the literary establishment, despite his popularity).  I’ll name one more figure who fits into the category of aesthetic balance–and for that reason gets rejected by various camps: Camille Paglia.  A highly controversial, contradictory, but rich, thinker, (who has wasted her talent on political blogging to some extent) Paglia provides more than single-genre types can chew on.

On this Halloween, here’s to celebrating books, films, and art that are scary, funny and beautiful in tasteful, ingenious combination. 

Take fright and add a little light.  The dark doesn’t have to be so stark.                                   

“[A]ffluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible.” – Camille Paglia

Click here to read more

Salon probably regrets the fact they have Camille Paglia on contract, but for me, she’s almost always a great and fun read.

Want to see how “progressives” treat non-conformers?  Read the letters.  Man, I can feel the hate in them and its awful.

I’m sorry to keep quoting Camille Paglia, but I can’t help it sometimes (in fact, let me take it back, I’m not sorry at all, this stuff is too good to ignore). In her recent column, Camille responds to a number of letters from readers. There’s a lot of good stuff here but the response below was to a letter expressing outrage over the attacks on Sarah Palin and how insulting the media has been toward her because she attended five colleges before graduating from the University of Idaho. Here’s CP’s response:

Thank you very much for your personal testimony. I too have been repulsed by the elitist insults flung at Sarah Palin in the massive, coordinated media effort to destroy her. Hence I have been thoroughly enjoying the way that Palin, despite all the dirt thrown at her by liberal journalists and bloggers, keeps bouncing back as if unscathed. No sooner did the gloating harpies of the Northeastern media think they had torn her to shreds than she exploded into number one on Amazon.com with a memoir that hadn’t even been printed yet! With each one of these amusing triumphs, Palin is solidifying her status as a bona fide American cultural heroine.

Yes, the snobbery about Palin’s five colleges is especially distasteful, given the Democratic party’s supposed allegiance to populism. Judging by the increasingly limited cultural and factual knowledge of graduates of elite schools whom one encounters working in the media, blue-chip sheepskins aren’t worth the parchment they’re printed on these days. Young people forced through the ruthlessly competitive college admissions rat race have the independence and creativity pinched right out of them. Proof? Where are the major young American artists, writers, critics or movie-makers of the past 20 years? The most adventurous and enterprising minds have gone into high tech. We’re in a horrendous cultural vacuum because our status-besotted education industry is geared toward producing not original thinkers but docile creatures of the system.

Oh, and one more, this regarding the nefarious Roman Polanski and his arrest for drugging and seducing a 13 year-old girl:

When I first heard that Roman Polanski had been arrested in Switzerland, I thought it was absurd because of his advanced age as well as the gravity of other issues facing this war-torn world. It seemed like a publicity stunt by Los Angeles authorities with too much time on their hands. However, on reflection, I soon concluded that Polanski, whatever his artistic achievements, has no right to claim exemption from the law’s demands. He is not a political refugee but a proud sybarite who has flaunted his tastes and conquests. If you live like the Marquis de Sade (one of the principal influences on my first book, Sexual Personae), then you should be willing to be imprisoned like Sade.

yes indeed. Nail blasted by hammer on head.

Every month I resist the urge to post about Camille Paglia’s latest column at Salon.com. Although I continue to feel that Paglia is the most intellectually honest columnist around and worthy of reading every month, I figure the permalink over on the right hand side of the page is usually sufficient.

But this month Paglia touches on so many of the subjects I’ve discussed recently that I can’t resist. What’s great about this column in particular is the high quality not only of her commentary but of the reader e-mails she quotes, some of which rebut her opinions quite skillfully.

Here is just one tidbit to whet your appetite:

The mainstream media’s failure to honestly cover last month’s mass demonstration in Washington, D.C. was a disgrace. The focus on anti-Obama placards (which were no worse than the rabid anti-LBJ, anti-Reagan or anti-Bush placards of leftist protests), combined with the grotesque attempt to equate criticism of Obama with racism, simply illustrated why the old guard TV networks and major urban daily newspapers are slowly dying. Only a simpleton would believe what they say.

Read the full article here.

Greil Marcus has always been a provocative and interesting writer, but his latest project has sprinting to the book store. A New Literary History of America seems like one of the smartest cultural and historical book to emerge in a while. Bringing a fresh method to the discussion history, Marcus compiles assorted stories about America and America’s characters, scattered voices brought together by Marcus’s editor’s hand. This varied, post-modern text book seems like the perfect way to write about America.

The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on Tarzan, Bharati Mukherjee on The Scarlet Letter, Gish Jen on Catcher in the Rye, and Ishmael Reed on Huckleberry Finn. From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, Life, Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.

It’s not often that one can turn to a radical feminist to clarify just how wrong liberals can be, but Camille Paglia, who evaluates what is actually going on rather than repeating the mantra of the movement, comes through on occasion.

Paglia said the fact there was little racism in the campaign against Obama is evidenced by the fact he “was elected by white people.”

Criticism of Obama, instead, is coming because of the “strategic failures he is making in pushing this very important issue of health care reform.”

Why can’t other liberals admit this obvious fact?

In the Spring, Paglia complained that conservatives needed to give Obama a break and to stop throwing every accusation in the book against him. However, there were some questions that she thought worthy of more investigation.

Yes, there were ambiguities about Obama’s birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved. And the embargo on Obama’s educational records remains troubling.

Thursday, Paglia appeared on NPR and reiterated her concerns over accusations that conservatives are motivated by racial animus.

First of all, I reject the idea that the ‘birther’ campaign is motivated by racism. There may be racism among it, but there are legitimate questions about the documentation of Obama’s birth certificate. I’m sorry, I’ve been following this closely from the start. To assume that all those signs about the birth controversy were motivated by racism, that is simply wrong.

Paglia’s comments occur at about the 35 minute mark – but listening to more is well worth it, as it strikes me as rare in my sampling to have someone appear on NPR who is liberal but doesn’t live in the zone and repeat the lies. Click here to listen.

Syndicated Columnist Kathleen Parker also appears on program, and offers that voter anger over the summer was a real populist movement. And Paglia tells Tom Ashbrook that the cultural problem is not racism, but rather, the accusations of racism such as those made by Jimmy Carter this week.

This kind of language is the coarsening. Okay? That is the coarsening – that makes the brain stop. That pulls an emotional trigger, and everyone takes sides, and we go back to the little tribal groups that we were before. I as an Italian American despise the malicious vilification of my people as criminal on shows like the Sopranos… so I have a right to complain too. But the media hailed that as the greatest show in the history of television. So we all can be angry. Let’s all trade anger cards, okay? That’s getting us nowhere in this country.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Camille Paglia, the lone Salon.com columnist who enjoys a support link to radical, rightwinger, Matt Drudge, appeared on NPR’s “On Point” yesterday and made a spirited defense of the “birther” movement. The exchange came about 36 minutes in, after one caller to the show recounted his experiences at the 9/12 march on Washington. Paglia snapped back at him:

First of all, I reject the idea that the “birther” campaign is motivated by racism. There may be racism among it, but there are legitimate questions about the documentation of Obama’s birth certificate. I’m sorry, I’ve been following this closely from the start. To assume that all those signs about the birth controversy were motivated by racism, that is simply wrong.

Paglia has been on this beat before, writing in April that “there were ambiguities about Obama’s birth certificate that have never been satisfactorily resolved.” But this particular interview is compelling, especially for Paglia’s convoluted explanation that she despises victim politics but thinks “The Sopranos” was a bigoted portrayal of Italian-Americans.

Why does Salon.com employee this woman?