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Camille paglia: a crown jewel of italian americana languishes in the shadow of the sopranos.

Camille Paglia first penetrated my consciousness through a televised   panel discussion about various women’s social, work and political issues. I soon became bored with the din of politically correct clichés.   I began puttering around barely conscious of the television background noise.

Her recursive parenthetical phasing was incredible.   She would start with a subject, then a parenthetical phase to the subject, then a second parenthetical phase to the first, and so on.   I swear she had sentences four or five parentheticals deep and then she would work herself back to the subject.   What an incredibly spontaneous mind!

Then they flashed her name on the screen “Paglia”; and I started to laugh.   An Italian - wouldn’t you know?   Passion and art are as much apart of Italian culture as salt and pepper are to food…” Later that day I was in the library looking for her books.  

Camille Paglia is 100% Italian by nature and nurture.   Her mother was from Ceccanon, Italy and her father of Italian descent. She dedicated her first book (“Sexual Personae”) to her grandmothers and aunt: Vincenaz Colapietro, Alfonsina Paglia and Lenora Antonelli.   Unlike John Ciardi who took great offense when called an Italian American poet, Paglia is very conscious and proud of her Italian heritage. She often refers to her Italianess.   For example, in her 1991 M.I.T. lecture she referred to her Italianess four times.   In a 1995 Charlie Rose interview, her explanation of why she was fired from Bennington College: “I’m Italian and don’t do well in institutions

Although Paglia’s mother was an immigrant, Camille was born in 1947, which places her solidly in the demographic cohort “baby boomers” and, the subset of that cohort, 3rd generation Italian Americans, i.e. the grandchildren of the pre-WW I immigrants.   The 2nd generation did not pass on the Italian language, history and little of the culture (save nuances such as family dinners) to their children, with one very significant exception – the concept of womanhood.   The girls of the 3rd generation were raised with the ancient Catholic values of their southern Italian ancestors.   Specifically, no sex before marriage, no artificial birth control after marriage, and homosexuality? – Oh my god! Don’t even think about it!  

She entered college at a time when Italian/Catholic sexual values were to become severely challenged by society. The 1960s saw the onset of major movements for social change: civil rights for Black Folks, women’s liberation, sexual freedom, academic freedom, etc. Many of those issues have been largely resolved or are in their denouement.   African Americans have attained de jure all the rights they were denied in the Jim Crow era through the 1950s; similarly women.   Although, for both groups there is de facto still significant “miles to go before we sleep”.   Nevertheless, the trajectory of change is in a positive direction and the mass protests and great polarizing debates have largely passed.

However, there is one factor of social change that began in the sixties that is still the basis of significant conflict – sexuality.   Issues having to do with abortion, various gay related issues (marriage, military), contraception, etc. are still heatedly debated and cause of public protestations.   For example, recent articles here in i-Italy.org have been very critical of Catholic theological principles and teachings having to do with sex related issues (e.g. the celebration of the virulent anti-Catholic Sabina Guzzanti).

Most amazing to me, is the unique combination of ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’ of her scholarship.   She covers the history of Western Art from ancient Egypt down to Madonna.   However, she doesn’t simply write in sweeping generalizations about this or that period such as one reads in many art histories.   Paglia is more than an art historian.   She is a philosopher.   She writes: “Sexual Personae seeks to demonstrate the unity and continuity of western culture…” In an effort to find that philosophic unity, she delves into the minutia of individual works.   For example in her discussion of Renaissance art she draws the reader's attention to a ‘feather’ on the boot of Donatello’s David:   “The feathery wing of Goliath’s helmet…like an escaping thought, climbs ticklishly up the inside of David’s thigh.”

Sadly, all the philosophical and aesthetic works of Camille Paglia, a very proud to be of Italian descent American, are of little value to the vast majority of the Italian Americans.   All her genius and energy can make no contribution to the development of Italian American culture because, frankly, she is too intellectual for our people.   Intellectual!   Not intelligent!   She is not too intelligent for our people.   We have the intelligence, but we chose not to apply it to higher education – especially in the humanities.   That, to my mind, is our tragedy.   Italian culture is in essence humanistic and we essentially reject our culture – indeed, our Being.

All cultures are a mix of ‘high and low brow’.   “Highbrow” understood as being intellectual, “Lowbrow” as un- or even anti-intellectual. Robust cultures, are a healthy mixture of high and lowbrow.   Early 20 th century Jews manifested genius in the sciences and in Vaudeville ‘shtick’. However, the low levels of Italian Americans going to college are reducing our culture to a disproportionate lowbrow.   We don’t, indeed can’t, read intellectually challenging Italian American writers like Camille Paglia (or Fante or Ciardi or DeLillo, etc).   Instead we anxiously await the next Scorsese movie or Sopranos season.   Ideally, we would do both: read Paglia, and enjoy the Italian Vaudeville of Scorsese and the Sopranos.  

Tragically, Camille Paglia a teacher, philosopher, social reformer is an Italian American Hecuba who languishes alone in Italian America - unknown and unknowable to her people.

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BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

Short Fuse Book Review: Camille Paglia — She Raves

If you try to take Camille Paglia seriously, despite the occasional insight you might find along the way, in the end it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that you’ve made a category error.

Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars by Camille Paglia. Pantheon, 224 pages, $30.

By Harvey Blume.

It’s no fun to take Camille Paglia seriously. Not rewarding. It could be the effort is, as someone remarked similarly about Slavoj Žižek, a category error. But in thinking about the opening pages of Paglia’s new book, it occurs to me that there is a simple way of describing her. Her pronouncements about art, literature, and assorted other topics over the course of her career (including, back in her heyday, when she regularly mounted a salon.com soapbox, strictures about how Madonna should sing and Hillary Clinton dress) have this in common: behind them there is a demagogue trying to get out.

Camille Paglia needs to rule. Only her dictates can save us from all that is eating away at civilization as she insists that we know it. Only she can defeat the feminists she despises (as opposed to one or two she spares); only she can rescue literature from literary theory (she pronounces “LacanFoucaultDerrida” as if it were one dirty word, the name of a Francophone tumor preying on the American mind).

In the new book, she wants to rescue us from the “vertigo” of digital distraction and social media. She complains in her introduction that “the genre of painting has lost its primacy and authority.” For this she blames the “tragic complacency” of the curators and directors of major art institutions. She will cut through that exhausted curatoriat and help, indeed, force us, “to relearn how to see.”

It doesn’t give Paglia a second’s pause that perhaps painting, along with sculpture, has lost its traditional role not because the likes of Phillip Montebello, for example, ex-director of the Metropolitan Museum, who was a slacker or a dolt—he presided, among other things, over the creation of a superb Greco-Roman gallery, though of course Paglia herself would have done better—but because other visual arts, from the beginning of the twentieth century on, have come into being. Photography, film, television, and now an overflow of digital possibilities all lay claim to talent and attention.

Her response to complexity is simple: rave. Not to rave is not to care. So she raves about the turn from painting to other media—what the despised postmodernists of Paris might have helpfully called the decenteredness of painting. Had she read and absorbed Marshal Mcluhan she might be less shocked, yes shocked, that the electronic age has provided so much competition to the paintbrush and the pedestal.

Had she read and absorbed Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), she might appreciate that media transitions are not doomed to be zero sum. According to Benjamin, yes, something precious is lost when a painting is stripped, by reproduction, of what he called its “aura,” its one-of-a-kind, almost human presence in space and time. But something no less valuable is gained when, by dint of the same technological revolution, film reveals motion as never seen before. Benjamin compares the painter to a magician and the cameraman to a surgeon and does not feel compelled to choose between their arts. His thoughts on this subject remain enchanting and substantial. Both Mcluhan and Benjamin were moved to reflect deeply about new media, as, too, was Plato, when, in the Phaedrus , he wondered about the harm that would be caused to an oral tradition by the new medium of alphabetic text.

These thinkers left plenty to think about. They did not just rave.

I had the unpleasant experience of interviewing Camille Paglia in 1995. In preparation for an interview, I try to immerse myself as fully as I can in the subject’s work. Most people like talking about their work with an informed, sympathetic, not necessarily uncritical interlocutor. Not Camille Paglia. I can’t help but chuckle, at this remove, when I think of her summarily saying: “Stop talking to me. It gives me a headache. Just ask questions. I give answers.”

I felt insulted, almost walked off and left her with her headache, but heeled. The results were instructive.

Paglia told me she had been inspired by psychedelics and psychedelic culture and liked to call her style of writing “psychedelic criticism” since there was a lot of “reverb” in it, just like in “acid rock.” She affirmed that she herself had never had a psychedelic experience, had never, in brief, tripped. She nevertheless felt entitled to speak for psychedelic experience—that “revolutionary, hallucinatory, and mystic way of seeing”—better than those who had indulged, better, by far, she opined, than Grateful Dead fans parading around in their “tie-died tee-shirts.” For Paglia, a contact high—but not from Deadheads—was all the revelation she needed.

She confirmed, as well, that she had never participated in sadomasochistic sex. Still, to my mind, the best bit in her diffuse Sexual Personae was the chapter on Rousseau, in which she managed to correlate his sex life (as expressed in his Confessions ) to his politics. As a boy, Jean-Jacques was regularly draped over the lap of his lovely governess for spankings he came to relish. As an adult, he saw women as potential spankers and himself as an aspiring spankee. Rousseau is best known for writing: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” But in his sexual fantasies, he kept some chains around. Paglia, to be sure, had no firsthand experience of this type to draw on. What she owes to Jean-Jacques is her eye-opening, contact spank.

THE REVENGE OF THE SITH — worth no end of praise?

Something of the same approach—a curious bifurcation hovering between disingenuousness and hypocrisy—marks Glittering Images . “The arts are fighting a rearguard action,” she writes, “their very survival at stake.” The minds of children are especially at risk and demand “rescue from the torrential stream of flickering images, which addict them to seductive distractions.”

How peculiar then—how typically Paglia—that this book, which is meant to be a sort of primer on art history and to serve as an example for grade school curricula, concludes with a prolonged gush of enthusiasm for George Lucas’s Revenge of the Sith (2005). Paglia has no end of praise for this, the sixth and most digital entry in the Star Wars saga, in which, as she sees it, George Lucas “closed the gap between art and technology.”

It somehow doesn’t bother her that the movie is embedded completely, as she notes, in “the gargantuan cosmos of Star Wars cartoons, video games, novels, handbooks, action figures, plastic kits, and Web sites.” Nor that it makes a substantial contribution to the “torrential stream of flickering images” that can disturb and derange young minds.

The tale is told that Alec Guinness, aka Obi-Wan Kenobi, once agreed to give an autograph to a young fan only on condition that the child gave up watching Star Wars . Obsessive viewing was the hypnotic dark side of the force. Other things—books, paintings, films—deserved attention.

Paglia herself was apparently never visited by Obi-Wan in his shimmering ghostly form to caution her against ending a book on the history of art with Star Wars . Would she have listened? Probably not. For her, art history, which began millennia ago, as per Glittering Images , in Pharaonic Egypt, ends in our time with the $135 million Revenge of the Sith .

“This book,” she says about Glittering Images , “was motivated by my dismay at the open animosity toward art and artists that I have heard on American AM talk radio over the past two decades.” Longtime Paglia readers can confirm that she is an avid listener to AM talk radio. A 1999 column she wrote for salon.com hinged on the following: “Within 24 hours of the opening of the present show, local radio talk shows in New York and Philadelphia were seething with allegations about the Jewish presence on the Brooklyn Museum’s board and administration.”

The show in question to was the second at the Brooklyn Museum to arouse furor, including threats by then mayor Rudolf Giuliani to defund the borough’s popular museum. The piece most offensive to Paglia, the mayor, and AM talk radio callers, was “The Holy Virgin Mary” by Nigerian/British painter Chris Ofili.

Camille Paglia

This was a dark-skinned Madonna on a canvas that included floating images of female genitalia. Some people seethed to find the Virgin in dark-toned, Nubian featured, non-virginal contexts. This can’t but bring to mind how often Muslims seethe when they detect what they take to be off-color representations of Muhammad. One reason not to push this analogy too far, though, is that Ofili, unlike the hacks behind the current, stupidly offensive, anti-Muslim video, is in fact a talented artist who was not out to insult Mary, though that would be well within his rights, so much as to Africanize and sexualize her. Ofili used cakes of varnished elephant dung as stands for the canvas. Elephant dung can have positive connotations in African contexts. But try explaining that on New York/Philadelphia AM Talk Radio.

Did Paglia try? Can you imagine her calling in to reason with the seething? No, when she turned on the radio, she enjoyed a contact seethe and wrote a column that debuted under the inflammatory title “Why are a Jewish collector and a Jewish museum director promoting anti-Catholic art?” This was Paglia’s inner demagogue unleashed at its most vulgar—and unforgiveable.

As for the extinction event Paglia feels is threatening art, and that Glittering Images was written to forestall, it’s worth noting that as of this writing MoMA is proposing to stay open seven days a week instead of six in order to accommodate a crush of visitors whose number has doubled in the last eight years. We have multiple choices, then. There are museums and galleries that seem, contra Paglia, to be thriving. Or you can go along with the flow of AM talk radio, never daring to contradict. Or you can download Revenge of the Sith , ignore Alec Guinness’s admonition, and follow along yet again as Anakin Skywalker completes his journey to the dark side.

You can even do all three.

I have so ached for someone to write something thoughtful and compelling that is critical of Camille Paglia. This is because a good ten percent of what she says and writes I find so over-the-top that I don’t want to believe her. Yet I feel compelled to accept what she says because, like the other 90 percent of what she says, makes so much bloody sense. She is a Herculean academic whose ideas seem to finally stitch the world together for me. But I want someone with chops as great as hers to try to knock her down so that I don’t just full stop take what she says as fact. But this ‘review’ seems like romper room compared to the level of polemic Paglia engages in. The philosophic connections you draw make no sense and it seems as though you simply took this chance to grind your axe with her. Disappointing.

i appreciate yr response but we disagree.

first of all, there’s the antisemitism she has channeled. am talk radio stuff. sorry, i feel, as a jew, i really need go no farther to explain why i wrote about this book. that’s reason right there.

anti-semitism has too long a half-life in academe. i referenced zizek. will tell you more if you want. (mel gibson is the lower antisemite, zizek, the higher). it makes me sick.

there are catholic thinkers — james carroll, garry wills — who have gone to great lengths to contend with the antisemitism in the catholic tradition to which they adhere. i respect them. paglia but brandishes her bifurcated love for catholic visual art and makes no mention of its, um, “dark side”.

when i first encountered her work, i found much to like. i thought her building “sexual personae” around apollonian v. dionysian principles a la nietzsche in the “birth of tragedy from the spirit of music” terrific and illuminating. that’s nietzsche, at his best, though she denied it had anything to do with him.

and contra the feminists she railed against, she was, vehemently “sex positive.” i liked that too.

what else? she wrote about writing in the first person, not hiding behind footnotes & authority.

but i think, perhaps unlike you, she’s not over but under educated. shd have read mchluhan & benjamin. for her critique insofar as there is any sanity to it is a critique of media.

her brilliance, such as it is or was, is pretty much neutralized for me again and again, and lately by telling me “revenge of the sith” is as good as it gets.

> yet i feel compelled to accept what she says because, like the other 90 percent of what she says, makes so much bloody sense.

as in, can you be more specific?

i called her a demagogue.

i’ll stick with that. a demagogue says something true, something that needs saying, so powerfully you stick with him/her through all the subsequent fraud.

again, i appreciate yr response. an argument about paglia wd be a good thing.

You are so completely off the mark with this review. I would suggest you stop trying to wrestle with Paglia’s ideas since it is obvious you don’t know what you’re talking about. Anti-Semitism?! Paglia has written at length about her admiration of Jews and their influence on her intellectual development. Your accusation is insulting. And do you really think Paglia forgot to read McLuhan? Again, she has referenced McLuhan many times in her work. Like the above commenter said, you are woefully unprepared to mount any intellectual challenge to Paglia.

yes, she writes about jewish intellectual achievements. then she posts an inflammatory piece of garbage entitled: “why are a jewish collector and a jewish museum director promoting anti-catholic art?” on the one hand, oft-repeated reverence for harold bloom, and on the other, gutter antisemitism. sorry you can’t see it. i called her bifurcated. and so, to put mildly, she is. (for a fuller treatment of her reviews of the sensation shows, neither of which, astoundingly, she actually bothered to attend, see the american prospect, http://prospect.org/article/oops-she-did-it-again ).

same with mcluhan: sure she read him. but when it comes to thinking about why painting is not the center of visual art it’s as if she never has. better to rage against museum directors and damn the art world in her inimitable soapbox style.

i said, in my response to karen bridson, what i once found valuable about paglia.

it’s interesting that neither bridson, who professed to find paglia “herculean”, nor you, have done as much. you prefer, after the manner of paglia herself, to rage and insult. perhaps it’s just paglia’s never less than enragée style that you find compelling about her.

In discussing the Sensation show and the Ofili painting, she was making a general observation of how it is considered “cool” and “hip” in the art world to poke fun at or denigrate Christian iconography. This may be one of the reasons, she thinks, that Christians have no respect for high art. They see it as blasphemous and childish. Like Serrano’s Piss Christ, the art world elevates these types of work, simply because they are shocking and.offensive, without explanation of what these works are doing, what they mean, etc. And she is highlighting the fact that any work that dared to do the same things to Jewish iconography would cause an uproar. As a Jew, how would you feel if the Torah was smeared with shit or the Star of David was pissed on? Again, she is only trying to explain why art has no prestige in America and why the art world is so keen on profaning religious imagery.

andres serrano’s piss christ is being shown in nyc, again, even as we speak, amid expected controversy.

here’s what serrano lately said about the work ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/nyregion/catholic-leader-turned-away-at-exhibit-he-deemed-offensive.html?ref=nyregion ):

. . . he said, the work is about his personal love of Jesus, and Jesus’s bodily torment on the cross, during which, Mr. Serrano believes, not only blood, but all Jesus’s bodily fluids, including urine, spilled out.

“The thing that offends me is that they characterize me as being an anti-Christian bigot,” he said, “and that’s far from the truth. They are barking up the wrong tree when they are saying I am not a Christian.”

i invited you to read my longer piece about paglia’s take on the sensation shows. in it i said that catholicism expresses itself brilliantly and variously through (though not only through) visual media.

serrano was contending with his tradition, critiquing and personalizing it through visual media. i’ve seen other work of his. he works with catholicism — its beauty, hierarchy, distances, and power — visually. he does not, no matter the media furor— to which paglia ever ready with her penchant for demagoguery contributed — mean to abuse it. though, of course, he has every right to abuse and disown it. to piss right on it, if he wants, which he doesn’t.

this is america. last i looked we hold the right to disavow religion, well, sacred.

as jews often do judaism.

have you ever read phillip roth? do you have any idea of the hostility he engendered among jews for “portnoy’s complaint”? the hatred? the death threats?

to (over) simplify: catholics have the benefit of a rich visual tradition. jews (oversimplifying again) have worked more with text.

> As a Jew, how would you feel if the Torah was smeared with shit . . .

as i sd in the piece i’ve referred to about paglia and the sensation shows, the nazis did that. it didn’t stop with torah scrolls. so sorry, it’s a ticklish subject. . .

nor am i talking about jews — or anybody else — walking into a church and defiling religious imagery.

i thought we were talking about art.

karen bridson said she found a “good ten percent” of what paglia writes “over-the-top”, as opposed to the rest, which, to her, “makes so much bloody sense.” i’d reverse that ratio. i’d say 10 percent of what paglia wrote was timely, necessary, and brilliant. the other ninety percent is boilerplate or foaming at the mouth. or silly, as in concluding glittering images with “revenge of the sith.”

There have been other writers critical of Paglia… Molly Ivins wrote a witty review of Paglia’s first book back in 1990, in which Ivins pointed out Paglia continual tendency to overgeneralize… I admire Paglia as an interesting “character” who stimulates thought, even when one disagrees with her… not taking her too seriously is probably the best way to enjoy her…

i can live with that assessment. problem is she encourages all or nothing, turns too many readers into followers, disciples. she promotes genuflection and surrender. it’s all: camille has spoken. . . yeah, you’re right. if one must take her at all, it’s best not too seriously.

This is not a real book review but merely a glorified blog post where the author wastes the reader’s time with his own petty grievances. There are many legit criticisms regarding Paglia’s contemporary selections here and in her volume on poetry, but Harvey Blume doesn’t get into any of it. This is because he doesn’t really talk about the book! He assumes it is obvious why the George Lucas film is a bad choice even though he never makes specific arguments about the film’s weaknesses. It is up to the critic to supply the evidence for his arguments! There is also nothing here about the rest of the book and the various artworks it covers. Buy yourself a diary and keep your dull musings to yourself, Harvey!

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Camille Paglia on Drag Queens and Democrats: Obama Behaved Like ‘King at Versailles’

Renegade feminist reveals how to be a public intellectual: 'get a real job'.

With last week’s publication of her new essay collection, Free Women, Free Men , Camille Paglia demonstrates that she’s as much of a cultural wrecking ball as ever. Fresh off of an appearance at the Brooklyn Public Library , we spoke with the feminist renegade—and renegade feminist—about some of her favorite subjects: politics, the state of academia, and, of course, drag queens.

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One of the things you often stress in your work is how provincial and ignorant of world culture many intellectuals have increasingly become. What do you think of the frequent comparisons between Trump and Hitler (even “literally” Hitler)? Part of me suspects they simply don’t know of any other dictators.

Yes, “provincial” is exactly the right word to describe the constricted worldview of so many American intellectuals—although there are very few true intellectuals left in this country. What we mostly have are insular, elitist academics and hopelessly bland literary journalists, clustered in genteel urban ghettos. Timidity and groupthink are epidemic.

“Presentism” is a major affliction—an over-absorption in the present or near past, which produces a distortion of perspective and a sky-is-falling Chicken Little hysteria. Fifteen years ago, after I gave a lecture at Yale in which I lamented the increasing loss of knowledge of the past, the chairman of the history department told me of his surprising difficulties in hiring young faculty. Specialists in medieval history were frustratingly rare, and even in American history, he said, there were few graduate students concentrating in anything before the Civil War. This collapsing trend is alarming, to say the least.

My first career ambition as a child was to become an Egyptologist. Archaeologists think in very long time frames. I’m extremely impatient with the narrowness of reference of today’s over-politicized academics and journalists. Over a quarter century ago, I wrote in “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (my attack on post-structuralism, reprinted in Sex, Art, and American Culture ): “The human record is virtually universally one of cruelty barely overcome and restrained by civilization.  Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly but are everywhere, from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China, and Japan.” There is no way we can understand the present without studying the past.

It was precisely my knowledge of ancient and modern history that led me to condemn George W. Bush ’s invasion of Iraq before it happened. I was one of the very few public voices who did so. Virtually the entire mainstream media went down flat in front of the Bush administration’s flagrant lies. I consider my Salon.com interview (with David Talbot) opposing that imminent invasion one of the highlights of my career.

As for the overblown comparisons of Trump to Hitler, I fail to see what the resemblance is. That Trump signs executive orders as a quick way around the gridlock operations of Congress? I don’t like that either, but it’s what Obama was doing for years, with few peeps from Democrats. Obama routinely usurped Congressional powers and often behaved like the French king at Versailles.

The real truth is that Trump won an election that the Democrats blew. I’m a registered Democrat who voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries. Sanders would probably have won both the nomination and the election had the prestige mainstream media, heavily in the tank for Hillary, not imposed a yearlong blackout on him. Despite being an unknown quantity to most Heartland voters, Sanders still almost won, and a couple of primaries, like Iowa, may have been stolen from him.

Trump was elected because he was addressing problems that the Democrats had ignored or had no solutions for. Why aren’t disappointed Democrats focusing their fury on our own party? The entire superstructure should be swept away and the egomaniacal Clintons consigned to mothballs. I’m looking to a new generation of younger Democrats to effect change. In the future presidential sweepstakes, my money is on California’s new senator, Kamala Harris . She seems to have the whole package!  

I cover “ RuPaul ’s Drag Race” for the Observer, and that is a direct result of learning about drag culture from you in the 1990s. Have you followed the evolution of drag culture over the last several decades, and what do you think of its evolution?

It was Andy Warhol ’s early black-and-white short films, above all Harlot , which I saw in college shortly after it was shot in 1964, that first made me see drag as a major art form. Mario Montez as a trashy Jean Harlow seductively unpeeling and eating a banana was electrifying! Warhol’s other drag stars—Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling—were major icons for me and my innermost circle in that decade. It’s one of the primary reasons I still call myself a Warholite.

Another landmark was the 1968 movie, The Queen , where a New York drag contest judged by Warhol was won by a gorgeous blonde called Rachel Harlow (Richard Finocchio from Philadelphia). David Bowie saw that film at Cannes and was heavily influenced by Harlow’s innovative soft look. Then there was a huge underground scandal in Philadelphia when Grace Kelly’s uber-athletic heterosexual brother, John B. Kelly, Jr., fell in love with Harlow and was driven out of the mayor’s race by his own vengefully Catholic mother!

I began writing about androgyny in college and did massive research into it in graduate school for my doctoral dissertation (called Sexual Personae: Categories of the Androgyne ). An excellent British book appeared in 1968, the year I entered grad school: Roger Baker’s Drag: A History of Female Impersonation on the Stage .  The photos in that first edition were a knockout—especially of the stately, charismatic Ricky Renee. In my historical studies, I was intrigued by the central role often played by transvestism in ancient religious rituals, particularly the cult of Cybele in Asia Minor, where male priests castrated themselves and donned the garments of the goddess.

After the gender-bending 1960s, with its unisex haircuts and flamboyant Mod outfits, there was a cultural reaction:  during the 1970s, newly liberated post-Stonewall gay men turned macho clone (jeans, lumberjack shirts, mustaches). The pornographic illustrator Tom of Finland (whom I revere) provided the black-leather master plan for the new s&m look. Drag queens were suddenly out—spurned as a residue of the humiliating era when gay men were automatically classified as effeminate. As I emphasized in the catalog essay that I wrote for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s giant exhibition of David Bowie’s costumes in 2013, the androgynous Bowie of his brilliant Ziggy Stardust phase was stunningly bold in defying the stereotypical masculine conventions of the current gay movement.

The drag resurgence began with the 1978 Franco-Italian movie, La Cage Aux Folles , based on a French play and set in Saint Tropez. Both the film and the 1983 Broadway musical of that name proved to be immensely popular with mainstream audiences. That crossover appeal continued with the surprise smash hits of two drag queen comedies, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995).

In 1993, I collaborated with Glenn Belverio (in his drag persona as Glennda Orgasm) in a pro-porn video shot on the streets of Greenwich Village, Glennda and Camille Do Downtown, where I declared that the 1990s were the period of the drag queen: “Drag queens are the dominant sexual personae of this decade.” I called my philosophy “Drag Queen Feminism” and talked about how much of my personality is modeled on drag queens. (A transcript of the film appears in my 1994 essay collection, Vamps & Tramps .)

The film was aired in June 1993 on Glenn’s show on Manhattan Public Access Television and premiered at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival. However, it was banned for political incorrectness by both the New York and San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Film Festivals. (It later won first prize for best short documentary at the 1994 Chicago Underground Film Festival.)

Hence my amazement and delight at the gradual mainstreaming of drag, which can be traced from RuPaul’s first VH1 show in 1996 to the enormous success of RuPaul’s Drag Race , which debuted in 2009 and is still going strong. RuPaul’s strict dictates over his brood of apprentice queens are overtly teacherly—like Eve Arden in “Our Miss Brooks.”

But we must not forget how controversial drag once was. For example, after a talk at New York’s 92 nd Street Y on my 1994 book tour for Vamps & Tramps , my friends, including Glenn in full drag as Glennda Orgasm, impulsively decided to go to Elaine’s, the famous Upper East Side bar and restaurant frequented by writers, actors and artists.

I had never been to Elaine’s and had no idea what to expect. As I made my way through the crowded, noisy first room with Glennda (looming over me at 6’1” even without heels), we had to squeeze by the equally tall actor Tony Roberts, known for his work with Woody Allen. Even now, 23 years later, I can still see the shockingly intense and intimidating look of hatred and contempt on Roberts’ face when he saw Glennda daring to trespass in that uptown shrine. The hypocrisy of elite bourgeois liberals! After we were all seated in the back, it became clear that service was purposefully slow and neglectful. I did not identify myself, but I vowed never to return to Elaine’s. My revenge was to give the story to Page Six at the New York Post —my usual perch for attacking the Manhattan establishment!

Regarding your question about drag’s evolution, I think it has recently trended toward courtly masque—which was the highly ornate and often allegorical style of theater that developed after Shakespeare’s generation of playwrights, who focused on plot and character. The performers of masque in England, France, and Italy were often aristocrats or even the king himself.  Masque had skeletal plots but extravagant costumes and lots of music and dance, sometimes with special effects of fire or water . Ultimately, masque gave birth to classical ballet.

The contestants on RuPaul’s Drag Race are fiercely drawn characters who carry their own plots in their head. They are as competitive and militant as masters of the martial arts. It’s very interesting how the high-fashion runway (symbol of an industry condemned by mainstream feminism right through the 1990s) has not only survived but become a now-universal symbol of self-presentation and performance.

I must admit to some nostalgia for the pre-Stonewall era of drag, when there were great Hollywood stars like Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Bette Davis, Tallulah Bankhead, and Judy Garland to impersonate. Sometimes contemporary drag seems a bit too Halloweenish—that is, random, stunt-like, and divorced from myth or psychology. But Halloween was a sacred day for me in childhood, when I startled people with my eccentric transgender costumes—Robin Hood, a Roman soldier, a matador, Napoleon, Hamlet. (It spilled over into adulthood: my new book reproduces a 1992 photo of me from People magazine where I’m flashing a switchblade knife while impersonating a street-fighter from West Side Story .)

I am very glad to see the older, more regal style of drag still flourishing in Manila Luzon, who does antic humor with her Fanny Brice crossed eyes but who also possesses genuine sensuality and mystery, a magic vibration. In her “Eternal Queen” video, where she mourned the death of her partner, Manila’s range and depth of feeling were on open display.  She is the rare performer who is equally adept at comedy and tragedy.

Your rapid-fire speaking style is something that makes any interview of yours a thrill to watch. What advice would you give someone who aspires to be a public intellectual, and what do you think of the level of discourse held by most talking heads nowadays?

I never watch any talking heads anymore—what a bunch of yammering parrots! [I am choosing not to take this personally. –MM] The glory days of TV news or deep-think shows like Crossfire or even The Phil Donahue Show are long gone. The Web is my primary source of information and opinion about current events. Everyone should make an effort to monitor news sources across the political spectrum. There is no other way to assess which direction the country is moving in. Many people who relied only on CNN and MSNBC or The New York Times and Washington Post last year were stunned and traumatized by the election because they had been lulled into false security by nakedly partisan and often duplicitous reporting.

How to be a public intellectual: first of all, get a real job! I’ve said for decades that Susan Sontag sabotaged herself by drifting off to Lotus Land, where she played the Deep Thinker while living off Vanity Fair largesse via her partner Annie Leibovitz. Exactly what the hell did Sontag know about real life from her Manhattan penthouse or Paris pied-à-terre? A true public intellectual must live an ordinary life like everyone else—not run with the pretentious elite and strike haughty poses at dinner parties.

Second, read, read, read! By which I mean non-fiction, present and past–history, politics, biography. Unlike the pretzel-twisting, solipsistic post-structuralists who infest academe, I believe there are real, concrete facts that can and should be known about the past 10,000 years of human life. Nothing beats going to an actual library and roaming the aisles. I practically ransacked Sterling Memorial Library when I was a grad student at Yale. Serendipity led me to so many wonderful discoveries—old, forgotten books that had unusual material or quirky perspectives.

Third, practice the craft of writing! In college, I filled notebooks with passages of striking prose whose structure or strategies I studied and absorbed. I kept lists of unfamiliar words to look up in the dictionary, with its intricate etymologies (unfortunately missing from most online dictionaries). Writing well can give anyone great power and profile—but it’s a skill that takes persistence and practice.

It’s worth reminding aspiring writers out there that I couldn’t get a book published until I was 43 years old.  Sexual Personae (an expansion of my dissertation) was rejected by seven publishers and five agents until it was finally released as a 700-page tome by Yale University Press in 1990. I honestly thought I’d never see it in print during my lifetime. But that bruising saga should give all rejected writers hope! Putting the craft of writing first brings dividends in the end.

Michael Malice is the author of Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il . Follow him on Twitter @ michaelmalice .

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Critic Camille Paglia Thinks ‘Revenge of the Sith’ Is Our Generation’s Greatest Work of Art

By Sean Craig

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Camille Paglia, the indispensable art critic and long-serving Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts, has for over two decades lived in the shadow of Camille Paglia, the polemicist, enfant terrible, expert provocateur and, according the British writer Julie Burchill, “crazy old dyke.” Paglia is the lesbian who doesn’t like lesbians, the pro-drug libertarian who wouldn’t touch the stuff herself. And, through no fault of her own, the extravagances of Paglia’s proclamations have too often lead spectators to overlook the marrow of her ideas.

She became an international celebrity in 1990 upon the release of Sexual Personae , wherein Paglia argues that Western art and culture are underlined by the pagan fixations on phalluses and Earth goddesses that pre-date Christian hegemony. An ardent defender of free expression and inquiry, she was a darling of the British and American talk show circuits on account of her parallel advocacy for Madonna’s tits and Rush Limbaugh’s revulsion at the sight of them.

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Paglia’s mission today, however, is less confrontational and yet more ambitious: She wants American culture to embrace the story of art. Paglia has just released Glittering Images , a direct and beautiful volume dedicated to the study of 29 works throughout art history. The book launches her quest to make David’s La Mort de Marat as common in US public schools as Uncle Tom’s Cabin .

Crucially, Paglia has the writerly gifts to make introductory art history sing to the uninitiated and old hands alike. It’s an essential work by an essential public intellectual. Paglia hasn’t left behind controversy, either: in the book’s final chapter, fed up with the direction of contemporary art, she argues that George Lucas’ Revenge of the Sith is the greatest work of art in recent memory. So, if you’re just wrapping up that MFA, set your sights on Mace Windu and Padmé Amidala instead of Jessica Warboys and David Altmejd.

Anyway, we were delighted to speak to Camille Paglia about contemporary art, education, penises, her goals for this new project, and Lorraine Bracco’s terrible acting.

VICE: So, Camille, how come contemporary art is so terrible? Creative energy has migrated into industrial design and digital animation—videogames, for example, are booming!  Commercial architecture is also thriving, as shown by amazingly monumental new buildings everywhere from Dubai to Beijing. But the fine arts have become very insular and derivative. There is good work being done, but it too often reminds me of ten other sometimes better things over the past 100 years. The main problem is a high-concept mentality. There’s too much gimmickry and irony and not enough intuition and emotion. 

Well, what about  Revenge of the Sith ? You say it’s the greatest work of art, in any medium, created in the last 30 years. It’s better than… uh, Matthew Barney or Rachel Whiteread or Chris Ware or Peter Doig?  Yes, the long finale of  Revenge of the Sith  has more inherent artistic value, emotional power, and global impact than anything by the artists you name. It’s because the art world has flat-lined and become an echo chamber of received opinion and toxic over-praise. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes—people are too intimidated to admit what they secretly think or what they might think with their blinders off.

Sort of like, regarding Bronzino’s Neptune , what you call the art world’s “nagging doubt about the dignity of the penis . ” It’s always been very difficult for artists to present the penis in a serious way. It lends itself all too easily to comedy!

Bronzino’s Neptune.

But the penis has dignity! Greek athletes or heroes were always shown with very small penises—it was a mark of intellectuality. Large penises by definition were ridiculous or animalistic—the exact opposite of modern standards. Modern gay male pornography has made the penis heroic by focusing on it as a totem of ritual display. But the problem with that is that there’s little room for any other aesthetic meanings in the image. I adore Tom of Finland, the Scandinavian illustrator whose drawings of stupendously phallic leathermen revolutionized the gay fantasy world. But even Tom found the penis funny!

OK, so with your new book, you’re trying to start a conversation about art education in America… There is no art education in America—only do-it-yourself stuff where students are handed construction paper and glue pots and invited to unleash their hidden creativity. It’s basically therapeutic pandering. Glittering Images  is the first shot in my crusade to get real art history into elementary and middle school. Students need to be introduced to major artists and learn how to look at a painting or sculpture.

Well, how come glue pots are in schools and “real art history” isn’t? The fine arts have never been deeply rooted in the US, which started with the art-phobic Puritans. Americans have always been a practical, utilitarian people. Art and beauty seemed frivolous or even decadent. Art history survey courses should be central to the university curriculum, but they’re slowly being phased out because young professors are not being trained to think in long historical trajectories. On the contrary, they’re told that chronology is a false narrative about the past. You wouldn’t believe the rubbish that’s been going down for 30 years at the elite schools!

So here we have this problem. We’re talking about how academic institutions are flawed but we need to expand and refine art education. That means more arts funding and grants, right? But isn’t it anti-democratic when public institutions fund artists? It’s been argued the insular, grant world removes the obligations artists have to cultivate an audience and, by extension, participate in the culture. Arts funding is pitifully low in the US and needs to be radically expanded. But the government should not be involved in awarding grants directly to individual artists—that is an invitation to venality and corruption. Instead, the funding should be distributed to communities to apportion as they see fit. It is especially critical for dance, which requires safe and roomy rehearsal space, now very costly in major cities. While painters and poets can work for decades on their own, dancers absolutely require contact with master teachers, who are the living embodiments of the great tradition of that art form. Similarly, musical instruments and concert spaces should be amply provided to young people in all the poorest neighborhoods in the US. Artistic expression can be a dynamic tool of social expression and mutual understanding.

Camille Paglia.

You’re an atheist, but you got schooled in the Catholic church. That’s the institution where you developed a sense of visual culture as a kid, right? Yes. The first works of art that I ever saw were the gorgeous stained-glass windows and polychrome statues of saints at my baptismal church of St. Anthony of Padua in the factory town of Endicott, New York. That experience is still being shared by young people in Latin Catholic parishes everywhere—from Italy and Spain to Mexico and Argentina. But US Catholic churches have slowly, snobbishly divested themselves of immigrant traces. Your average Catholic church here now looks as bland and generic as an airport terminal. It’s a foolish aping of the Protestant plain style—but with less taste and rational symmetry.

And the church is in decline. So where can young people look to develop aesthetic sensitivity in secular society? The internet is a tremendous tool because the world’s images are on it. But young people need a guide to help them find those art works. That’s a process I’ve tried to begin with  Glittering Images.

Talking of which, there’s no Asian, Latin American or (outside of Ancient Egypt) African art history in the book. No Ukiyo-e, no Qing Dynasty paintings, no Persian miniatures… I would have loved to extend  Glittering Images  to world art, but the whole point was to produce a slim, inviting introduction to the history of art. As it was, a project that was supposed to take two years took five. Chronology and connectedness were also my goals. To leap around the world taking a bit from here and a bit from there would have just repeated that blobby style of pointillistic fragmentation that is the kneejerk mode of what is currently called “cultural studies”—but which is neither cultured nor studious.

A landscape painting from the Qing Dynasty.

And you’re trying to go in a different direction, away from fragmentation. I am trying to demonstrate a coherent historical stream—the continuity of spiritual feeling from Egyptian tomb-painting to Mondrian and Jackson Pollock. I had considered using Japanese anime for the digital art chapter of the book, but it lacked the overwhelming operatic power and yes, seriousness of Lucas’  Revenge of the Sith . The British sculptor Henry Moore was almost included—and for that chapter I would have shown the great Chac-Mool statue from Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. When Moore saw a plaster cast of that statue in a small museum in Paris, it revolutionized his style and had a profound effect on modern art. At museum or art gallery venues on my book tour, I am showing a photo of the Chac-Mool, which is a knockout.

Now, you’re a feminist, but you have been critical of many of the movements and ideologies that constitute the feminist project. What are your hopes for feminism at this point in history? The rebel feminism of the 1990s, inspired by Madonna, was a major correction of feminist ideology, which had become oppressively Stalinist. Feminism did not fail; it was merely its tyrannical cadre of cliquish leaders who had to be overthrown. The movement has always been cyclic. We are in a quiet period right now in the Western world, when all careers have been opened to women. But feminism is still desperately needed in Third World countries where women can be treated like chattel.

Does your own personal feminism, or dissident feminism as you have called it, play into the book? The feminism in  Glittering Images  is in the variety of women who are featured as both artists and the subject of art—from an Egyptian queen seeking resurrection to the haggard Mary Magdalene or a tragic modern Magdalene, Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe. My climax is the African-American photographer Renee Cox, who poses as a dominatrix superheroine on the Statue of Liberty and represents the pro-sex, pro-art, pro-beauty feminism, which has triumphed.

And, speaking of awesome ladies like Renee Cox, you have mentioned a few times that The Real Housewives of New Jersey  is amazing and that  The Sopranos  sucks. Lorraine Bracco called you “fucking crazy.” I guess Lorraine Bracco is so addicted to flattery of her soporific and specious acting in  The Sopranos  that a little chill breeze from the real world comes as a big shock.  The Sopranos  was porn for the genteel Manhattan upper-middle-class, gazing uncomprehending across the river at the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. 

Sure. The issue is authenticity. I’ve been working for nearly 30 years in Philadelphia, which shares a proletarian ethnic Italian culture with New Jersey.  The Real Housewives of New Jersey  really captures it. I could never watch  The Sopranos  for more than two minutes because it was so distorted with condescending, ham-handed fakery.

You say Fluxus and other “anti-art” movements imperiled the reputation of art, especially in the United States. Tell me why “anti-art” is bad. Anti-art movements are vital when there is actually an art establishment that has cultural weight and power. But when society is ruled by popular culture, as it is now, anti-art gestures serve no purpose whatever and are positively destructive. I was an early apostle of pop—it was one reason most professors didn’t take me seriously at the Yale Graduate School when I arrived in 1968—but I certainly never wanted pop to be the dominant force in America. Pop itself is weakened when art is weak. Artistic standards aren’t always subjective. I believe in principles of quality in every sphere, including professional football!

Wait, you don’t get art? Read these:

I Don’t “Get” Art 

I Still Don’t “Get” Art 

OK, Do It: Teach Me How to “Get” Art 

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Camille Paglia

Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars

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Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome cultural critic CAMILLE PAGLIA for a discussion of her new book, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars.

From the best-selling author of Sexual Personae and Break, Blow, Burn , Glittering Images is an enthralling journey through Western art’s defining moments, from the ancient Egyptian tomb of Queen Nefertari to George Lucas’s volcano planet duel in Revenge of the Sith. 

Passionately argued, brilliantly written, and filled with Paglia’s trademark audacity, Glittering Images takes us on a tour through more than two dozen seminal images, some famous and some obscure or unknown—paintings, sculptures, architectural styles, performance pieces, and digital art that have defined and transformed our visual world. She combines close analysis with background information that situates each artist and image within its historical context—from the stone idols of the Cyclades to an elegant French rococo interior to Jackson Pollock’s abstract Green Silver to Renée Cox’s daring performance piece Chillin’ with Liberty.

Written with energy, erudition, and wit, Glittering Images is destined to change the way we think about our high-tech visual environment.

Camille Paglia   is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. A regular contributor to Salon.com, she is the author of Glittering Images ; Break, Blow, Burn; Vamps & Tramps ; Sex, Art, and American Culture ; and Sexual Personae.

Photo credit: Michael Lionstar

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From Camille Paglia, ‘Free Women, Free Men’ and No Sacred Cows

By Dwight Garner

• March 23, 2017
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FREE WOMEN, FREE MEN Sex, Gender, Feminism By Camille Paglia Illustrated. 315 pages. Pantheon. $26.95.

“One test of un homme sérieux,” Christopher Hitchens wrote, “is that it is possible to learn from him even when one radically disagrees with him.” By this measure, Camille Paglia is une femme sérieuse indeed.

Her best book remains her first, “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson” (1990), a surprise academic-press best seller about decadence in Western art. It grew out of her doctoral dissertation at Yale, where her mentor was Harold Bloom.

If you’ve forgotten “Sexual Personae,” or have never read it, Paglia helpfully reprints a few chunks of it in her new essay collection, “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism.” These chunks are fiercely erudite, freewheeling and sex-drenched. Nothing else in this collection can touch them.

Paglia’s second-best book is “Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems” (2006). Her exegeses are prickly and acute, the Helen Vendler-meets-Patti Smith grad seminar you wanted but never quite got.

One reason Paglia gets under people’s skin is that she has no sacred cows. Reviewing “Break, Blow, Burn” in The New York Times Book Review, Clive James got at why she made some readers uncomfortable.

“The most threatening thing about her, from the American viewpoint, is that she refuses to treat the arts as an instrument of civil rights,” he wrote. “Without talent, no entitlement.”

It’s worth recalling how good Paglia can be, because in between major books, she does her best to help you forget. Her essay collections — “Sex, Art, and American Culture” (1992), “Vamps & Tramps” (1994) and now this one — display her worst qualities (we will get to these), which swamp her obvious intellect.

The pieces in “Free Women, Free Men” have two primary targets. One is modern feminism, at least the spongy wing of it she considers to be puritanical and man-bashing. Here is the tightest and liveliest summation of her position I can find in this book:

“Women will never know who they are until they let men be men. Let’s get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catchall vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.”

Tell us how you really feel, Camille.

Her second primary target is groupthink at America’s coddling universities. A free-speech absolutist, she asks, “How is it possible that today’s academic left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and overregulation of student life?”

In the wake of their violent treatment of a professor of international politics and of Charles Murray, an author of “The Bell Curve,” students at Middlebury College, my alma mater, could do worse than invite Paglia to speak while on her book tour.

Paglia considers herself, depending upon her mood, a libertarian feminist, a pro-sex feminist or an “Amazon” one. What she is really committed to, she writes in one essay here, is this: “My mission is to be absolutely as painful as possible in every situation.”

Paglia’s arguments are incisive and worth tangling with. The problem, for the reader of “Free Women, Free Men,” is that she repeats the same arguments and anecdotes over and over again. Reading this book is like being stranded in a bar where the jukebox has only two songs, both by Pat Benatar.

Paglia’s petitions grow fuzzier with each iteration, as if they were documents smudged from being photocopied 300 times. Her prose can be electric. Yet too often in these pieces, you sense she’s written them while in line at the bodega.

For The Wall Street Journal, for example, she composed a piece in praise of football. It’s included here, and it begins: “This week, after being written off for dead in a monthlong flurry of grumpy magazine articles, the National Football League stormed back and retook center stage.” Three clichés! In the first sentence!

Paglia’s temperament, in her essay collections, has much in common with that of our commander in chief. Like Trump, Paglia is paranoid and never forgets a slight. She speaks more than once here of “coordinated” campaigns against her work.

Like our leader, she is vainglory on wheels. This book’s introduction is strewed with honeyed nuggets, like “my signature one-liners” and “my flamboyant media presence” and “my cheeky use of slang.” (Readers can weigh a writer’s cheekiness on their own home scales.)

Declining an invitation to go on “Oprah” with Naomi Wolf, she asks, “Would Caruso appear with Tiny Tim?” She’s striding into Norman Mailer territory here, but this kind of guff dented Mailer’s career as well.

Like Trump, with his displays of steaks and Time magazine covers with his face upon them, Paglia also fills this book with her own clippings and glossy magazine covers. She’s a lawyer who wears her diploma around her neck.

“I don’t fit in anywhere!” Paglia cries in one of these pieces. “I’m like this wandering being, the Ancient Mariner.” When she bears down and worries about sentences more than poses, she doesn’t wander at all. Then she’s a fearless public intellectual and more necessary than ever.

Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner

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Camille Paglia

Professor and author Camille Paglia talked about her writing and teaching career and about her books. She also talked about American culture… read more

Professor and author Camille Paglia talked about her writing and teaching career and about her books. She also talked about American culture, feminism, the state of American politics, and her experiences as a social critic. She responded to audience telephone calls and electronic mail. Professor Paglia is a social critic, political commentator, professor, and essayist. She is the author of four books: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art and American Culture; Vamps and Tramps; and The Birds. close

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Camille Paglia on Her Lifestyle of Observation and Lamb Vindaloo (Ep. 9 - Live at Mason)

On david bowie, lamb vindaloo, her lifestyle of observation, why writers need real jobs, star wars, harold bloom, amelia earhart, and more., cass sunstein.

Camille Paglia joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation on the brilliance of Bowie, lamb vindaloo, her lifestyle of observation, why writers need real jobs, Star Wars , Harold Bloom, Amelia Earhart, Edmund Spenser, Brazil, why she is most definitely not a cultural conservative, and much more.

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TYLER COWEN : Camille has written the very best essays ever on Edmund Spenser , Alice in Wonderland , a nd the Marquis de Sade . She understands Bob Dylan and Susan Sontag  — .

PAGLIA : [hisses]

COWEN : And she has pursued a career of great integrity. That’s my introduction for Camille.

PAGLIA : Oh! [laughs]

COWEN : I’d like to start with a question from a reader. I asked readers for questions. “How do you feel about the fact that Silicon Valley dominates our economy and culture? Is there any tech guru you’re interested in?”

PAGLIA : Well, no. My last big tech guru was probably Marshall McLuhan . Had a prophetic insight into what was about to happen. He’s kind of the patron saint of my working on the web from the very first issue of Salon in 1995. It’s hard to believe that the web wasn’t taken seriously by already-established journalists.

There was a major political reporter at the Boston Globe , for example, who tried to pressure me not to write for the web. He said, “Oh, no one takes the web seriously.” It’s an enormous thing that’s happened. Which, of course, has also sucked in a whole generation of young people, alas. That’s all they know. I think we’re kind of on the downside of that right now.

COWEN : Take your last book, Glittering Images , and your other work, which emphasized the role of the iconic in Western and Eastern culture, the role of the spectacular. Vivid visual life-giving spectacular events. Now here we have people, they look, they listen on very small smartphones. Is this culture dead? But if the culture was so splendid, why did people give it up so quickly?

PAGLIA : The reason I wrote Glittering Images is because I felt that there’s an avalanche of fragmented visual impressions — disconnected, glaring, tacky, badly designed — that young people are growing up in. I think it really is true that children’s brains are being reshaped. The standard forms for logic and for sequential information and for reasoning, everything’s kind of disappearing. I tried to write a book where people would just stare at an image for a certain length of time.

I think it’s getting worse and worse. Web design, which my school, University of the Arts, teaches — I think web design is in the pits. I thought web design was moving into becoming a major genre of the arts. I think we’re in a kind of swirling vortex — and yes, what you mentioned about the miniaturization of image is terrible.

I was raised in a time, 1950s, when Hollywood was competing with television by doing something which television couldn’t do, with those gigantic screens. Like in The Ten Commandments , there’s a giant thing of Pharaoh, a giant sculpture. It starts at one end of the screen and you watch it go to the other end of the screen. Phenomenal. Lawrence of Arabia , oh my God, the dunes of Lawrence of Arabia with that music.

There’s no sense of the large. Young people have no sense whatever of the expansive, of the big gesture.

COWEN : But do we maybe overrate the large? If the large gave through so quickly, so readily, to what you’re describing as this kind of mediocrity, what was wrong with that culture of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s to begin with?

PAGLIA : I would say that a culture always moves in cycles. You have periods that esteem the colossal, like the Bernini Renaissance and Baroque periods. Then you get the small, the art of the small. The Rococo is a kind of evanescence, evaporation of the big Baroque swirls. All of a sudden it’s little tiny things like on a Valentine’s card.

I think we go back and forth. I just feel lucky, I think, that I have a kind of epic imagination, because I was raised watching The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur . Oh my God, Ben-Hur . I could watch that 300 times.

COWEN : It’s one of your 10 favorite movies , right?

PAGLIA : Yeah.

COWEN : It’s the one on the list that’s surprising.

PAGLIA : Torment. And the music composed for those things. It directly inspired my writing of Sexual Personae , absolutely. I’m directly inspired by music. I think for women it’s good to have something that’s going to make you assert and trample [laughs] and conquer. It animates me. These are my maxims.

COWEN : Given what you’re saying, do you today consider yourself a cultural conservative?

PAGLIA : No, not at all.

COWEN : Why not? Everything used to be better. Isn’t that — ?

PAGLIA : No, we’re in a period of decadence, a falling off, you see. No, conservative would mean that I would be cleaving to something past, which was great, and no longer is, and I would be saying, “We need to return to that.” Usually I’m not saying we need to return to anything. I do believe we’re moving inexorably into the future. There’s a momentum to that. I’m a libertarian. That’s why I’m always freely offending both sides.

PAGLIA : Liberal, conservative. I’m a Democrat, even though I’m constantly criticizing — I think a true intellectual should be always beyond partisanship.

COWEN : And always criticizing.

PAGLIA : Yes, and always critiquing the premises of your own friends and allies.

COWEN : In the back, we were talking about Brazil. You mentioned you’ve been there nine times?

PAGLIA : Yes. Nine or ten.

COWEN : What does Brazilian culture have which North American culture lacks? What’s the draw?

PAGLIA : It’s such a polyglot of cultures and ethnicities. But beyond that, Brazilians understood my work from the first moment I began to publish. Because what they understood was artifice, art — because of Carnival for them, and costuming, masquerade, and that baroque exuberance, and the syncretism of Christianity with the Yoruba cults of West Africa in Salvador de Bahia .

They understood my vision of art and beauty — and beauty as an incredibly important human principle, rather than the way it was being trashed by my fellow feminists at that time.

They also understand nature, the grandeur of nature, the power of nature. It’s much larger.

COWEN : Iguaçu , right?

PAGLIA : Yes, instead of these silly little arguments that, “Oh, climate change is causing the end of the world.” Oh my God. Anyone who talks like that does not understand the grandeur and the power of nature. To imagine that we can make a change in it is so absolutely absurd.

COWEN : What’s your theory of modernity that puts them on one part of the curve, and we’re on another, more decadent part of the curve? What’s the difference? What’s what we would call the structural equilibrium as economists, if I dare invoke such a thing?

PAGLIA : Brazil, it’s in its own world. It’s not been part of the world wars. It doesn’t have this huge militaristic superstructure. It doesn’t have a messianic view of itself politically. The politics are always chaos [laughs] and drama. It’s like in grand opera. It’s like another planet, really, Brazil.

On George Lucas and Star Wars

COWEN : To continue the whirlwind tour of Camille Paglia, you wrote in Glittering Images that George Lucas was perhaps, or maybe definitely, the greatest artist of our time. I do not disagree with that, but now that you’ve written that, The Force Awakens has come out, which is not George Lucas. It’s Disney, who is not the greatest artist of our time.

PAGLIA : It has nothing to do with George Lucas.

COWEN : What did you think?

PAGLIA : I haven’t seen it. I wouldn’t dream of going. When it’s on TV, I’ll look at it. Please. Do you think I want to sit in a theater and be tortured by the contamination of my ideals? I’m not going to do that.

COWEN : You’ve spoken very highly of the prequels, which many people don’t like at all.

PAGLIA : Yes.

COWEN : What is it that people don’t get about the prequels? They say Jar Jar Binks, and they scream, and they run away.

PAGLIA : I can’t tell you.

COWEN : Clutching their head.

PAGLIA : I know exactly what they’re talking about.

COWEN : Tell us what’s good about the prequels.

PAGLIA : It was Revenge of the Sith —  after the great volcano planet climax of Revenge of the Sith . I think it’s one of the greatest sequences in all of modern art . The thing is once I had written about it, I realized, as I went out in the world, how few people had actually seen the movie, because people had given up on the prequels long before.

Therefore, I think anyone who dismisses what I say about the sublime quality, the vision, the execution, the emotions, and the passions of that scene, they don’t know what I’m talking about, because they haven’t exposed themselves to it.

On popular music, both past and present

COWEN : Music. Rolling Stones. There are the two albums, Hot Rocks , More Hot Rocks . You wrote about the Rolling Stones some time ago , but if I look at the career of the Stones — they have a new album coming out this year — I find it striking that they’ve kept on going. And I actually count that as a mark against them.

I still think they’re good, but when I go back and listen, I never hear new things in their music. Now that some time has passed, what would you say about the Rolling Stones, and do you agree that you’re a little disappointed with them?

PAGLIA : I haven’t been following them for many, many years. To me, the Rolling Stones were a revolution when they happened, in that period when the Beatles were all upbeat. Then, here come these surly guys sneering, and spitting, and so on.

COWEN : But the Beatles were dark and subtle, too, right?

PAGLIA : Not like the Stones. Here’s the difference. The Rolling Stones are inspired by, animated by, to this day, by the blues tradition. The Beatles really were more almost Broadway and musical comedy.

COWEN : British music hall.

PAGLIA : Yes, British music hall and Tin Pan Alley , and so on. They were tremendous songsmiths, but there’s nothing dark about them. In other words, Paul McCartney is a wonderful bass player, but you’re not getting the big, roaring sounds of Bill Wyman’s bass at the beginning of the Stones’ career.

I really have not been following the Stones. Ever since Bill Wyman left the Stones, I have not felt that this was the Stones I knew. I’m delighted that they go on, and that they perform, and so on, but I have absolutely no interest in exposing myself to those horrible arena conditions for music. Oh my goodness, just the light shows and the this and the that. They’re not musical experiences. They’re social experiences now.

COWEN : What’s the music from classic rock that when you listen to it today, every single time you hear more in it? I would say Brian Wilson and Jimi Hendrix. Every time I hear them, it sounds different and fresher for me. What are your picks?

PAGLIA : Jimi Hendrix is one of the great geniuses of any instrument in the last a hundred years. Obviously, his music has lasted and is still fresh. For me, there’s a whole period there I teach in my Art of Song Lyrics course. I just was doing Crosby, Stills & Nash, “ Wooden Ships ,” and it still has this incredible power.

I love that entire period of the 1960s, the music. It was a magic moment. Still in the ’70s, Led Zeppelin, “ When the Levee Breaks .” It still has enormous power. A lot of that music that Jimmy Page was doing. A lot of it working in the studio, actually. It wasn’t just live music.

COWEN : Fast-forward back to the present. Who would be a musical artist today — I know you’ve written Taylor Swift is a pestilence, so it’s probably not her.

PAGLIA : Taylor Swift is like a nightmare.

COWEN : Who would be the musical artist today who stands up to the giants of the past?

PAGLIA : Stands up working today?

COWEN : Working today or close to today. The last 10 years.

PAGLIA : I was really very hopeful about Rihanna for a while there. Unfortunately, she’s not really working with the top producers any longer. The new album is an atrocity. It’s really terrible. It’s sad, because there are so many people with talents who are not being developed.

It’s because our music industry is now very formulaic. Young people can’t really move along studying their instruments and getting their chops over a period of time. There’s nothing to draw on in the way that the musicians of my generation could draw on the folk tradition, the folk music.

COWEN : You’re sounding like a cultural conservative. [laughs]

PAGLIA : I’m just saying there’s certain moments, certain magic moments, of fertility or creativity that happened in many of the arts. You can find certain key moments where there’s a confluence of influences and a certain richness. In that very moment, it’s a great time to be alive, to be young.

For example, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare if he were alive today. As it happens, he left Stratford — for whatever reason — went to London at a magic moment when theater was flourishing, which was only for a few decades, and then it was out again. There’s a certain kind of luck. If you’re the right person at the right time in any one of the artistic genres.

COWEN : Kanye West? Every album is different. He draws upon a lot of sources from the past.

PAGLIA : Oh my God. The bloat.

COWEN : Inspired by rap, rhythm and blues, no?

PAGLIA : What can I say?

On higher education

COWEN : I understand. Education, some questions about education. There’s a new model school called Minerva , where you take four years, you spend each of the four years in a foreign country. One year in Buenos Aires, one in Istanbul, one in Bangalore, I think.

You work in small classes, but the classes are all online. There’s no library. There’s no formal campus, per se. It’s been around for about two years. What do you think? What’s your prediction?

PAGLIA : I think the idea of sending young people abroad is great. I think that is a proper use of the money that’s going down the tubes at the major universities right now. For parents to think — it would profit young people a lot to be exposed to the world. Right now, our primary school education is absolutely appalling in its lack of world history and world geography.

I know because I get everyone in my classroom. I’m lucky I teach at a kind of school where I’m getting students from a wide range of preparation. There might be a couple private school people, but people from the inner city, from good schools, from bad schools. I really have a very clear sense, after 40 years of teaching, what’s going on at the primary school level.

It is unbelievable how little they know. It is absolutely shocking how little they know. This is a recipe for a disaster. I say yes, send them abroad. Fantastic idea.

This other thing of the online thing, I don’t believe this online thing at all. I think that you need a live person, and you need a live person who can talk extemporaneously and respond to the moment. Not just people who are reading the same old damn lecture over and over again.

Also, the kind of teaching that goes on in the Ivy League where there’s a flattering. There’s these small seminar things.

COWEN : The A-minus seminar, right?

PAGLIA : There’s all this practice and learning how to talk in a slightly pretentious way about things and impressing each other. So what? They’re all packaging them for the bourgeoisie.

COWEN : Send them to Brazil, right?

PAGLIA : They’re so proud of themselves as they produce all these clones, these polished, bourgeois clones, witless, knowing nothing.

COWEN : Speaking of inspiring teachers, what’s your favorite Harold Bloom story — that you can tell?

PAGLIA : My favorite? You mean personal story?

COWEN : Personal story.

PAGLIA : I don’t know about favorite, but if you want to know the story — .

COWEN : The story, please.

PAGLIA : Here’s the story. I never took a course with Harold Bloom. I was in graduate school at Yale, and I just never took a course with him, so I didn’t know him at all. And then he heard — one time I encountered him — uh-oh, I shouldn’t say this. OK, maybe. Let’s say he would come a-courting with a famous poet, who was a friend of his.

I would see him turning up at a doorway. “Hello, hello, hello,” OK, that’s all. I just knew him to say hello to him. Then, he heard what I was going to be working on and that I was having trouble finding a dissertation director for a study of androgyny in literature and art.

That’s a time when nobody was doing — it’s hard to believe now because everything is sex and gender everywhere — but at the time, no one was doing a dissertation on sex at the Yale Graduate School. It’s hard to believe. He summoned me to his office. That’s really how we met. He said, “My dear, I am the only one who can direct that dissertation,” and I said, “OK.” That was it.

He understood everything. He understood everything I wanted to do with the book, and he understood my ideas. He was a fantastic resource for me in so far as he also supported me or gave me confidence throughout all those decades when I couldn’t get it published. Sexual Personae was rejected by seven publishers and five agents.

By the time it was published, I was 43 years old. I’m a great role model, it seems to me, for people to just soldier through adversity and rejection and just continue to develop the craft. Eventually, hopefully, one will see one’s work in print.

COWEN : What did he think of you and Sexual Personae ?

PAGLIA : Of course, he always said I gave him great naches , which is sort of like of a father to a daughter, et cetera. He and I agree about Freud. We have a Freudian psychohistory and so on.

On things under- and overrated

COWEN : There’s a segment of all of these conversations in the middle. It’s called underrated or overrated. I mention something, and you tell me if you think it’s underrated or overrated by our society.

PAGLIA : By our society or by me?

COWEN : Your opinion relative to the society opinion. Now, don’t hold back on these. Tell us what you think.

COWEN : First one, economics.

PAGLIA : Economics as a field?

COWEN : As a field. Overrated or underrated?

PAGLIA : Probably underrated.

COWEN : Why?

PAGLIA : I don’t know. I just think that economists are figures of fun sometimes in cartoons. I’m just judging by what I sense.

COWEN : William Faulkner .

PAGLIA : He’s totally gone, poor man. Actually, I’ve been commenting on this recently to my friends. I said, “You remember that period when Faulkner was everywhere, and everyone read him? He was just a baseline figure.”

Thanks to Kate Millett and all these philistine feminist types in the early ’70s, there was a great sweeping away of many, many major male figures in the history of literature including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, who had a huge influence on me.

If you are a resident of Mississippi, Faulkner still lives and is vivid. I think, outside of that, it’s been years since I’ve heard Faulkner mentioned.

COWEN : You’re saying underrated?

PAGLIA : I think he should be on the reading list. I don’t know. Perhaps he was overrated in our time, but he certainly was a major author and a major influence on American literature, for heaven’s sake. Young people aren’t reading him, and they aren’t reading many of the great authors.

COWEN : Yoko Ono, overrated or underrated?

PAGLIA : Yoko Ono, don’t start me on Yoko Ono. One of my least favorite people in the universe. Yes, I blame her for the breakup of the Beatles.

PAGLIA : All that screechy yodeling that went on. Oh my God, she’s a horror. But, I gave her her due in Glittering Images , because she was a very important figure in the development of conceptual art. She really was very innovative in the 1960s, but what a dreary, humorless person.

COWEN : When I think of a lot of your books, especially if I contrast you to Marxist criticism, I think of your emphasis as being a lot of metaphysics in a very exciting, big-picture way. Let’s say we take a writer, very high quality, but she moves very far from metaphysics. She writes about small numbers of people in rural Ontario, Alice Munro.

PAGLIA : Oh, I don’t read fiction. I don’t read contemporary fiction. I have absolutely zero interest in contemporary fiction. The last contemporary fiction I had any interest in is Auntie Mame , and I’m not kidding. I like plays like Tennessee Williams.

The fiction writers are off in another world. They don’t see the world as it exists now. They don’t use the language of the contemporary world. Their English is utterly stale and cloistered. I cannot read a page of contemporary fiction, I’m sorry. Anything that’s pre–contemporary fiction, I’m a great admirer of. Believe me, these are the kind of books I’ll open like this and like that.

The fiction writers are off in another world. They don’t see the world as it exists now. They don’t use the language of the contemporary world. Their English is utterly stale and cloistered. I cannot read a page of contemporary fiction, I’m sorry.

COWEN : You’re going to pass on Harry Potter , too?

PAGLIA : Harry Potter , no, I don’t. In fact, I refused to write on Harry Potter for the Wall Street Journal once. They said, “Who should we ask next?” and they asked Harold Bloom. Harold Bloom became known for it . He got that because of me. Just like Norman Mailer got to interview Madonna for the cover of Esquire because Madonna said no to me.

People kept trying to bring us together. HBO wanted to do a My Dinner with Andre type of thing with Madonna and me, and she was afraid. I don’t know. I think she thought I was going to be some big intellectual, but it’s not true.

COWEN : Parenthood, underrated or overrated?

PAGLIA : Who?

COWEN : Parenthood.

PAGLIA : No. I don’t have anything to do with that. No, nothing. I don’t watch — no.

COWEN : No, not the show Parenthood , the thing parenthood. Being a parent.

PAGLIA : Oh, that was a big switch.

COWEN : That’s what these are about.

PAGLIA : Good Lord. We need a warning sign: “U-turn.”

COWEN : Parenthood, overrated or underrated?

PAGLIA : Parenthood? Obviously, we’re in a time now where parenting is in crisis, I would think. The reason we have all these whiny, super sensitive girls on campus that’ll run shrieking at the slightest thing that offends their ears or drag mattresses onto the stage at commencement exercises, the reason we have that is because the parents have not prepared them for real life.

In other words, they’ve been raised in this bourgeois, pampered cocoon, so I think there’s been a tremendous failure of parenting, certainly, in terms of young people being ready to take on the real world in their late teens.

COWEN : What’s the most underrated play by William Shakespeare?

PAGLIA : The most underrated play?

COWEN : Yes.

PAGLIA : I don’t know. I really can’t answer that. I’m teaching my Shakespeare course this semester. I simply focus on the really major plays. Perhaps Antony and Cleopatra is starting to recede. I don’t know why.

I think Antony and Cleopatra was a great favorite of my generation, of the ’60s generation, but, for some reason, it’s becoming marginal. I’m not sure. Maybe because it’s about imperialism.

On sexual attitudes, both foreign and domestic

COWEN : May I ask a few questions about sex?

PAGLIA : Of course.

COWEN : You’ve covered this topic before.

PAGLIA : The audience will demand it.

COWEN : Which country comes closest to your vision of having healthy relations between the sexes? Or among the sexes, which may be a better way to put it.

PAGLIA : I would say that Brazil has the healthiest view of sexuality, but I wouldn’t say that the sexes are particularly getting along in the upper middle class in Brazil, as I meet professional women, journalists and so on, there.

I think that the women are magnificent. They’re incredible, the way they look and dress. They have such style, and assertiveness, and so on, but I’m not sure the communications with men are particularly successful right now. There’s a lot of static there.

The men are like gnomes. It’s strange. They don’t have this thing. In the United States, usually the upper middle class, successful careers and so on, you have the women doing their Pilates, and then the men will be going to the gym also. Not in Brazil. The men just seem to sag and get plumper and plumper, and duller and duller, and lose their hair and nobody minds.

I think because they assume that woman rules. Woman is the cock of the walk down there. I’m still trying to figure it out. Anyway, I love it. I adore it. I love Brazilian women. They’re so bossy.

COWEN : We’ve now had gay men in the military for some time out openly, legally, permissible. How that has run, has it surprised you? Earlier you wrote you expected it could be quite disruptive, and it hasn’t been. In a sense, has male gay culture turned out to be tamer than what you expected in the early ’90s?

PAGLIA : Tamer?

COWEN : Tamer. More domestic. More people adopting children, more people settling down.

PAGLIA : It’s changed. There’s no doubt about it. I think that AIDS was like a Holocaust. The number of interesting, fascinating, talented men and artists and people in fashion and every level. I think that, in many ways, gay culture is still recovering from that. We’re at a kind of holding pattern.

There was an enormous flamboyance and assertiveness to gay male culture once. It had a distinct style and voice of its own. What you’re saying, things are turning out better. Yes, there’s an assimilation going on, but also, to me, a disappearance of that gay aesthetic.

Oscar Wilde is one of the major influences on my thinking and remains that. I teach a whole course on Oscar Wilde. Now, what can you say? Is there anything distinctly gay right now, except there are certainly gay activists who are extremely successful in terms of pushing their agenda. Probably these little cadres of gay activists are the only thing that’s left.

I don’t know. Assimilation is always a loss. Certainly, my culture experienced it. Italian-American culture has kind of vanished, too.

COWEN : For America, what should an ideal of masculinity look like now?

PAGLIA : What should it look like? I don’t know.

COWEN : An older generation, you would have a Cary Grant or a Rock Hudson. You would see the movie Philadelphia Story , one of your favorites. There was some ideal of masculinity on the screen, maybe not your ideal. Today, what is it that’s out there which comes closest to your ideal?

PAGLIA : Well you know many of those images on the screen which would seem to be masculine, often the actual actors were gay, like Rock Hudson — and Cary Grant’s sexuality remains one of the great mysteries. I adore Cary Grant, oh my God, but he’s like a hallucination. All of the great images on the screen are hallucinations. Kim Novak in Vertigo is literally a hallucination.

The problem right now is that the masculine has no honor whatever in our culture. We’re in a period now where young people are being processed for the universities, and the gender norms are said to be that gender is a construct. It is simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There’s no nothing in the body — .

COWEN : We have a big culture. Not everyone goes to university, thank goodness. You can go to a NASCAR race and a few of the people there have not been to the Ivy Leagues.

PAGLIA : Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But, with that, comes static. So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men.

That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. That’s what we have. Our university system, anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture. A utopian future is imagined where there are no men. We’re all genderless mannequins.

The movie The Time Machine is like one. We’re moving toward that, the Eloi. That’s how I see the upper middle class graduates of the Ivy League. They’re the Eloi.

COWEN : [laughs]

PAGLIA : They’re completely bland. They have no ideas. They all get along very well with each other because they’re nothing.

PAGLIA : They’re eating their fruits which are given to them by the Morlocks, or the industrial class. That’s how I see the future — unfortunately. I began my career talking about androgyny and talking about the imaginative complexity of androgyny and how the artist and the shaman and the prophet have this androgynous component. But today’s androgyny, it’s just boring.

PAGLIA : David Bowie, at his height, was absolutely brilliant, electrifying, kabuki — on and on and so on. Now, all these pallid androgynes of today, there’s nothing creative about them whatever.

COWEN : But to try to cheer you up a bit, what then is the healthiest segment of American society? Because, again, you’ve lived most of your life in the northeast, mostly in colleges and universities, correct?

COWEN : Think outside the box. Where do you see vitality, both culturally, sexually in terms of aesthetics?

PAGLIA : [laughs] No, I don’t. I think it’s been a tremendous flattening. There’s very little culturally right now. There’s very little of substance or interest being produced in art and in culture. We’re in a retro period. We’re chopping up everything, putting everything from the past through the grinder again.

COWEN : How about Canada? Overrated or underrated? Or, do they have all the same problems?

PAGLIA : Canada, they have this ideal of the consensus. That’s why when I go up there, people have said to me actually quietly, “Oh, I love having you here, because everyone’s always forcing us to have consensus in Canada.”

I’ve been told that also when I go to Norway. People say, “Oh, we can’t stand it. We are not allowed to have an opinion in Norway. We all have to have a consensus.” Everyone is very civilized in Canada, but it’s impossible to rise above the herd, also. You can’t make any big gestures; you’re thought to be antisocial. I wouldn’t glorify Canada.

On middle- and late-period Camille

COWEN : Let me ask you a few questions about yourself. There’s a wonderful four-page essay you wrote called “ The Artistic Dynamics of ‘Revival’ ,” where you talked about how creators have early, middle, and late periods.

Beethoven is maybe the most obvious example, but there are many, many others. When you think of your own career, how do you see it as fitting together in terms of a time arc, what you’ve done and what you want to do? What are your early, middle, and late periods? Where are you in it now?

PAGLIA : My early period was total failure, flop, and in the middle to get published. There was that. Then, all of a sudden, I started to burst out, like a jack-in-the-box. It’s been like blabber, blabber, blabber ever since. Like that. I really don’t see phases. I see like nothingness, then everything. It’s like a carnival.

COWEN : What will the late period look like?

PAGLIA : The late period?

COWEN : We haven’t gotten to it, yet. The everything is the middle period.

PAGLIA : Right now, I’m working on something that no one has any interest in, whatever. I’ve been working for eight years on this, my Native American explorations. I’m very interested in Native American culture at the end of the ice age as the glacier withdrew.

I go around and I find little tiny artifacts. I read. Absolutely no one, especially anyone in Manhattan, has the slightest interest in what I’m doing. Everything has been prepared for in my life. I’ve always been interested in archeology. I feel like I make a contribution, even though no one’s interested at all. What I’m trying to do is show how the politicization of ethnic studies, of racial studies, and so on has actually been very limiting.

I find very objectionable this eternal projection of genocide and disaster and so on onto Native American studies. I’d like to show the actual vision of Native American culture which is a religious vision, a metaphysical vision, and — .

COWEN : Cyclical approach?

PAGLIA : Cyclical?

COWEN : Relevance of nature.

PAGLIA : Yes, totally.

COWEN : Metaphysics epicenter.

PAGLIA : It’s almost like an early animism. That’s why I’m interested in Salvador de Bahia, also, because of the Yoruba cults of West Africa that were absorbed into Salvador de Bahia in Brazil. It’s the same, where all of the forces of nature are perceived as spirit entities that can bring you energy or vision.

COWEN : Of the Native America cultures which have come down to us, which is different, of course, from what you had at the Ice Age, which of those do you relate to the most and why?

PAGLIA : All I’m doing is exploring the Native American cultures of the northeast. Because when the settlers came from Europe, the Indians were pushed out, the hunting grounds were limited, then there was general destruction of Native American culture for many reasons during that period.

We know more actually about the Plains Indians and, obviously, Northwestern Indians, and the Navaho than we do about the Northeastern Indians. I believe that there are remnants everywhere — I stumbled on this. I’m very sorry I didn’t notice this when I was living all those years in Upstate New York, where the Onondagas still have their reservation. Probably the remnants of these glacial era cultures were still there as well.

But I find it’s absolutely staggering. It is staggering the actual signs and remnants that are everywhere in the Northeast. I could go out right now, find some dirt, and I’ll find you a broken tool. It’s absolutely incredible. I feel that’s what I should be doing something like this, which no one is interested in. But I feel it’s substantive, and I hope can help to show what was here before.

COWEN : More about you. In Vamps & Tramps , you once wrote that as early as 1981, the second volume of Sexual Personae was more — finished is a tricky word we know as writers. But some version of finished, and do you think we will — .

PAGLIA : It was finished.

COWEN : All ever have the privilege of reading it?

PAGLIA : Yale Press didn’t want to publish those last chapters.

COWEN : I’ll publish it.

PAGLIA : Yale Press ended with the end of the 19th century with Emily Dickinson and it was already a 700-page book. Yes, I put in there the next book was coming. Then what happened, of course, is throughout the ’90s, and since the last 25 years, I’ve been essentially writing in articles everything that I would have written in that sense.

All my writing on popular culture, I’ve continued to do. Like on football, I had a chapter, “Baseball versus Football,” and football is the ultimate pagan sport, etc.

Well I wrote for Wall Street Journal , my football feminism. I have a whole concept and philosophy of that. Now, football is getting more and more boring. It’s gotten more and more technocratic. It’s not in a period right now that I would celebrate.

But I was celebrating that tremendous period when there were still hard hits and there was still defense. There wasn’t all this throwing, flinging the ball down the field, people catching it like ballerinas.

PAGLIA : Please, that’s not football. Football is wham, like that.

COWEN : Bring back the football.

PAGLIA : The TV won’t show the great defensive plays. The whole art of defense, the great offensive, defensive lines, and that tussle, it’s gone. I feel lucky that I saw football on TV at its high point.

On Amelia Earhart and feminism

COWEN : You also wrote that when you were in high school, you either wrote or just started a book on Amelia Earhart.

PAGLIA : Oh, yes!

COWEN : What was the appeal of her to you?

PAGLIA : Oh my God. Amelia Earhart, I stumbled on. It was an article in 1961 in the Syracuse Herald Journal . There was always some article about Amelia Earhart. Someone finds a fragment or something.

I became very interested in her . At that point, I was, I guess, 14. I began researching her in the bowels of the Syracuse Library, the things were still not on microfilm yet. All the newspapers were still there from the 1930s.

I did that for three years on this research project. That’s how I became a feminist before feminism had revived, because I suddenly discovered this period just after women had won the right to vote. In the 1920s and ’30s, we had all these career women, like Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Thompson, Clare Boothe Luce. There’s so many women, Margaret Bourke-White.

By the time second-wave feminism revived, which was with Betty Friedan’s cofounding of NOW in 1967, I was out of sync with them. When suddenly they revived, began complaining about men, and all that stuff, so on and so forth, I hated it. It was early clashes that I had with those feminists from the start. I tried to join second-wave feminism. They wouldn’t have me because I would not bad mouth men.

These women, like Amelia Earhart, they did not bad mouth men. They admired men. They admired what men had done. What they said was, “We demand equal opportunity for women,” which gave us the opportunity to show that we can achieve at the same level as men who did all these great things.

That was not the tone of second-wave feminism from the start. It’s almost like, “Patriarchy — ” [makes sounds] like this. These women were insane. I found out from the start. I went to this feminist conference at the Yale Law School when I was in graduate school. It was 1971. Kate Millett was there. Rita Mae Brown who later became a lesbian novelist and lives on a horse farm in Virginia came around.

COWEN : Maybe she’s here.

PAGLIA : Maybe she’s here. She’s very rich. At any rate, Rita Mae Brown said to me, she said, “The difference between you and me, Camille, is that you want to save the universities, and I want to burn them down.” What can you say? What a conversation stopper. I had the knock down argument of the Rolling Stones with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band. I adore the Stones. They hated the Stones.

We had this huge screaming argument. My back was to the wall. They were screaming in my face. I said, “Yes, the Rolling Stones are sexist, but they made great music.” They go, “Oh, no, no, no!”

I said, “All right, let’s take ‘ Under My Thumb .’ ‘Under My Thumb,’ yes, it’s sexist, but it’s a great song. It’s a work of art.” These women, they said to me, they said, “Art! Art! Nothing that demeans women can be art!” Now that is a Stalinist view of art!

COWEN : More about you. Less about them.

[laughter and applause]

PAGLIA : Wait a minute. Then there was the argument that I had. This is about Amelia Earhart. You asked about Amelia Earhart, right?

PAGLIA : Then I had my first job at Bennington College in 1972. People said, “There’s this new women’s studies department. One of the first ever at the State University of New York at Albany. Oh, you’ll be one of them.”

I thought, “Well, they’re feminist. I’m feminist. OK. All right.” We had a dinner. We were going to go to a lecture, and so on. We didn’t get through to dessert. Let me tell you about that dinner. Because we had this screaming argument about hormones.

They deny that hormones have the slightest impact on human life. They said hormones don’t even exist. They told me I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe — these are women who are in the English department. Wonderful education they had in biology.

At any rate, Amelia Earhart — .

COWEN : Yes, of course.

PAGLIA : Never was like this with men. This is the point. In fact, my next book, my next essay collection, I’m going to reproduce the page from Newsweek magazine, 1963, I wrote in a letter to the editor. It was their number one letter. I was 16 years old, at that point.

What was it? They put a picture of Amelia Earhart there. It was Valentina Tereshkova had become the first women in space. The Soviet Union had sent her up. I wrote a protest letter into Newsweek and I said, “That Valentina Tereshkova, the cosmonaut, has became the first woman to be — on the anniversary that Amelia Earhart flew the ocean,” whatever it was. It was some big anniversary.

I said, “Obviously, Amelia Earhart’s lifelong fight for equal opportunity for American women remains to be won.” That’s 1963. Gloria Steinem can lick dirt, as far as I’m concerned. When I was doing that, Gloria Steinem was running around New York in a plastic skirt, I’m telling you. She’s a fraud, that woman. A fraud.

On Camille’s lifestyle of observation

COWEN : You can consume, absorb, experience a remarkable number, amount, and diversity of culture products, music, art, architecture, interior design, fashion, whatever, right?

COWEN : Just a very prosaic question, in terms of your own time management, how is it that you do what you do? What is your method, so to speak? What is your diet?

PAGLIA : It’s a lifestyle of observation.

COWEN : Tell us.

PAGLIA : I feel that the basis of my work is not only the care I take with writing, with my quality controls, my prose, but also my observation. It’s 24/7. I’m always observing. I don’t sit in a university. I never go to conferences. That is a terrible mistake. A conference is like overlaying the same insular ideology on top of it. I am always listening to conversations at the shopping mall.

I feel that the basis of my work is not only the care I take with writing, with my quality controls, my prose, but also my observation. It’s 24/7. I’m always observing. I don’t sit in a university. I never go to conferences. That is a terrible mistake. A conference is like overlaying the same insular ideology on top of it. I am always listening to conversations at the shopping mall.

COWEN : Radio.

PAGLIA : I adore radio. The radio is fantastic, any show on radio, the talk shows, political talk shows, but also the sports shows. The sports shows are the only place that you can hear on radio actual working class voices calling in. “I want to talk about what happened in the game on Monday,” and what they would do if they had $2 million, and who they would hire.

It’s fantastic. My writer’s voice is actually very — rather than these novelists with their recherché lingo and so on — my actual writing voice is very influenced by the way English is spoken today by people and often men on radio. You get this high impact sound, you see.

On lamb vindaloo, LSD, and other mental stimulants

COWEN : You once wrote, I quote, “ My substitute for LSD was Indian food ,” and by that, you meant lamb vindaloo.

COWEN : You stand by this.

PAGLIA : Yes, I’ve been in a rut on lamb vindaloo.

COWEN : A rut, tell us.

PAGLIA : It’s a horrible rut.

COWEN : It’s not a horrible rut, it may be a rut.

PAGLIA : No, it’s a horrible rut. It’s a 40-year rut. Every time I go to an Indian restaurant, I say “Now, I’m going to try something new.” But, no, I must go back to the lamb vindaloo.

All I know is it’s like an ecstasy for me, the lamb vindaloo.

It’s a 40-year rut. Every time I go to an Indian restaurant, I say “Now, I’m going to try something new.” But, no, I must go back to the lamb vindaloo.

COWEN : Like De Quincey , tell us, what are the effects of lamb vindaloo?

PAGLIA : What can I say? I attain nirvana.

PAGLIA : I don’t know.

COWEN : How would you describe your views on astrology? A reader wrote to me, asked me to ask you.

PAGLIA : Wait! Wait! You mentioned LSD, can I say something else about that?

COWEN : Sure, LSD, please.

PAGLIA : Now, LSD, I never took it, thank God. I never took drugs. I didn’t believe it. I thought “What is this untested thing?” I thought, “A little wine, beer, all these things have like thousands of years behind them — .”

COWEN : Lamb vindaloo.

PAGLIA : Right. And so LSD, I’m so glad I never took it. Everyone around me was taking LSD. People who did take LSD and survived will still say things like, “Well, I’m really glad I did because I — .”

Everyone who says that, I feel, actually never attained the level of accomplishment that they should have in terms of whatever their vision had been. I think LSD gave vision. It gave vision, but then it deprived people of the ability to translate that vision into material form for the present and for posterity.

But I still remain very oriented toward the LSD vision. I feel I took LSD because I have the music. With “ Bathing at Baxter’s ,” Jefferson Airplane, the first people to be using [makes sound] like this. Distortions of The Byrds, “ Eight Miles High ,” I adore that song.

I feel I’m in that psychedelic world. I’ve sometimes said that what I do is psychedelic criticism. Because it is metaphysical, it is visionary. I have a vision. I have a vision that’s bigger than society. That’s the problem with the Marxist approach. I believe the Marxist approach is useful. Arnold Hauser’s one of the great —  The Social History of Art is one of the most influential things on me. It’s a Marxist perspective.

Indeed, my work is always very attentive to the social context of anything. But what Marxism lacks is that larger vision of the universe. There are all kinds of questions and issues about human life that Marxism has no answers for. It doesn’t even see it.

It doesn’t see nature. What kind of a vision doesn’t see nature, could only see society? This is what’s happening. We have all these graduates of the elite schools, whereas my generation was all into cosmic consciousness and opening — we were influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, and all kinds of Eastern — .

I feel that is the true multiculturalism. I’ve been arguing for that for 25 years. I’ve been saying that if you want true multiculturalism, you have to present world cultures, including religion. Religion is extremely important — the most complex systems human beings have ever devised were the great religions of the world.

COWEN : Past Arnold Hauser, past Norman Brown , who are the contemporary writers and thinkers who influence you now who are writing serious books on either the world cultures or anything else?

PAGLIA : Is there anyone left writing serious books?

I’m trying to think who has written a serious book I’m interested in right now. Listen, there’s no one I would say, “Oh, so-and-so’s book is coming.” What? They’re dead. The people who I admire are long dead.

Unfortunately, it’s a terrible destruction. My work looks very strange and idiosyncratic because I’m alone. I’m alone and all the people who should have been writing interesting, quirky books, as I do, are dead or their brains were destroyed by LSD.

It’s one or the other. I knew so many, to me, brilliant minds in graduate school and early in my teaching career at Bennington College, really brilliant minds. I had great hopes for them and for what they would do. Then they couldn’t get anything done. For whatever reason, they couldn’t. They didn’t have the — I don’t know what. They didn’t have the resilience to continue against obstacles.

When their work would get rejected, they would become discouraged and would stop. Rejection simply infuriates me. I’ll say, “Well, I’ll have my revenge on you in the afterlife.” I’ll be around, and you’ll be dead. I don’t know, it’s an Italian thing. What can I say?

COWEN : This is Sexual Personae , your best known book, which I recommend to everyone, if you haven’t already read it.

PAGLIA : It took 20 years.

COWEN : Read all of it. My favorite chapter is the Edmund Spenser chapter, by the way.

PAGLIA : Really? Why? How strange.

COWEN : That brought Spenser to life for me.

PAGLIA : Oh, my goodness.

COWEN : I realized it was a wonderful book.

PAGLIA : Oh, my God.

COWEN : I had no idea. I thought of it as old and fusty and stuffy.

PAGLIA : Oh, yes.

COWEN : And 100 percent because of you.

PAGLIA : We should tell them that The Faerie Queene is quite forgotten now, but it had enormous impact, Spenser’s Faerie Queene , on Shakespeare, and on the Romantic poets , and so on, and so forth. The Faerie Queene had been taught in this very moralistic way. But in my chapter, I showed that it was entirely a work of pornography, equal to the Marquis de Sade.

PAGLIA : How interesting that you would be drawn to that.

COWEN : Very interesting.

COWEN : The cover image is Queen Nefertiti in the Neues Museum in Berlin. Recently in the news, we’ve seen that someone has scanned the bust .

PAGLIA : Oh, that’s awesome.

COWEN : And it will soon be possible using 3-D printers to print out your own “copy” of Nefertiti.

PAGLIA : [laughs]

COWEN : How do you feel about this?

PAGLIA : Oh well.

PAGLIA : To me, archaeology is one of my master tropes. What can I say? “The Bust of Nefertiti,” discovered in 1912, and it’s amazing. We’ve known it for like a century. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, how it’s become such a symbol of art.

I should say that the push of countries like Greece and Egypt to recover their masterpieces from where they were taken and scattered around the world, I think with what’s been happening with ISIS, and the demolition of Palmyra and all kinds of things that have happened, my attitude now is keep Nefertiti in Berlin, please. Don’t send it back to Cairo.

COWEN : Of all the aesthetic judgments in your writings, and you’ve covered a lot of ground, but are there any where you really fundamentally regret an earlier judgment and have revised it? Not in a marginal way, which happens all the time, but really just thought, “Well, I was wrong about that?”

PAGLIA : Interesting. [laughs] I’m trying to think. My early work, I’d worked on for so long that it was like I had plenty of time for second thoughts and third thoughts, and hundredth thoughts, so no. I can’t think of anything offhand. Can I get back to you about that?

COWEN : Sure.

COWEN : If you could travel to one place you haven’t been, where would it be and why?

PAGLIA : I’m like Huysmans’s aesthete, des Esseintes . I am not a great fan of traveling. I just feel like it’s become too onerous. No, I’m a mind traveler.

COWEN : What is your unrealized dream in life?

PAGLIA : My unrealized dream, to meet Catherine Deneuve . But I met her once. I ran into her, smack ran into her once on 5th Avenue in front of Saks. I know this is kind of bizarre.

COWEN : It’s a realized dream?

PAGLIA : Yes, but it was odd. I pursued her into the glove department and forced her to sign my ticket envelope for the Fillmore East, where I was seeing Jefferson Airplane.

PAGLIA : To have a conversation with Catherine Deneuve, shall we say. [laughs] A civilized conversation.

COWEN : On that topic, one of your books, The Birds , about the Alfred Hitchcock movie  — great book, one of my favorite movies. Going back to that time, if you had the opportunity to date either Suzanne Pleshette or Tippi Hedren  — .

PAGLIA : Date? To date?

COWEN : Date.

PAGLIA : I don’t date. I’m just a mad nun — .

COWEN : Hypothetically.

PAGLIA : Is all that I am.

COWEN : Of course.

PAGLIA : Dating is so banal.

COWEN : Tea with Suzanne Pleshette or Tippi Hedren.

PAGLIA : Tippi Hedren invited me to lunch on Rodeo Drive after that. I was, I don’t know, giving some speech on Shakespeare at the Los Angeles Public Library. She invited to thank me for writing this and I met her. She had a stack of 12 of these books, and I signed them for her. She was the most elegant and wonderful, warm woman.

I didn’t have much time. She invited me to go to the ranch and see all the animals and the lions that she collected and so on.

Suzanne Pleshette, I think, was absolutely underutilized by Hollywood. What an intelligent — she’s this knife-sharp character, she was. In fact, I recently, in one of my Salon columns, compared her to Lena Dunham  — is, oh — .

PAGLIA : Lena Dunham is the product of exactly the same world. That whole affluent — our entertainment world in Manhattan. I say, “Look what’s happened to culture.” If you want to see the difference between Suzanne Pleshette, the sophisticated Suzanne Pleshette, and Lena Dunham. You want to see the decline [laughs] that we’re in the middle of right now, there it is.

Can I say a word about this?

PAGLIA : I wrote this. The British Film Institute asked me to write on a film and I said, “How about The Birds ?” and I did. I wrote this book, and it was universally panned by the film journals, which said about it, “This book does nothing. This book does nothing.” By which they meant that it wasn’t poststructuralist, it wasn’t postmodernist.

There wasn’t a lot of theory. I wasn’t citing, you know, the male gaze , and et cetera, et cetera. All this book does is go through the film The Birds from beginning to end, scene by scene by scene, and pays attention to the film itself.

Slowly it’s made its way. Now here it is. It was 1998 when that came out, and it’s starting to happen now. Routledge is a publisher that’s done nothing but this theory stuff. They’re starting to go, “Hmm. Maybe there was something in her — ,” I’m hoping.

I’m just trying to inspire graduate students to rebel against this horrible fascism that forces theory onto them before they expose themselves to everything that’s wonderful and imaginative in the history of literature and art.

I believe that paying minute attention to the actual work itself is the mission of criticism. I am hopelessly old-fashioned. Because that’s not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to mention Foucault 59 times in one paragraph, et cetera.

PAGLIA : What a windbag that guy is, I’m telling you .

PAGLIA : Foucault is nothing. He’s nothing.

PAGLIA : Nothing. The reason why I know he’s nothing is because he was influenced by — he pretends to be such a mastermind, but in fact he’s just a collection of influences and one of the biggest influences on him was Erving Goffman, of Philadelphia, who was the great sociologist — originally Canadian — who wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life . All the things that were an influence on me influenced Foucault.

You have all these people thinking Foucault was some sort of innovative figure in the history of modern sociology or intellect, and he wasn’t. It is a disease in these people. Everywhere, every single university in the United States, every single gender studies department, they’re impregnated with Foucault. That’s why we have graduates who know nothing.

COWEN : Impregnated is an interesting word to use.

PAGLIA : Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

COWEN : Do you like Marnie , the Hitchcock movie?

PAGLIA : Do I like Marnie ? Certainly, there are parts — I like most of Marnie . Yeah.

COWEN : But it goes askew in a way The Birds doesn’t.

PAGLIA : Yes. There are problems with it. So much was toxic going on on the set between Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren at that point, and so on. But there are wonderful things in Marnie .

On the simple life

COWEN : If you were to take someone who had read all or almost all of your work, and they had a sense of you and read a lot of your columns, watched some of your talks online, whatever, and they get a picture of you, but you wanted to tell them one thing about you that maybe they wouldn’t get from any of that about what motivates you, what drives you, what your life is actually like, what is — .

PAGLIA : My life is completely mundane. I’m a schoolmarm. That’s all I am. I had the wisdom — hello, having been raised Catholic  — that once I finally became known, at age 43, I didn’t change one thing about my life. Not one thing. I didn’t move to New York. I didn’t go chasing around. I didn’t get a speakers’ bureau. All that stuff. I have a cousin who’s a nun, and I have all these bishops and priests and sextons and so on in the family.

I just try to keep to reality. Because I know that the basis of my work is the closeness with which I live to ordinary life. I hate the elites. I hate parties. I don’t have any book parties or anything like that. [groans]

PAGLIA : I think that people, they want success and they want material advantages and so on. Being a writer is just scut work. Being a teacher, that’s what Susan Sontag also did wrong. Susan Sontag began in graduate school. “Oh, it’s so boring.” She did a little teaching and then went off and became a luminary. She was a big luminary, a big giant dirigible luminary her whole life.

PAGLIA : Floating above the continents. “Here’s Susan Sontag, the dirigible, woo — .”

PAGLIA : “Here she is.” Nothing that she said made any sense actually over time, eventually. She loved to hold court at parties. It’s notorious. People who remember her, “She was so brilliant. I saw her at this dinner party. Everyone was in awe.”

People who go to dinner parties to impress other people, it is such BS. Susan Sontag over time, her work got less and less meaningful, even though people worship at the shrine of Sontag. You try to quote her on anything. What can you quote her on? There’s nothing important. The one thing you can quote her on — .

COWEN : Camp ? Photography ?

PAGLIA : Quote a sentence from Susan Sontag, a great sentence. You can’t. The only sentence was the one she regretted, “The white race is the cancer of history.” That’s the one she retracted finally when she got cancer. Remember? She realized how horrible that was.

PAGLIA : Now she realized. “Now I realize I shouldn’t have said that.” That’s the only thing that you can quote her on. She’s not quotable, because there’s all this sleight of hand that she’s doing. She’s taking material that she borrows from others, or places that she’s been personally at a time when downtown New York was very exciting, so basically it was a kind of transcription of her everyday life.

I think the best thing she did probably was for me, she wrote a very witty thing, “ The Imagination of Disaster .” I like that essay a lot, which is all about the horror films of the 1950s. I thought if she only had stayed like that, unpretentious and really engaging with actual materials.

But Susan Sontag, basically her life became going from lecture to lecture, being hailed as the Great One, and being so detached from ordinary life. Whereas, when you’re a teacher, like a classroom teacher, as I’ve been for 40 years, the kids have no idea that I write books. Now and then, someone’s father will say, “She writes books,” and they’ll come and say, “My father is a fan of yours.” “Oh, really? That’s so nice,” I’ll say.

Anyway, the point is all these professors at Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they have the graduate students are paying court to them, because they need letters of recommendations. Hello, they want something from you. They’re so used to “They’re so grand” and so on.

I go in, and it’s like, “We need more chairs.” “What’s wrong?” “The curtain is wrong.” I’m always in touch with the janitors, infrastructure, condition of the buildings. I deal with everyday life. I’m not treated like a queen. I’m just like an ordinary schoolmarm working like a horse, pulling the plow.

I think that’s a really good idea for writers is to have a job where you’re dealing with constant frustrations, and problems, and so on. I think that’s really good for you.

COWEN : Like Herman Melville , right?

PAGLIA : Yes, yes.

COWEN : Hunting whales is not easy.

PAGLIA : Or Wallace Stevens . He kept going to the office, the insurance company, every day.

COWEN : My last question before they get to ask you, but I know there are many people in this audience, or at least some, who are considering some kind of life or career in the world of ideas. If you were to offer them a piece of advice based on your years struggling with the infrastructure, and the number of chairs, and whatever else, what would that be?

PAGLIA : Get a job. Have a job. Again, that’s the real job. Every time you have frustrations with the real job, you say, “This is good.” This is good, because this is reality. This is reality as everybody lives it. This thing of withdrawing from the world to be a writer, I think, is a terrible mistake.

Get a job. Have a job. Again, that’s the real job. Every time you have frustrations with the real job, you say, “This is good.” This is good, because this is reality. This is reality as everybody lives it. This thing of withdrawing from the world to be a writer, I think, is a terrible mistake.

Number one thing is constantly observing. My whole life, I’m constantly jotting things down. Constantly. Just jot, jot, jot, jot. I’ll have an idea. I’m cooking, and I have an idea, “Whoa, whoa.” I have a lot of pieces of paper with tomato sauce on them or whatever. I transfer these to cards or I transfer them to notes.

I’m just constantly open. Everything’s on all the time. I never say, “This is important. This is not important.” That’s why I got into popular culture at a time when popular culture was — .

In fact, there’s absolutely no doubt that at Yale Graduate School, I lost huge credibility with the professors because of my endorsement of not only film but Hollywood. When Hollywood was considered crass entertainment and so on. Now, the media studies came in very strongly after that, although highly theoretical. Not the way I teach media studies.

I also believe in following your own instincts and intuition, like there’s something meaningful here. You don’t know what it is, but you just keep it on the back burner. That’s basically how I work is this, the constant observation. Also, I try to tell my students, they never get the message really, but what I try to say to them is nothing is boring. Nothing is boring. If you’re bored, you’re boring.

PAGLIA : Wherever you are, it’s exhausting. It’s frustrating. I don’t know what. The plane has been canceled and whatever. After you get over your fury, you realize what opportunity is there here to absorb something more from this experience, from observing other people or whatever it is.

I think there’s really no experience that you can have that there’s not something in there that eventually you can’t use as a part of your developing system.

Another thing I have to say, anyone interested in ideas, do not read any of the current books like Pierre Bourdieu and all that stuff. Oh my God, it’s so incomplete. It’s really boring. I believe in the library. The library is my shrine. It was my shrine when I was researching Amelia Earhart. When I got to Yale, Sterling Library was my shrine. I ransacked that building, oh my God.

That’s the thing, is that I’ve learned more from the old commentators. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough , which was considered completely gone but had a huge impact on “ The Waste Land ” and other works of modernism. I’ve learned a great deal from the commentators of the past, the historians of the past.

Now, when I did Glittering Images , the actual nullity of current scholarship became very exposed to me. Of course, I already knew about it, but I really got objective proof of it. There’s 29 chapters in it. Each artwork that I chose, I did a full research of what had been said about that particular artwork, so I began chronologically.

I would work, if it was an older work from the late 19th century, moving through the decades to the present. There, oh my God, could you see it, could you see the fall in the quality of scholarship in our time from the 1980s on. I would move from these incredibly erudite and wonderful sentences, beautiful stylus about art, late 19th century moving into the 20th century.

Still solid into about the ’60s. And then the ’70s is kind of holding there. All of a sudden comes the ’80s, ’90s, 2000s. All these people are pygmies. Pygmies, the people at the elite schools. Let me say, the big art survey courses are being dismantled. Hello? It used to be you had a two-semester course. It would begin with cave art and move, in two semesters, down to modernism.

Magnificent structure, now abandoned wholesale except when students have protested, like at Smith. My sister is a graduate of Smith, and was part of the protest that got the survey restored.

Graduate students in art history and art historians no longer have the ability to teach the big picture, because all narratives are regarded as fictional now, imperialistic fictions. The entire story of art is not possible, and therefore, people know nothing.

COWEN : I need to give them the chance to ask you questions, but thank you for a fascinating discussion.

PAGLIA : Thank you. All right. [laughs]

AUDIENCE MEMBER : You mentioned Smith. I saw you speak at Smith, or Mount Holyoke, in 1993. It was fascinating to compare that to this, because there was a great deal of booing and hissing at Smith. It was eye-opening to me, being steeped in this — I am going to wrap up — the hegemony of the patriarchy and how we must even dress like men.

You saying something to the effect of, “I teach in a skirt, because I have more control over the classroom that way.”

PAGLIA : Actually, I don’t remember teaching in a skirt, but go ahead.

AUDIENCE MEMBER : In any case, I remember something to that effect. The question is, do you think that feminism has evolved beyond that, or is it just sort of running that same record dry?

PAGLIA : It’s really shocking. When I arrived at Smith, they had papered the walkway, in fact, as people walked in with all these hostile and uncomprehending things. People had no idea what my real ideas were. The whole PC thing was escalating out of control at that point.

It’s really shocking. Here is a woman, a middle-aged woman at that point, I’m in my 40s, who had spent 20 years writing a book that had been rejected, and finally was published by Yale Press. A book on the whole history of the Western civilization, and this is the treatment that I got at Smith College?

This is one of the bastions of the Seven Sisters, one of the most noble names in the history of modern women’s education. That just shows you how ideology really is very distorting.

Feminism is going through phases. I call myself a feminist, absolutely. I simply belong to a dissident wing of feminism, and I think that the error made by all these people was not to understand that my wing of feminism had been suppressed and silenced at that point for 25 years.

Eventually, we won in the ’90s, the pro-sex wing of feminism, thanks to Madonna, who wasn’t a feminist. But because of Madonna’s foregrounding of sexual themes and so on, it allowed us to break through the over-control by the Steinem politburo at that time.

COWEN : I’ll take another question, but you’ll still get to say more.

PAGLIA : OK, but the — .

PAGLIA : The problem is right now that a whole younger generation has risen up, and it’s now Steinem has returned. She’s like a bad penny . She’s back again.

PAGLIA : I feel like I’m back to square one.

COWEN : Next question, here.

PAGLIA : I’m sorry we can’t go on.

AUDIENCE MEMBER : Hi, thanks for coming. You mentioned your incident with Catherine Deneuve, and you also talked about that in 1995 and Playboy following her, and also having 599 pictures of Elizabeth Taylor.

AUDIENCE MEMBER : At the same time earlier this year, when David Bowie passed away, and you mentioned how he had reached out to you and wanted to meet you, you talked about how you weren’t sure you would have wanted to, because you have to keep a respectful distance from an artist of that towering stature.

You also mentioned in that interview that obsession and genius are pretty much the same thing, so where would you draw the line between — say you have an opportunity to meet someone who’s very important to you, or contrive a meeting, or just seek them out. Where do you draw the line between the obsession, and I mean the Paglia kind of obsession, not the John Hinckley kind — .

AUDIENCE MEMBER : And just that respectful distance? Do you stifle creativity with respect for who this person is and their privacy?

PAGLIA : I personally have never had this great desire, necessarily, to meet the figures that I most admire in the arts, because I understand that what they represent onscreen is something that is an artificial construction. It’s not the reality.

I’ve been working in art schools also my entire career, so I know. I have dancers in my class. I have actors in my class, and I completely understand the difference between the fallible real self, the mundane real self, and the artistic self suddenly emerges within what I call the temenos , which is the sacred precinct that I regard as art.

Therefore, when I encountered Catherine Deneuve by accident that day, and I was at the peak of my obsession with her, it really almost ruined my interest in her, because it’s like, “Oh, my God.” It’s not the real Catherine Deneuve [laughs] that I was so intent on. It was this magical creation that is a result of her talent, but also of the director’s own magical skills, and so on.

Oh, yes, Elizabeth Taylor, I have 599 pictures, yes. People often say what’s odd about that is not the number, but that I had counted them.

PAGLIA : She represented to me everything — the pure sexuality that had been repressed during the Doris Day 1950s and early ’60s. BUtterfield 8 still remains for me a great pagan exhibition. Here is Elizabeth Taylor as a high class call girl. Oh, my God, and I had Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti and Anouk Aimée and Melina Mercouri.

There were so many phenomenal images that I was inundated with when I was in high school and college, and what do these kids have today? Taylor Swift? Oh, my God. She is such a fake. She poses in things that she imagines are sexy and sultry, and it’s so fake. Awful, awful, awful. At least Rihanna, who’s on dope most of the time, and that’s why she looks so sultry, but — .

PAGLIA : Rihanna’s Instagrams are, to me, like a work of art. That’s the only thing I’m following right now, I have to say, that’s of equal importance, is Rihanna floating from one nightclub to another, and yet some other fashionable thing, but back to your question.

PAGLIA : Wait, did I answer? I don’t know if I answered the question.

AUDIENCE MEMBER : I’m not sure, either.

PAGLIA : Oh, David Bowie. I wrote this essay called “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution.” I wrote it for the Victoria and Albert exhibition catalog for the costume show that they did that is now touring the world, and I consider it one of my most important pieces, but it’s in the catalog.

I want to get into my next essay collection, but with Bowie, see, Bowie is different than Deneuve. Bowie is truly like a creative artist, whereas Deneuve and Taylor are performers in other people’s fictions. But Bowie was truly a master creator of a level that just is staggering.

When I did the research for that essay, I knocked out all over again at the enormity of what he achieved, and also at how little has been acknowledged, his deep knowledge of the visual arts, and how he had been influenced by that. I found all kinds of little details that showed his deep knowledge, his erudition about that.

It appears to be that he did tell the V&A to invite me. That time, people don’t know. What you’re talking about is where — it was earlier in the 1990s, and a message came to my publisher saying — and it was conveyed to me by the publicist and my publisher — saying, “David Bowie wants your phone number,” and I burst out laughing.

PAGLIA : I said, “That’s ridiculous. Oh, boy. It’s just some fan trying to get it.” They said, “David Bowie they claimed really wants your phone number.” I said, “Is that the way David Bowie gets in touch with you when he wants your phone number?” I laughed, and I didn’t believe it. It was all so shadowy.

Only now, only after I did the research for this Victoria and Albert thing, did I realize that the reason it was so strange was that he had fired his entire staff. He had fired his management. He had fired his company, and dealing with the record companies and so on after Berlin , and he only dealt with the world via friends. That’s what was so strange about it. It was strange. I made a mistake.

What he wanted was he wanted to use an excerpt from Sexual Personae on a record album in one of his lyrics. I’m like, “Oh, my God.” It’s very embarrassing that that happened, but that’s OK. I think there should be a distance, or a sense of respect and reserve, with great artists.

COWEN : Next question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER : I’m a master’s economics student here at George Mason, and I’m told today is Equal Pay Day, so that makes the question I want to ask you about pay disparity even more relevant, I guess.

I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and it seems to me that it boils down to a problem of culture, to the extent that, for example, Mark Zuckerberg publicizing taking paternity leave does more to alleviate the pay disparity problem that we have than either companies or governments setting a policy.

Because to the extent that the demand for flexibility, to have children and care for children is only used by women, it’s going to hurt us on the margin when it comes to pay. Since you’re such a great and incisive social critic, I just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

PAGLIA : First of all, I think the way that my own party, the Democratic party, is using this rubric of equal pay for women as if this has not been a matter of law ever since the presidency of JFK , for heaven’s sake.

There may be cases of outrageous disparity in pay for doing the same work. Now and then, they’ll find something like in a hospital, a woman doctor, a veteran doctor who’s not being paid the same level. But it’s rare when these actual cases do surface.

There’s all this propaganda being pumped out about this issue, when in fact, women are not — if women are earning 72 cents or 75 cents on the dollar, it’s not for the same job. This is the lie that’s being told. Women doing the same job as a man are not being paid 75 cents for something that the man is being paid a dollar.

What it is, is overall, the averages of women, of their own volition, for whatever reasons, are taking jobs that have more flexibility as opposed to the around-the-clock, seven days a week, night thing.

For example, women tend to shy away from commission sales jobs where they’re on the road a lot, and that is where a lot of men have very high earnings. Women are making choices, and they would prefer to be closer to their children, so yes. These disparities are ultimately based in biological differences.

Susan Faludi and these other feminists of the Steinem kind of credo have one answer. Men must do more. That’s their answer. Men must do more. Susan Faludi has never had a child, so has absolutely no idea.

What I feel is that there is a tie. There is an ineffable, indefinable, biological tie between a child and the mother in whose body the child has developed into a full being, and there are all kinds of impulses and instincts that women may have of protectiveness toward their biologically born children.

I think that to politicize the thing, and to assume that a woman bearing a child is like an automaton, “Yes, here is the baby. Here, to my husband, you are equally fit to be able to nurture this three-month-old child.”

As a child gets a little older and turns into a real human being with a personality and so on, it’s not so dependent, then is when men can do more. I believe personally, from my observation of human life, that there is something going on. An infant doesn’t want the father, hello.

The infant wants the mother. You want the nice, cushy — the smell is the mother. “Who is this person coming closer? Go away.” Freud talked about that. This distraction comes in, the father. “Get out.” Remember?

PAGLIA : This is why Freud said every child wants to kill the father and marry the mother. They don’t want men, and men don’t know what to do. Men are clumsy, and they have the big hands and so on.

PAGLIA : What I have seen from my own observation is that women — because I have a child who I adopted from my former partner and so on. What I have seen is the world of the moms. I have seen the world of the moms from the inside, and what I see is that the minute our children are born, it’s the woman who biologically, I believe, has the master strategist mind.

She is the generalissimo of the household. The man, her husband, who was lasonce her equal, shrinks down to merely one counter.

PAGLIA : Becomes one. It is she who issues the master plan for the week. He is hopeless. She has the multiple levels. She assigns. She knows what — she’s the one who makes the schedule and so on, and the good father is the one who says, “OK, yes, I will do. OK, give me the plan, give me the sheet,” and so forth.

To ask men to do more, seems to me to ask them to do something that they are not biologically prepared to do.

COWEN : Our next question is from a man.

PAGLIA : Oh, sorry. That was so interesting, I wanted to go on, but it’s all right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER : I’d just like to preface my question by saying that as a whirlwind, Job’s God has nothing on you.

PAGLIA : How nice. Thank you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER : My question is do you ever have any concern that modern literature and eventually all the classics will have to be rewritten so that in order to be understood, every fifth word will have to be the word “like”?

PAGLIA : Unfortunately, the sense of language in general, or just a respect for language or interest in language is degenerating. I’m someone who used to write down, always, I’d write down any word I don’t know in what I’m reading. I would make lists, and I would study the dictionary and etymologies, and now, young people have no concern for language, per se.

The way they communicate with each other and the email format now in text is very truncated, and it’s why the writing on the web has also degenerated horribly. The writing for blogs is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but no one has — .

It used to be with newspapers and magazines, there was a space limit, and that imposed a real kind of format. It forced you to condense, and it gave a crispness to language. We’re in a period now, I’m afraid that the ear for language is degenerating.

COWEN : One last question, very quickly.

PAGLIA : Oh, the last one? Oh, no.

AUDIENCE MEMBER : I’ll try to be quick. In my view, feminists have made a lot of progress in the Western world in the last century, and I’m curious to know if you think we’re close to basically achieving the goals that were set out, or if the feminists will ever feel like the fact that more women go to college these days, for example, is a symbol of progress, or that they’ll never feel like the job has been done?

COWEN : You have one minute, 30 seconds to answer this question.

PAGLIA : Oh, no. I’m an equal opportunity feminist, by which I believe that all obstacles to women’s advancement in the political and professional realms should be removed.

What I’m also saying is that there are huge areas of human life that are not political that have to do with our private spiritual nature, and that is a place where legislation will always be helpless and hopeless and indeed, intrusive, so I think that feminism has made enormous gains in terms of — there was a time that women were totally dependent on father, on husband, on brother, for their survival.

Now, women can be self-supporting, can live totally on their own. It’s part of this whole Western world powered by capitalism that our university curricula are now habitually always demeaning. Capitalism made women’s emancipation possible.

I think that the problem right now is that young women have been taught that to somehow identify their own sense of personal unhappiness with men, and men are responsible for our unhappiness, when in fact, part of the issue is that we have lived as a species for tens of thousands of year, where mating occurred early, where you left your parents’ house, and had your own household, and your own children.

Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet, is 13 going on 14, and already, she’s ready for marriage. In this life, we have a very long, an unnaturally long period here, before women can attain some sense of who they are as women. I think that that is — .

It’s not men. It’s not the patriarchy, and it’s ultimately not a feminist issue. It has something to do with this very mechanical system of the modern technological, professional world that has emerged to replace the agrarian period, when there were multiple generations living with each other, and women had a natural sense of solidarity, being all together.

There was the world of women, and the world of men, once. They didn’t have that much to do with each other once. All the problems have happened since we started having to deal with each other.

COWEN : Just to close, Steven Pinker will be coming on October 24th. This summer we’ll have Cass Sunstein, not yet scheduled. Camille, we thank you heartily, so, so much.

PAGLIA : Thank you.

The Catholic Pagan: 10 Questions for Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia is an American cultural critic who serves as the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia , where she has taught since 1984. She received her B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1968 and her M.Phil and Ph.D degrees from Yale University in 1971 and 1974, respectively.

Her six books are Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) ; Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992); Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (1994); The Birds , a study of Alfred Hitchcock published in 1998 by the British Film Institute in its Film Classics Series; Break, Blow, Burn:  Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems (2005) , and Glittering Images: A Journey through Art from Egypt to Star Wars (2012) . Her third essay collection is currently under contract to Pantheon Books.

Professor Paglia was a co-founding contributor and columnist for Salon.com, beginning with its debut issue in 1995.  She has written numerous articles on art, literature, popular culture, feminism, politics, and religion for publications around the world—most recently including TIME  and the Sunday Times  of London. Her essay, “Theater of Gender:  David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” was commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum for the catalog of its major exhibit of Bowie costumes, which opened in London in 2013 and is currently touring internationally.

Although raised Catholic in an Italian-American family, Professor Paglia left Catholicism in her youth and embraced the sexual revolution. Nevertheless, she still cites Italian Catholicism as the strongest influence on her personal identity. On Feb. 22, I conducted the following email interview with Professor Paglia about her secular work and its Catholic influences.

You’ve been teaching at University of the Arts since 1984. What do you love most about your job?

There is no doubt that my commitment to the vocation of teaching is part of my Catholic heritage. I view classroom teaching as a discipline and duty, a responsibility to convey the legacy of the past to the next generation. As I strictly monitor attendance and enforce order, I sometimes ruefully feel like a teaching nun from the over-regulated era of my upstate New York youth! I have a powerful sense of the descent of modern education from the medieval monasteries and cathedrals, whose Gothic architecture has been imitated on so many college campuses here and abroad. My faith in that nurturing continuity is certainly diametrically opposed to the cynically subversive approach of today's postmodernist theorists, who see history as a false or repressive narrative operating on disconnected fragments.

Despite your teaching schedule, you’ve found time to speak and write a great deal, including your last book in 2012. What’s your next big project?

For the past five years, I have been researching Paleo-Indian culture of Northeastern America at the end of the Ice Age, as the glaciers withdrew. I am particularly interested in Neolithic religion, which was focused on elemental nature, a persistent theme in my work. I have been studying Native American tribal history and doing surface collecting of small stone artifacts. Professional archaeologists and anthropologists have tended to gravitate toward Indian lifestyle issues like kinship patterns, governance, hunting strategies, food preparation and fabrication of tools, clothing, and shelter. I have found surprisingly few attempts to approach Native American culture from the perspective of world art and world religion. There is a puzzling gap in the record, and I hope to be able to make a contribution. However, this challenging project will be long in the making. In the meantime, I am preparing for my third essay collection, which is under contract to Pantheon Books.

Identifying yourself as a “dissident feminist,” you often seem more at home with classical Greek and Roman paganism than with postmodern academia. How has this reality affected your public and professional relationships?

I feel lucky to have taught primarily at art schools, where the faculty are active practitioners of the arts and crafts. I have very little contact with American academics, who are pitifully trapped in a sterile career system that has become paralyzed by political correctness. University faculties nationwide have lost power to an ever-expanding bureaucracy of administrators, whose primary concern is the institution's contractual relationship with tuition-paying parents. You can cut the demoralized faculty atmosphere with a knife when you step foot on any elite campus. With a few stellar exceptions, the only substantive discourse that I ever have these days is with academics, intellectuals, and journalists abroad.

In your view, what’s wrong with American feminism today, and what can it do to improve?

After the great victory won by my insurgent, pro-sex, pro-fashion wing of feminism in the 1990s, American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology. As in the hoary old days of Gloria Steinem and her Stalinist cohorts, we are endlessly subjected to the hackneyed scenario of history as a toxic wasteland of vicious male oppression and gruesome female suffering. College campuses are hysterically portrayed as rape extravaganzas where women are helpless fluffs with no control over their own choices and behavior. I am an equal opportunity feminist: that is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women's advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women, which I reject as demeaning and infantilizing. My principal demand (as I have been repeating for nearly 25 years) is for colleges to confine themselves to education and to cease their tyrannical surveillance of students' social lives. If a real crime is committed, it must be reported to the police. College officials and committees have neither the expertise nor the legal right to be conducting investigations into he said/she said campus dating fiascos. Too many of today's young feminists seem to want hovering, paternalistic authority figures to protect and soothe them, an attitude I regard as servile, reactionary and glaringly bourgeois. The world can never be made totally safe for anyone, male or female: there will always be sociopaths and psychotics impervious to social controls. I call my system "street-smart feminism":  there is no substitute for wary vigilance and personal responsibility.

Briefly put, what is post-structuralism and what is your opinion of it?

Post-structuralism is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process reality only through language and that, because language is inherently unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and contemporary thought. It is a laborious, circuitously self-referential gimmick that always ends up with the same monotonous result. I spent six months writing a long attack on academic post-structuralism for the classics journal Arion in 1991, "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf" (reprinted in my first essay collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture ). Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact.

What audience do you write for?

I have always written for a general audience interested in ideas. I believe culture critics should address the reader in a lucid, vivid and engaging manner. In college, I was very drawn to the lively, transparent writing style of early 20th-century British classicists like Gilbert Murray and C.M. Bowra. Academic writing needs to purge itself of its present provincialism, insularity and pseudo-French preciocity and recover the colloquial robustness and earthy rhythms of natural English.

In your view as a classicist, what can the ancient Romans and Greeks teach us as human beings?

Following my culture-hero, Oscar Wilde, I do not subscribe to the implicitly moralistic assumption that literature or art "teaches" us anything. It simply opens up our vision to a larger world—or allows us to see that world through a different lens. Greco-Roman culture, which is fast receding in American higher education, is one of the two foundational traditions of Western civilization, the other being the Judeo-Christian. These traditions twined about and influenced each other for centuries and produced the titanic complexity of the West, for good and ill. To ignore or minimize the Greco-Roman past is to put intellectual blinders on—but that is exactly what has been happening as colleges are gradually abandoning the big, chronological, two-semester freshman survey courses that once heavily emphasized classical antiquity. The trajectory is toward "presentism," a myopic concentration on society since the Renaissance—a noble, humanistic term, by the way, that is being ruthlessly discarded for the blobby new Marxist entity, "Early Modern."

You grew up as an Italian-American Catholic, but seemed to identify more strongly with the pagan elements of Catholic art and culture than with the church’s doctrines. What caused you to fall away from the Catholic Church?

Italian Catholicism remains my deepest identity—in the same way that many secular Jews feel a strong cultural bond with Judaism. Over time I realized—and this became a main premise of my first book, Sexual Personae (based on my doctoral dissertation at Yale)—that what had always fascinated me in Italian Catholicism was its pagan residue. I loved the cult of saints, the bejeweled ceremonialism, the eerie litanies of Mary—all the things, in other words, that Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers rightly condemned as medieval Romanist intrusions into primitive Christianity. It's no coincidence that my Halloween costume in first grade was a Roman soldier, modeled on the legionnaires' uniforms I admired in the Stations of the Cross on the church walls. Christ's story had very little interest for me—except for the Magi, whose opulent Babylonian costumes I adored! My baptismal church, St. Anthony of Padua in Endicott, New York, was a dazzling yellow-brick, Italian-style building with gorgeous stained-glass windows and life-size polychrome statues, which were the first works of art I ever saw.

After my parents moved to Syracuse, however, I was progressively stuck with far blander churches and less ethnic congregations. Irish Catholicism began to dominate—a completely different brand, with its lesser visual sense and its tendency toward brooding guilt and ranting fanaticism. I suspect that the nun who finally alienated me from the church must have been Irish! It was in religious education class (for which Catholic students were released from public school on Thursday afternoons), held on that occasion in the back pews of the church. I asked the nun what still seems to me a perfectly reasonable and intriguing question: if God is all-forgiving, will he ever forgive Satan? The nun's reaction was stunning:  she turned beet red and began screaming at me in front of everyone. That was when I concluded there was no room in the Catholic Church of that time for an inquiring mind.

You’ve certainly written a lot about your early experiences of Catholic art, iconography and saints. Who were the Catholic artists and personalities who most inspired you as you grew up in the America of Doris Day?

It's no coincidence that the first women intellectuals who impressed me in adolescence had been raised Catholic and wrote eloquently about it: Simone de Beauvoir ( Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter ) and Mary McCarthy ( Memories of a Catholic Girlhood ). Later, Germaine Greer, another rebellious Catholic girl, became and remains my favorite feminist. Catholic doctrine, however personally limiting, trains the mind with its luminous categories and rigorous discipline. Medieval theology is far more complex and challenging than anything offered by the pretentious post-structuralist hucksters. For most of his career, my father taught Romance Languages at a Jesuit school, LeMoyne College, where I took a course in logic from a Jesuit professor one college summer. For centuries, the Jesuits have been world-famous for their keen and penetrating minds and their agile argumentation. My familiarity with Jesuit analysis must surely have helped produce my later instant scorn for the confused and pointless morass that is post-structuralism.

What is your impression of Pope Francis so far?

Francis seems like an affable gust of fresh energy after the near-sepulchral persona of the prior pope, who seemed strangely stiff and reserved for a Bavarian. So that's a big positive, in terms of captivating young people around the world and inspiring them toward charitable social action. However, I am somewhat baffled by the cat-and-mouse game that Francis seems to be playing with the media. Is he or is he not signaling his support of revolutionary reforms in Catholic doctrine?—particularly as it applies to sexuality. As a veteran of the 1960s, I of course strongly support the sexual revolution. But as a student of comparative religion, I have to say that when the Catholic Church trims its doctrine for politically correct convenience, it will no longer be Catholic.

Sean Salai, S.J., is a contributing writer at America.

Kenneth Wolfe 9 years 6 months ago The last four sentences are powerful in their honesty and clarity, a rare thing from the far left. In fact, it's a rare thing from many on the center-right, too, over the last two years, as conservatives (yet not traditionalists) have repeatedly attempted to read Francis through Benedict instead of admitting there has been obvious rupture. At least Paglia is blunt with simple observations, particularly her conclusion that Pope Francis governs the Church as a center-left politician.

David Eveld 9 years 6 months ago Camille Paglia is one of my favorite current writers. Her intellect is obvious reading this article. She's a great writer, she's very funny, and, most importantly, she's relentlessly intellectually honest. I wish she would forgive the poor nun who scolded her and consider coming back to the Catholic Church. We need her. It would probably take divine intervention, though, so I suggest we all pray for Ms. Paglia to connect with Christ.

David Chu 9 years 6 months ago Camille's discussion of the ceremonialism and pagentry of the Church is interesting. While I'm sure there's been a lot of scholarship on the origin of such, I suspect that some of it derives from syncretism with pagan Rome during the period of the early Church.

Louis Pizzuti 9 years 6 months ago In fact, there is scholarship that it does not derive in any way from sycretism with pagan Rome, but rather, Christianity is a revival and broadening of the theology and worship of Solomon's temple, a faith which was suppressed by Josiah's reforms. I recommend the work of Margaret Barker on this, particularly her "Temple Theology: An Introduction"

Joseph Sciambra 9 years 6 months ago I was at Berkeley, an Art History student, when Paglia's book came out - it's influence and reach was enormous; by then, although I was already an ex-Catholic, and fully immersed in the gay lifestyle as a would-be porn star, what Camille wrote about the beauty of porn and the courageous endeavors of gay men who discarded the establishment and forged their own ways, spoke to me on a level that no academic ever did – it made me believe that the road I was on was the right one; only, this sense of freedom came at a very heavy price. After 10 years in the gay lifestyle and after losing most of my friends to AIDS, drugs or suicide, near death myself – I left and went back to the Catholic Church. While I praise her breadth of knowledge and her fearlessness, I take issue with many of her conclusions regarding homosexuality – for, I found it, in its modern form, neither beautiful nor noble, for, most of us were wounded little boys still looking for daddy – and, never finding him in the promiscuity of gay sex – we left the whole thing unsatisfied and disenchanted. I wrote about my experiences in the gay scene of 1990s San Francisco in my book “Swallowed by Satan.”

Isadora Mary 9 years 6 months ago I left the Church and lived a bi-sexual lifestyle and my observations are the same as yours "wounded people looking for mommy or daddy". After years of searching and reading I found myself back at the Catholic Church. All the things I was never taught about the Church, the theology, the history, the reverence, the Mass of all ages are now an integral part of my life. I couldn't be more grateful.

Isadora Mary 9 years 6 months ago Ms. Paglia, I so admire your intellect and the honesty that accompanies it. I hope soon you let go of the sexual revolution and become a full time student of the Catholic Religion which has been infected by the liberal left marxists. We do need you and I'm going to pray for you and your family. In no other place will you experience God manipulate time so that the singular event of Calvary over 1980 years ago on the linear timeline, is made to intersect and touch today at Mass. Is anything on earth so beautiful? If you go to Mass today the 2/25/2015 point on the timeline will be looped back over the altar at the consecration of the Host and Chalice such that the two points in time touch each other. Albert Einstein, whenever he would see a Catholic priest, would stop him and ask the priest questions about the Eucharist. Because even though Einstein was an atheist, he knew that time was not linear, and had an inkling that the non-linear nature of time was somehow a dynamic in the Mass and the Eucharist. "And, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself" John 12:32

Edward Mikol 9 years 6 months ago I've been curious what Camille Paglia's view on Islam is, and its iconoclasm concerning Art, which has followed Mohammad's prohibition of representational works, based on his saying that " An angel will not enter a house where there is a picture on the wall or a dog on the floor ". And, also, what she might think of the hypothesis that, as a belief system ( of the self-identified "children of Ishmael" -whose patriarch historically resented his brother Isaac for being given the family honors and inheritance rights- by the Lord -even though Ishmael was the true elder son ), the Muslim faith could be seen as a ( unrecognized by its believers ) savage parody of monotheism and a cosmic "revenge on God" ( equally unconsciously ), more than a traditional "religion"; a kind of Supreme payback for God's "cruel and unjust betrayal" of the real founder of the sanctified line. Taking on the trappings of the Judeo-Christian creeds and covertly inverting them ( "Deus est Demon inversus", in effect ) for verisimilitude. In short, could Islam itself be a subterranean Satire? ( Even though its own founder might remain doggedly unaware of this- for reasons a Nietzsche might suspect? ) To put it baldly, "Submission " could be a revenge disguised as a "religion", id-designed to make "God" look bad. ( A book of real "Revelations" .) I'd love to hear her thoughts on this. As someone who learns toward Taoism, I have no theological "dog in this fight" except that I am also an artist who finds representational art as essential to our nature as music (also forbidden by Islam). Ms. Paglia always scintillates and stimulates, and I look forward to her next book.

Karen Heiby 9 years 6 months ago Dr. Paglia, you have left the Church because of one nun. Please don't let one nun stand between you and the Church! Of course there is room for questions of all kinds. Check out the web for a lot of Catholics having discussions and questions for each other. We are out there, and we are many! Benedict was portrayed by the media as some kind of stiff dictator, but in reality, he has the innocence of a boy and the intellect of twenty cardinals. He is a grandpa figure and very sweet. He loves his flock. I shook his hand and that moment was one of the greatest in my life. Pope Francis is not going to change doctrine. A pope simply can't change what the Church teaches. That's why, since Christ's time, the teachings of the Church have remained the same over two millennia. The baby boomers did not invent sex; homosexuality and contraception were accepted by previous cultures, yet Church teaching did not bend due to popular opinion. And it's not going to bend in our time or any time just because a culture wants disordered behavior to be accepted by the Church. Pope Francis said he wouldn't judge a homosexual who was seeking God, to paraphrase. He didn't say that he approved of homosexual acts. Listen carefully to what he says and what he doesn't say. There is no left and right, liberal or conservative Church. The Church is above politics, and is simply "Catholic". It is wrong to try to place the Church on a left-right spectrum. It teaches and does things that liberals tend to like, and teaches and does things that conservatives might like, but to the Church, left and right are irrelevant. Thank you for reading.

Bill Mac Iver 9 years 6 months ago "Jesus loved the pagans. Humanly speaking one might even say that he longed for them; obedience alone held him within the close boundaries of his mission." -- Romano Guardini, The Lord

Morton Abercromby 9 years 6 months ago Paglia is a well-educated and smart woman. I love what she has to say and I love that she disturbs conservatives and liberals. She's a solid thinker… But it's too bad her blind spot is she thinks the sexual revolution is something new: the 1960s was an explosion of thoughts fomented in the late Victorian era that were aborted by the first two World Wars. Eugenicists like Havelock Ellis and Bertrand Russell offered their free love arguments, as did a sundry of other kooks, like Bolsheviks such as Madame Kollantai. All the 1960s Sexual Revolution did was try to codify and legalize what polite company didn't talk about, like making it a "right" to go hookup in a closet during a keg party, to give a ridiculous analogy. Paglia the scholar should know that God doesn't need to forgive Satan; Satan needs to seek forgiveness. I guess those deft Jesuits were too busy ruminating over that blowhard Teilhard de Chardin? But yes, I agree whole-heartedly with Paglia: the Catholic Church should not bow to the politically correct nonsense that poses as "equality" and "social justice." This stuff is all thin thinking and is scattered with holes.

Patrick Chisholm 9 years 6 months ago Why doesn't God forgive Satan? Based on what I've read, even if God did forgive Satan, he wouldn't come back to God. Angels' intellects are far superior to those of humans, and once they make a decision - which Satan did when he chose to rebel against God - they accept and embrace that decision as final, with full knowledge of the consequences. It's silly to leave the faith because a nun couldn't adequately answer that question. I'm sure Ms. Paglia had other reasons, but one should not join or leave a religion based on personal preferences. One should do so based on whether that religion is true. There's abundant circumstantial evidence, as outlined in several recent books, for the divinity of Christ and authenticity of the Gospels. There's also a very strong case to be made that the Church that Jesus established upon Peter's rock was the Catholic Church. By rejecting that Church, Ms. Paglia is taking an extreme risk. Best not to set oneself up for a rude awakening when it's time to plop down on that judgement seat.

Kathleen Wimmer 9 years 6 months ago Thank you for your very thoughtful and clear commentary, you are absolutely right.

enzo barovnica 9 years 6 months ago God did not provide a plan of redemption for the angels as He did for mankind. The fall of the human race necessitated an atoning sacrifice for sin, and God provided that sacrifice in Jesus Christ. In His grace, God redeemed the human race.

L Fabry 9 years 6 months ago I'm embroidering "American and British feminism has amazingly collapsed backward again into whining, narcissistic victimology" onto a throw pillow.

Timothy Bauman 9 years 6 months ago Because of one nun's reaction to a question Professor Paglia concluded the Church is not the place for an "inquiring mind"? That's stunning. I've got to believe she misspoke.

JR Cosgrove 9 years 6 months ago No, I have to believe it is an excuse not a reason. Her incredibly shallow reaction to the nun's response to a question that no one can really answer is what is telling. So my guess is that there is much more there which she does not want to talk about. Maybe all her reasons were just as shallow.

Mary Flynn 9 years 6 months ago When I was ten in 1952 our priest bombastically preached "There is NO salvation outside the CHURCH! I remember clearly saying to myself, "God won't send grandma and grandpa to hell" (they were Lutheran). Now at age 72 that was a pivotal moment in my Faith journey;always a discernment to put Christ at the center of my life. I am a among all the sinners who God in his great mercy loves and saves. I find my spiritual center still is the regular reception of the sacraments, social justice practices (specifically I am a Vincentian) frequent daily prayer and forming my own conscience with discernment to find God in all things. Childhood experiences, negative or positive associated with faith formation are not shallow!. They are sources of grace. I still find it easier to experience Christ near by remaining active in the Roman Catholic Church, flawed as she, and as we all, are.

William Sutton 9 years 6 months ago Timothy Bauman: It is all about tipping points. The nun's reaction was an explicit and hard attempt to shutdown an enquiring young mind. I could easily see that happening.

Kathleen Wimmer 9 years 6 months ago A reaction one would expect from one looking for a way out. I can identify with her experience myself, but fortunately for me, my beliefs and Faith in The Words of Jesus Christ, were and still are strong. Christ gave us many examples in the Bible regarding sexual morality as well as God gave us the 6th Commandment. Progressives wish to see changes in Church doctrine to absolve their responsibility to comply. All that is happening in our world and Church has been prophesied.

Jude Rodriguez 9 years 6 months ago Outstanding. Just wonderful. Thank you for saving me from having to go to GQ or Rolling Stone to read a feature piece on another sad, immoral person that flaunts her proclivities, tempting and convincing others to follow suit like her with one breath (see comment below), and make a couple of well-aimed jabs at the catholic faith in the next. How pleased I am to find a Catholic publication, would so quickly and proudly give voice, time and validation to such a person, even though she has all of the secular world promoting her views and her lifestyle. No, why would we ever want to find a faithful, moral, Catholic (layman, priest, etc.) art and culture academic- after all, if Playboy would not be interested in such a boring scholar, why should we? What I really mean: After being bombarded by secularism at work, in the news, on the radio, and every other which way I turn… A catholic publication should be a moment of rest for our soul and conscience from the sin surrounding us. Our priests, our shepherds, no matter how cerebral they feel they are should be using the great gift of journalism to offer comfort and respite from our world. Our priests should look and write like priests, not like worldly men.

Mary Dearing 9 years 6 months ago I am very disappointed in Paglia. I am surprised at the extent of the narcissism and self-indulgence she reveals here. "Her" feminism is the only valuable feminism, as opposed to the Marxist or Stalinist feminism of others. One wonders if she knows what Marxism is? "Her" Italian Catholicism is superior to Irish Catholicism... as if the Roman Catholic Church were not, in concept, a unified body of believers. A great deal of what she says seems rooted in generalized assumptions about ethnic identities that in anyone else would be called out as prejudices. Her statement that only European thinkers are worth conversing with, as if no American academic is capable of intellectual integrity. I am truly disappointed and appalled. No doubt Dr. Paglia would find fault with my 'PC' values, yet what I see here is a woman who is almost entirely self-referential in her judgments.

Thank you, everyone, for reading. I'm glad you found the interview engaging. It's hard to read Paglia without agreeing and disagreeing with her in equal measure, but that's partly why she's so good at what she does.

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The cult of Camille Paglia

Or: how to cut through academic jargon.

• 5 April 2024, 4:59am
• From Spectator Life

There’s a spectre floating inside the head of a certain type of young woman. It’s the fast-talking, sex-realist American academic Camille Paglia. She was big in the 1990s but my parents haven’t heard of her. ‘Did she write Fear of Flying? ’ asks my dad. On sections of the internet she has become a folk hero. She’s an ideological guiding force for the female hosts of Red Scare , an influential left-ish podcast which was described by the Cut as ‘a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they’ve spawned’. Paglia is equally popular among some conservative factions: a 2017 debate between Paglia and Jordan Peterson has amassed 3.5 million YouTube views. Her TV appearances from the 1990s are passed around online like prison contraband: she disses Susan Sontag (‘She’s dull, she’s boring, she’s solipsistic’), and denounces, before her time, ‘any politicised agenda in the classroom’. 

Paglia gives us proof that you can make a sophisticated, original point without resorting to academic Esperanto

I first read Paglia’s breakout book, the 712-page Sexual Personae, when I was 19 and studying online during the Covid lockdowns. At that point I knew my academic career was over because of my semi-religious enthusiasm for Hollywood’s classical period. My lecturers were intent on decolonising and deconstructing, but their attempts were doomed in the face of prophetic screenwriting and of soft focus, which I’d started to think of privately as magic. Here only Paglia seemed to understand me. Greta Garbo was an interwar stand-in for the mythological Artemis, and Elizabeth Taylor, the writer’s childhood obsession, a fanged, sniping Venus. All roads, according to Paglia’s most celebrated theory, led back to the mystery cults of the ancient Mediterranean. The monotheistic religions once had a shot at quashing this pagan continuity, but were doomed to live with it whenever it re-emerged in modern culture, which it often did. Modern progressives were hopeless against paganism’s violent impulses and sexual imperatives – the sort you’d expect at the Roman Bacchanalia. Its archetypes, gods, goddesses, and vampires, could be found in all western art and literature.

This sounds like material for Pseuds Corner – but few scholarly books are as readable as the 1990 Sexual Personae , and none are as funny. Paglia later led me to wits like Mary McCarthy and Gore Vidal, but at the time her writing style seemed totally unique. ‘She showed me the value of writing and speaking in a confident, direct, declarative manner, without mealymouthed qualifications and apologies and alienating academic jargon,’ says Jack Mason, who credits his underground podcast The Perfume Nationalist for some of Paglia’s renewed fame.

If you want to know the kind of academic jargon Paglia is pitted against, look to someone like Judith Butler, the revered poststructuralist, who holds the contemporary humanities under a suspiciously drowsy spell. This is someone who once won the first prize in a Bad Writing Contest for a 94-word sentence about hegemony, Althusser, and ‘structural totalities’. In a 1999 foreword to her classic text Gender Trouble , Butler defends herself for sentences that ‘call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense’: they’re the best vehicle for her ‘radical views’. (Tell that to Mao, whose Quotations were recorded for the benefit of provincial farmers). Paglia learnt to write by keeping a notebook of Wilde epigrams. By contrast, every paper I read for university seemed to have been written by someone who’d spent hours in a candlelit cell, tracing out Butler’s verbal calisthenics with quill and ink. 

On my university course there’s a new compulsory module called ‘East Asian Imperialisms’. This ideological coup is made only worse by its linguistic ammunition: you can’t even mention the name of the class without inadvertently agreeing with the lecturer. (‘Yes – I believe you – there are several different kinds of East Asian imperialism,’ I imagine myself gasping out to Butler et al , who brandish large plural morphemes as they chase me through the night). At Durham, there’s ‘Geographies of Difference’, at Surrey, ‘Histories of Sex/uality’, at Exeter, ‘Queer Ecologies’. (‘How,’ asks the website, ‘can attention to queer theory help to challenge the colonial rationalist binaries including the un/natural, non/human, dis/order, dis/orientation, un/civilized and un/known in this moment of planetary precarity?’). 

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Gavin mortimer, keir starmer is falling into the same trap as francois hollande.

I hate this cryptolect not only because it is unreadable (I get the same nauseous feeling from Butler et al as I do from the fake-compassionate ad copy on an Innocent smoothie, or from generative AI) but also because it exists, in permanent condescension, to demarcate the right-thinkers from the wrong-thinkers. Despite its facade of concern for the ‘disenfranchised’ and ‘subaltern’, it works to separate those who can afford university from those who cannot. If you can’t keep up with its bylaws and vagaries, you’re out. To the academy, everything is exclusionary – apart from its shibboleths. 

Paglia gives us proof that you can make a sophisticated, original point without resorting to academic Esperanto. In its search for pagan archetypes, Sexual Personae spans centuries of apparently continuous art and literature, from the Aeneid (a ‘closet drama’) to Emily Dickinson (an ‘autoerotic sadist’). The wit may date back to a McCarthyan midcentury, but the book’s breadth is unmistakably a hangover from the New Age upheaval of the late 1960s, which the author experienced first-hand as a young woman. ‘Today’s academic leftists are… timorous nerds who missed the Sixties while they were grade-grubbing in the library,’ she says in her essay Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders . Her work is as defiantly multicultural as George Harrison playing the sitar, and is littered with telltale preoccupations of psychedelia, like Aubrey Beardsley and the ancient cults of Dionysus.

This signature Sixties-ness may be a clue to her resurgence. My generation occupies what often seems to be the exact inverse of the Summer of Love. We are theoretically connected to people all over the world, but secluded – through both algorithms and the narrow language-games of academia – from any New Age-y width of thought or belief. When you spend lots of time immobile on the internet, you’re shut off from an awareness of your own body – it’s not uncommon to see young people calling themselves ‘brains in meat suits’, or occupants of a ‘flesh prison’.  We are having less sex than those before us, and we cover our eyes when there’s nudity on TV. All of this might explain a collective aversion to the Boomers, who were born between 1946 and 1964 and got to stomp around happily in the hallucinogenic debris of the Sexual Revolution. But it also explains why ideas like Paglia’s feel, to us, as potent as psychedelic drugs.  

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Artsbeat | living with music: a playlist by camille paglia, living with music: a playlist by camille paglia.

Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a columnist at Salon.com. Her most recent book is “Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World’s Best Poems.”

Camille Paglia’s July 2008 Playlist:

1) Train Kept A-Rollin’, The Yardbirds (1965). An addictive London Mod rave-up epitomizing the accelerating mania of the 1960s, which finally self-destructed. Based on a 1951 song by an African-American musician, Tiny Bradshaw.

2) Ballad of a Thin Man, Bob Dylan (1965). Sinister atmospherics of the garish sexual underground in the repressive pre-Stonewall world. A naive voyeur reporter steps through the looking-glass and may or may not escape. 3) Season of the Witch, Donovan (1966). Nature and society in turmoil, as identity dissolves in the psychedelic ’60s. The witch marks the return of the occult, a pagan subversion of organized religion.

4) 8 Miles High, The Byrds (1966). Shimmering Hindu sitar riffs with jet flight as a metaphor for mental expansion. The song’s ultimate theme isn’t drugs but cosmic consciousness, a now forgotten ’60s goal.

5) Foxy Lady, Jimi Hendrix (1967). Oh, those crazed, strutting, supersonic, wham-bam chords! Their shock on the nerves still excites, more than 40 years later.

6) Lickin’ Stick, James Brown (1968). A deliciously sly exercise in sexual suggestiveness underpinned by Brown’s hypnotic, trademark, heavy-bass rhythms. Is the lickin’ stick an antebellum whip or melting phallic candy?

7) Wooden Ships, Jefferson Airplane (1969). An apocalyptic spectacle of wandering survivors of nuclear war. Male and female voices meet and bond as humanity renounces aggressive nationalism.

8) Bitch, The Rolling Stones (1971). Powerful, jagged, stabbing chords that seize the mind. Is the Stones’ bitch goddess a capricious woman or enslaving heroin?

9) Hotel California, The Eagles (1976). West Coast hippie hedonism meets the new satanism. Staggeringly brilliant double guitar solos ecstatically entwining — men in love!

10) On Broadway, George Benson (1977). The Drifters’ aspirational 1963 hit song tooling along on a seductive Latin jazz beat. Benson explicitly flaunts his guitar as his artistic alter ego.

11) Straight on For You, Heart (1978). The Wilson sisters give a throbbing, sonorous tour of erotic neurology. Phenomenal display of basic, stripped rock rhythms.

12) Edge of Seventeen, Stevie Nicks (1981). The only woman rocker with a majestic orchestral flair. Stevie as Druid seer showering her maternal compassion on youthful romantic trauma. 13) Coming Out of Hiding, Pamala Stanley (1983). Now a gay anthem, this song is actually a soaring assertion of female power. It’s an exuberant war whoop, flawlessly executed by Stanley’s witty, knockout voice.

14) Ain’t Nobody, Chaka Khan with Rufus (1983). A masterpiece of modern popular culture. The passionate lead voice stays cool and low amid the pulsing, swooping neo-African rhythms. This song is a living, breathing organism.

15) Middle of the Road, The Pretenders (1983). Chrissie Hynde at Dante’s midlife crisis. She ingeniously fuses explosive, in-your-face street attitude with rueful reflections on her new role as mother.

16) On the Turning Away, Pink Floyd (1987). Celtic mysticism rising to a grand, Wagnerian finale. David Gilmour’s luminous lead guitar is ravishing beyond words.

17) Hazy Shade of Winter, The Bangles (1987). The best rocking the Bangles ever did. Simon and Garfunkel’s classic aria of angst given a crisp, slamming treatment. The drums are like artillery fire.

18) Black, Pearl Jam (1991). Deep-sea diving in the inky depths of male emotion, explored by Eddie Vedder’s rich, keening, achingly honest baritone. Wonderful interplay with the band’s virtuoso instrumentalists.

19) Un-break My Heart, Toni Braxton (1996). Two centuries of African-American church singing produced the expert dynamics and peaking structure of this elegant display of musical theater. Poignant and devastating.

20) Easy, Groove Armada (2002). An ultra-sophisticated Euro-tech descendant of Giorgio Moroder’s seminal disco collaboration with Donna Summer. Sunshine Anderson (a North Carolinian in a British band) brings introspective intensity to the moody, multi-layered soundscape.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

Druid seer?

Excellent list for any month! Are you hiding some less easily defended guilty pleasures from us?

Just wanted to clear something up. Edge of Seventeen isn’t about romantic trauma. It is about Stevie Nicks’ cousin (almost 17 years old) who was losing his father. At least that’s what the “edge of seventeen” part is about. His father was in the hospital with a terminal illness. The song was inspired by her uncle’s and John Lennon’s death. The “white winged dove” part is about the spirit taking flight after death. Stevie was the only one of her family members with her uncle at the time he passed. This story is in the liner notes of her TimeSpace album.

WHO CARES!!!

This is the most interesting and least pretentious playlist ever to ever on this blog. Ms. Paglia, I will go on a road trip with you anytime.

Oh please, Camille, no Eagles. NO EAGLES. We could do without Stevie Nicks, too. The rest is fine.

//swine.wordpress.com

All tunes I grew up on. Pop. Pure pop. I love Paglia’s deconstruction: at first, I chuckled at having such having such sugar-coated standbys analyzed by an esteemed academic. Then, of course, I was pleased that each song was deep enough to withstand such investigation. Thanks for sharing, Ms. Paglia!

No real variety here. Bland, middle-of-the-road “classic rock,” all confined to a fairly straightforward genre; safe bets for an aging Baby Boomer, with no real sense of exploration or risk. This is all stuff you’d hear on any mainstream AOR radio station.

The universe of music is too vast to explore only such a narrow slice. It’d be nice to see something a little less ordinary and a little more challenging here.

No doubt. I agree. But the beauty is in investing these songs with a depth that they don’t deserve. I’m not saying she’s being ironic, but you’ve got to love “Stevie as Druid seer.”

Firstly, to Alex at #6…even reading “The Eagles” or “Stevie Nicks” gives me hives. Secondly, to Franklin up there at #8.. “Train Kept A Rollin” (I’d rather “Too Much Monkey Business”) and “Ballad of a Thin Man” bland? Ordinary is in the mind of the beholder….you know…like the Eagles and Stevie Nicks.

How refreshing. How can you not be moved by “Train Kept Rolling?” With all due respect to comment 8, I’d love to hear a mainstream AOR station playing that one, any time. Hello, this is rock ‘n roll here. Druids and soaring guitar riffs and apocalyptic visions and sex belong in this stew. For the first time in this feature, I read this list and heard almost every song in my head — almost as good as a Maxell mix-tape.

Wow! Hotel California and Jimi Hendrix, so original and subversive…

George Benson’s smooth jazz cover of “on broadway?” hilarious choice. Pearl Jam’s “Black?” just sad.

Thank you Ms. Paglia for proving once and for all that the application of hyperbolic pedantry to overplayed boomer radio anthems is not only a waste of time, it is the Platonic ideal of Absurdity.

I really appreciate the lack of pretense here — this is music that probably most the authors interviewed from this column listen to but are too proud to admit it.

Camille Paglia is a great critic, but whenever she dabbles in pop culture she tends to sound, as Franklin noted, very square, very dull, and her analysis is just foolish. The fact that a song is about middle age does not justify the word “Dantean”; the Italian poet had a lot more on his mind than that, for heaven’s sake.

Ms. Paglia picks from an over-sampled “classic” pool (mostly avoiding the “alt-whatever” offspring of punk/new wave that really dominate adult rock radio today), but within that pool she exercises fascinating taste. If you’ve been hearing versions of 7 and 17 on classic rock stations, you’ve been hearing the originals, which lack exactly what she says these far better covers have. That Pink Floyd you hear twice an hour is from The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon–or *maybe* it’s “Learning to Fly”–but not #16. And so forth. Now I want to know what she would listen to from The Clash onward.

Where is the promised volume 2 of Sexual Personae so we can have a whole book of this Please!

I WISH that ‘Train Kept A Rollin’ by The Yardbirds was a staple of AOR radio! You might hear Aerosmith’s version but not the one by The Yardies. Russ Garrett //www.yardbirds.us

Dantean? Yeah, Chrissie Hynde had more on her mind than middle age, though she was only 33 and was to learn way more about middle age than she had ever planned. With the exception of “Hotel California,” which I find to be pretentious in any decade, I’m cool with the tuneage du mois. “Train Kept A Rollin?” Perfect. I’d like to know whether Dr Paglia really thinks the sexual politics of the Airplane’s “Wooden Ships” trump the politics and barefaced beauty of the CSN version. C’mon. Finally, “Hazy Shade of Winter,” especially if you can summon the opening montage of “Less Than Zero,” is perfect for this coldblooded dirty deal of a summer.

i kind of gagged on the Eagles inclusion, but heartily agree with #1. For a real kick in the pants, try and find the soundtrack to Antonioni’s 60s film “Blow Up”. The version included therein, from later period Yardbirds, is retitled as “Stroll On,” and features twin solos from Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page that will pin your ears back.

Nice to read Ms. Paglia’s song list. I too feel the same about Rufus and Chaka Khan’s Ain’t Nobody. With that said, music is personal.

Most of the comments on here are very strange with their dismissivness to Ms. Paglia’s taste in music.

Your choices of music to listen to are your own.

#22: Paglia has a right to her musical choices–but the question such a list raises for me is: if your playlist only includes such mainstream, chart-topping, overplayed songs as the (majority of the) above, do you actually have the ears to hear anything more challenging or marginal?

A once great mind turned to mush. A lame list of tunes and even lamer commentary. Go back to the library Camille!

Sublime. Love all the cross referencing to the occult. And the Toni Braxton…who’d a thunk it? And yet perfectly appropriate and loopy.

//www.astroinquiry.com

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My magical movie mystery tour

On her u.k. "camille does the movies" road trip, la paglia enlightens the brits about "auntie mame," fails to see a roman lucky phallus and throws a diva fit over the lighting., by camille paglia.

Tues.-Wed., June 1-2 British Airways overnight flight from Philadelphia to London for the "Camille Does the Movies" festival at the National Film Theatre. Landing is delayed by unusually heavy downpours that have flooded highways and car parks in southern England since before dawn. Choral laments about the weather will mark my stay for the next week -- though by apocalyptic American standards of hurricane and tornado, things seem positively balmy.

My schedule has been organized by Brian Robinson, the very forceful and hilariously amusing press officer of the NFT. Interviews start almost immediately in my hotel off Oxford Street, after which I am driven to a radio studio for the gay-themed program "Lavender Lounge," a regular stop on my London visits.

Host Matthew Linfoot asked in advance for a list of my six favorite pop songs, and they are cued up for my commentary. It was a hard crunch to whittle my canon down to six, particularly since I taught my "Art of Song Lyrics" class this spring (a course I devised in 1985 for student musicians at the University of the Arts). My final cut: the Drifters, "On Broadway"; Jimi Hendrix, "Foxy Lady"; the Rolling Stones, "Jumpin' Jack Flash"; Cream, "Tales of Brave Ulysses"; the Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"; and Donovan, "Season of the Witch."

Now on to the National Film Theatre in the South Bank complex, where I must introduce the first film of my series, John Schlesinger's "Darling" (1965). I am shocked to hear from NFT staff that this great British classic (it won three Oscars) has fallen into obscurity in its native land. My program notes laud its extraordinary star, "coltish, mercurial Julie Christie," who represents "the exhilarating burst of cultural vitality" in the "restlessly kinetic new women" of the 1960s -- completely outside the frame of feminism.

Seeing "Darling" on the big screen again (after so many years of videos) is a revelation. I never stop talking for days about the film's fineness of detail as well as its swift economy of editing. Too many of today's movies are turgid and trite, with sloppy production values and buffoonish acting.

Thurs., June 3 The day begins in mad panic as the telephone rings and I hear, "This is Sally Soames." I had no idea that the photographer for my scheduled interview downstairs with the Times was to be Soames -- whom I revere as one of the few true artists I have ever had the privilege to meet. (Her moody 1992 picture of me for the Times was later reprinted in her volume of portraits of writers.) Unlike the pretentious pachyderms of big-ticket media photography who arrive with a ton of equipment and a pack of scampering lackeys, Soames works quietly and alone, using available light and homing in on her subject by creating a near-mystical mood of charged silence. With only five minutes' notice, however, I feel like Norma Desmond dragged into the light of day.

After a lively interview with the Times' Eleanor Mills (vis-`-vis the Yugoslavian fiasco, I snap, "Blair is Clinton's whore!"), I'm whisked off to the BBC for a long TV interview where I denounce the declining quality of current films and espouse my usual "pro-penis feminism." There are very stringent security measures because of the recent unsolved murder of BBC star presenter Jill Dando, a day after NATO bombs destroyed television studios in Belgrade and killed working staff.

I introduce my evening films at the NFT: "Butterfield 8" (1960) and "The Philadelphia Story" (1940). Liz Taylor makes a sensation as the swank Manhattan call girl in "Butterfield 8" -- a film that is unknown to the London audience and that probably has rarely if ever been shown in a theater anywhere in the world since its release. Its emotional power is enormously intensified by the big screen. A cardinal film of my adolescence, "Butterfield 8" imprinted me forever with its Babylonian vision of carnal woman.

Fri., June 4 More media interviews about the film series. War news escalates with talk of a Kosovo peace deal. Political commentary on British TV seems more detailed and substantive than in America, but there's less of it, and the war itself seems oddly distant, the violence almost censored out by the limited TV programming. I'm also struck by how credulously uncritical newspaper coverage is of Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose perky photos make her look like Joan Crawford in June Allyson drag.

In my first free hours, I rush over to the British Museum to revisit the Parthenon's pilfered Elgin Marbles, thronged in their majestic shrine by pilgrims from all over the world. The austere Rosetta Stone, newly restored, is even more mobbed, with blinding flashes going off on all sides.

I introduce the evening screening of "All About Eve" (1950), which I celebrate as the dazzling zenith of old-style Hollywood craftsmanship in moviemaking. Its theme of the star as bitch goddess, I say, helped form my general theory of the artist's amoral will-to-power. But I cannot stay for Jean Cocteau's "Orphie" (1949), since I must dash off with an NFT contingent to St. Pancras Station for our trip to the north of England. Until our departure, I pace up and down the platform admiring the central vault's soaring Victorian ironwork.

On the train, the NFT party unpack a delicious picnic supper with bottles of choice red wine, which we quaff as the landscape flies by. We discuss the summer's upcoming total eclipse (the first in England since 1928) and then the lethal cruelties of high school proms -- an exclusively American social phenomenon, I'm surprised to learn, that the rest of the world knows about only through films (such as "Carrie").

We pass a mammoth nuclear plant with nine cheek-by-jowl cooling towers ("What if they all melt down at once?" I ask), and we launch into a discussion of Jane Fonda in "The China Syndrome." A huge rainbow, as in a Turner painting, appears in the heavy, gray-black sky near Leicester. I'm fascinated by a line of parked trucks with big attached signs, "Gritting in Progress" -- which I long to snatch for the wall of my office in Philadelphia. These are "grit lorries," I'm told -- sanding trucks for winter roads.

As we wind our way by taxi to our charming bed and breakfast in Sheffield, I scrutinize the old buildings from the city's manufacturing past and am startled to see "HINDU TEMPLE" in big orange block letters on a decrepit brick factory. Oddly, a lady's black, strappy high-heeled shoe sits abandoned in the middle of the highway in front. Here as elsewhere in the north, I am struck by the ubiquity of McDonald's advertising posters (offering "Spicy McLamb" and "McChicken Korma Naan") and by the number of road signs pointing traffic toward the local "Crematorium" -- apparently a focus of civic thought.

Sat., June 5 As we consume our lavish English breakfast, our vivacious chatelaine advises us to visit nearby Hardwick Hall, a Tudor stately mansion in the rolling Derbyshire hills. When we reach it by rental car, we are flabbergasted by the gaping ruin of the unrestored old hall, with its steep stone staircases and three stories of ornate fireplaces exposed to the open air. It's like an eerie Caspar David Friedrich painting under a sunny Constable sky.

This was the birthplace of the formidable Bess of Hardwick, a friend of Elizabeth I and a Hatshepsut-like political instigator who married four times and got richer and richer until she built the massive pile of new Hardwick Hall across the grounds. We dash over to Chatsworth, her family's more famous estate with its Baroque cascade and Victorian primeval "rockery," but return for tea in the cavernous Hardwick kitchen, with its gleaming array of period copper cookware. Touring the galleries, I am agog at the quality of historical portraiture, particularly relating to Mary, Queen of Scots (Bess of Hardwick's marital rival, genteelly imprisoned for 18 years at Chatsworth), whose parents' chic images hover like delicate blond ghosts.

Now we adjourn to the Sheffield theater for the NFT-sponsored screening of Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (1966), a film that devastated me when I saw it at its American release in 1967 and that I paid homage to in the title of my doctoral dissertation and later book, "Sexual Personae." Although I have repeatedly studied it in video and in the classroom (via a worn print owned by my university), I have not seen it on a big screen since 1973, when I had it brought to Bennington College for a women's film festival that I organized.

The mood in the theater is hushed and thoughtful. When I begin my lecture, after the short interval, I acutely feel how close art is to religion. What greater function can a critic hope for than to introduce so oblique a masterpiece to a general audience? Afterward, the NFT team adjourns to a nearby Indian restaurant, where I feast on Lamb Madras with the two silver cans containing the five reels of "Persona" next to my feet. Overnight, the cans stay with me in my room. I feel awed and abashed, like a serf bunking with royalty on the Crusades.

Sun., June 6 We set out for Newcastle-upon-Tyne, near the border of Scotland. The weather is fierce and rainy, and we feel the presence of the Yorkshire moors that nurtured the Brontks' Gothic imagination. The landscape is reminiscent of upstate New York, where I grew up. I too am a brusque Northerner, impatient with the sycophancy and solipsism of urban mores.

We drop "Persona" off at the famous Tyneside Cinema (where in the lobby we spot my picture, arms akimbo, on the front of Pink Paper, the national gay weekly, with the headline "Paglia's pick of the flicks") and then set off for the nearby Castle Keep, a formidable tower whose first stones were laid in 1080. Buffeted by a cold wind on the high turret, we admire Newcastle's great iron bridge and curving Regency arcades.

We're eager to see Hadrian's Wall -- but little of it remains in town, so we end up desperately driving mile after mile into the countryside. The straightness of the road, chimes everyone, signifies that it was laid by my Roman ancestors, who observed no impediments of nature but just plowed right on through the landscape with their fanatical, mathematical vision. With nice timing, the rain stops and the sun beams down as we arrive at the half-excavated Roman encampment at Chester, where tourists wander the green pastures amid curious herds of cattle and sheep. Artifacts at the on-site museum include a votive statue of Mars and a perfectly preserved ancient leather shoe, found nearby.

After an acrobatically Clark Kent-like metamorphosis in a narrow toilet stall back at the theater, I emerge in formal dress for my lecture on "Persona" in the cinema's vintage Oriental-palace auditorium. Afterward, I am invited to sign the upstairs book reserved for special visitors and am floored to find on the last line (dated 1997) the dashing script of the divine Susannah York, one of the finest flowers of British cinema. "I am not worthy!" I exclaim, but sign anyhow after I catch my breath.

On the three-hour express train back to London, I dine on Chicken Tikka Masala, drink bottles of Hadrian ("Still Spring Water of Northumbria") and avidly study a guidebook about the Wall, which reveals, to my vexation, that the entire NFT party missed the symbolic lucky phallus carved on a Roman threshold at Chester.

Mon., June 7 An early call, as I must get to "Start the Week," a serious ideas show on BBC Radio. To my delight, the renowned biographer Antonia Fraser is also on the panel, and it's a great relief to be outranked for once in the diva department. Lady Antonia is very gracious indeed to a foreigner with, let's face it, a checkered reputation.

I'm infuriated that today's Independent, in an otherwise fairly favorable article on my visit, opines that I need "a better theme": "Sex was a world-class subject. Going to the pictures isn't." So dismissive a statement about film as a genre would be inconceivable in the U.S. except among the most hardcore religious conservatives. That a progressive British newspaper could make such a claim stuns and inflames me with a sense of mission.

In late morning, I get a rare treat -- a private screening in the empty NFT theater of Joseph Losey's lost 1962 classic, "Eva," in a dual-subtitled Scandinavian print that Losey said was the closest to his original cut, butchered by his French producers, the Hakim brothers. I am in ecstasy as I watch Jeanne Moreau at her height vamp around and trash the men of Rome and Venice. This was another film I brought to Bennington in 1973, but it isn't available on video, and the British Film Institute owns the one archival copy of the version I'm seeing. It's appalling that a whole generation of cinema-lovers has grown up without seeing "Eva," a film that had a profound impact on my thinking about sex.

At a midafternoon interview with London's Gay TV, I throw a diva fit over the lights (both Raquel Welch and Cindy Crawford told me that a gal must take control of her lighting), but things even out as I prepare for the evening's films. Yesterday, while we were in Newcastle, "The Ten Commandments" (1956) and "La Dolce Vita" (1960) were shown in my series at the NFT. Tonight is "Auntie Mame" (1958) and "Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959), both of which I introduce to a very receptive audience. ("Agnes Gooch, c'est moi!" I declare.) Although frequently shown on American television, "Auntie Mame" is virtually unknown in England (where the sentimentalized Lucille Ball musical "Mame" has supplanted it). In Panavision on the big screen, "Auntie Mame" is a knockout, and the crowd breaks into warm applause at the end.

Afterward we decamp for the official series dinner at the glass-walled Oxo restaurant with its spectacular view of St. Paul's dome illuminated across the Thames. We are joined by my friend and ex-student Kristen Lippincott, who first saw many of these films at Bennington over a quarter-century ago and who now, as the director of the Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich, is literally overseeing the Western world's entrance into the new millennium. American women get it done!

Tues., June 8 On the early morning news, British officials are at last musing that Europe "must take more responsibility for itself" and not always rely on the U.S. to sort out its problems. "Yeah," I mutter, "how about repaying American taxpayers for all those bombs and warplanes?" NATO has fatally gored its own reputation in this ill-planned Yugoslavian incursion.

I am interviewed at length by the Sunday Telegraph about religion and make my central ideological point that modern Hollywood is in the main line of ancient paganism. Then I dash to a nearby mews to videotape an introduction for the NFT screening of Losey's "Accident" (1967). Invoking the campy preludes to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" (a beloved TV show of my youth), I dodge speeding black taxicabs and red Royal Mail trucks to sing the praises of this superb but neglected film, which begins and ends with the sound of a car crash.

Lunch at a gourmet pizzeria with the core group of the British Film Institute with whom I worked for my book on Hitchcock's "The Birds." I am overjoyed to hear that the bloom is off the Paltrow rose in England after Miss Gwyneth "blubbed" her way through her Oscar acceptance speech. At lunch last year at this very restaurant, it was heavy going as I argued that Paltrow has the depth of a spoon. Once again, I am met with total bafflement by the wait staff when I request red pepper flakes for my pizza -- a standard Neapolitan condiment that apparently has never wafted across the English Channel.

Feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, now teaching at the University of London, also comes to lunch and mentions that she has never seen "Auntie Mame" and in fact had never even heard of it. Since "Auntie Mame" has dominated my life and consciousness with biblical power for over 40 years, I am struck yet again by the divergence of my basic premises from those of most feminists. As an Amazon with the brain of a pre-Stonewall gay man, I can scarcely be surprised at always being odd man out of every group.

After lunch, I address a large seminar of BFI staff about my principles of film criticism and my view of the current stagnation in filmmaking. Feathers visibly ruffle when I scorn the pre-World War II Frankfurt School of criticism as totally useless when dealing with American popular culture and laud instead my major North American influences -- Marshall McLuhan, Parker Tyler and Andy Warhol. I proclaim that Pauline Kael and early Andrew Sarris are much more to be valued than the ponderous, outdated Theodor Adorno.

Back at the NFT, I am given a tour of the spacious projection booth, but my glee is nipped in the bud by the terrorizing news that two reels of "Persona" didn't leave Newcastle yesterday and had to be rescued today by emergency lorry. All is well, however, with the evening screening of the film, which looks fabulous. Brian Robinson explains how the NFT's projection system -- in equipment, range and screen quality -- brings out every detail of Sven Nyquist's stunning high-contrast black-and-white cinematography.

My lecture (including choreographic scene reenactment) and the questions from the very sophisticated audience go on and on until Brian must bring the evening to a halt so the theater can close. My call for broadening the cultural education of young artists seems to have been well-received. Andy Martin (my co-host for last year's NFT screening of "The Birds") has come down from Cambridge for "Persona," and we all traipse off for a midnight meal in Soho, where I am bemused by the many men affectionately kissing -- a far cry indeed from the tense, buff parade of U.S. gay life.

Wed., June 9 I fly home amid a heightened security alert at Heathrow, with purse searches and prison-style pat-downs. "Camille Does the Movies" is continuing, partly in reruns, for another week without me. After "Accident" tonight, "Valley of the Dolls" (1967) will be shown next Wednesday with Glenn Belverio's short "Glennda and Camille Do Downtown" (1993). My 13-part series concludes on June 17 with "Niagara" (1953), starring bad girl Marilyn Monroe: This full-color film noir, I say in the program notes, "unveils the power of nature, which is far greater than that of any political regime. Sex itself is torrential here, destroying all in its path."

On the plane, I watch a series of recent movies with open disgust -- "Shakespeare in Love," "You've Got Mail" and "Analyze This." After the masterpieces at the National Film Theatre, the dialogue, acting, photography and editing are unbearably ugly. Then Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange" (1971) begins, and my eye is ravished anew. What style and panache!

I burn with indignation: How can we get interesting, enduring films out of talented young people these days if they never see great films in fresh, sharp prints on real movie screens? What the hell has the National Endowment for the Arts been doing with its money? We need a nationally funded film consortium that will deal aggressively with this cultural crisis. America, which invented Hollywood, is squandering its artistic heritage.

Fri., June 11 Two days after my return from London, Alison and I go see "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace." It's so stupid, inept and visually dull that I fall fast asleep halfway through. I dream, of course, of Julie Christie, Jeanne Moreau and a paradise of film reborn.

Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.  Her most recent book is "Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars." You can email her at [email protected] .

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