Camille Paglia interview excerpts from salon.com

[lescaret]

Camille Paglia recently published a new book of criticism, "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems".

Salon.com conducts a very interesting interview with her (unfortunately, salon is a subscriber site which, though I find it worthwhile, costs $30 a year, I think).

Nevertheless, here's the link:

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/04/ ... index.html

Some excerpts:

Q: Going back to "Sexual Personae" for a minute, and that battle with the feminist establishment. What's happening with that now, would you say?

A: It's over. It's completely over. I won that war! -- or rather, the wing of feminism that I led into the light won the war. Madonna made it possible. In New York magazine's cover story on me in 1991, it was reported that a Yale faculty member had marched with her graduate student in New Haven to return "Sexual Personae" because it was "ideologically unacceptable." A Yale faculty member would return a 700-page Yale Press book by a woman author on the basis of its not passing some p.c. litmus test -- that shows you what was going on!

But things have changed -- at least in the media. The media has moved on, the media has realized that the pro-sex side has won, and it has seen all the anti-porn maniacs as what they are -- fanatical Puritans. When it did a profile on me in 1992, "60 Minutes" sent a woman producer and a camera to the 92nd Street Y when Gloria Steinem was appearing on a panel. The producer stood up at the end and asked a question about me. And they caught Gloria Steinem saying something like, "We don't give a damn what she thinks!" -- at which the audience loudly applauded. They caught her and her entire Manhattan elite in action. But then Steinem learned, once she'd been burned, so that a year later she was saying things about me like, "She has a right to express whatever she feels."

Still, I was systematically excluded and ostracized. When Vanity Fair did a cultural-icons issue a little later, they asked to photograph Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and me together -- like the different generations. But Steinem refused to pose with me! So Vanity Fair had an inspired solution -- it simply commissioned a full-page caricature. What great revenge -- there were the three of us, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and me, posing amicably together in cartoon form!

The point is, this hostility to dissent had been going on for decades in feminism. If they were doing that repressive stuff to me with a bestselling book, what were they doing to ordinary women just trying to open their mouths? So it's great that my side has won so resoundingly. However, the universities are still in the hands of the feminist ideologues. Nothing has changed at the major universities, nothing. The same professors are there, but they're really mad now because they know they've lost! So over the last decade, they've spent a lot of time trying to be me!

They made contracts with trade presses. They wrote Op-Ed pieces. Before me, only poli-sci or history professors would write Op-Ed pieces. You just didn't do that if you were in humanities. In the early '90s, some Harvard woman snob actually said to a reporter about me: "Oh, we don't consider anyone serious who writes articles for the newspaper." That's where things were back then. They all tried to write books directed toward a general audience, and none really succeeded until Stephen Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare -- which as far as I'm concerned is ultimately a product of my pressure on the profession in the early '90s, when I called for literary critics to address the general audience.

As someone who teaches Shakespeare, however, I don't think it's a very good book, even though the New Yorker and the New York Times laid down flat in front of it. Greenblatt's Shakespeare isn't one I recognize from my own study of the plays, and the connections posited between the life and the art aren't particularly sophisticated. The TLS [Times Literary Supplement] reviewer wrote that Greenblatt is "innocent of English history," which of course is just a devastating thing to say about the leader of new historicism whose specialty is Renaissance England and who is head of the Norton Shakespeare editions. But too many books coming out of the Ivy League tend toward the trendy and shallow -- even though the New York media eats them up.

Q: They do get great press. Why?

It's media sycophancy toward the brand-name schools. Because a lot of reporters in the mainstream media went to those schools and want their children to go to those schools, they don't want to disrupt their brand-name value. The alternative press has been completely, cowardly negligent, including the Nation. The leftist press has been out to lunch on this for 25 years -- it's outrageous that this matter hasn't been vigorously pursued. Because these academics mouth leftist sentiments -- even though their lifestyles are ones of ostentatious materialism -- the alternative press has been afraid to appear to take the side of the conservatives who have justifiably been berating the politicization of the campus since the '80s.

Come on, let's look at reality. What important, essential works have come out of American humanities departments in the last 30 or 40 years? The important book just isn't there. Where is the great American scholar that poststructuralism has produced? When Harold Bloom goes, he's the last of the line. These people aren't great scholars -- they have no deep erudition. They just do gimmicky manipulations of other people's research. The people at the top with the power positions and the huge salaries are flashes in the pan -- their work isn't going to last.


Q: Like who, precisely? Henry Louis Gates is frequently mentioned as among the new public intellectual...

A: Gates is a pivotal figure, a very shrewd handler of people. He knew how to work college administrations to guilt-trip them for their exclusion of African-American studies and thereby to win a huge investment of money for the expansion of faculty and facilities. He put African-American programs on the map. But as a group they still do not have a high reputation because so many of them are rife with ideology. Beyond that, the problem is there are too few African-American scholars to go around -- everyone wants them. There are simply not enough who have entered the profession. Thus many schools have had to reach further and further down and hire people who are really marginal in scholarly terms.

Look at the Ward Churchill case, this guy who was the chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder and who didn't even have a Ph.D. He had absolutely no scholarly training in anthropology or in anything in ethnic studies -- his M.A. was in communications. He had no business being rocketed to a tenured position literally overnight in the early '90s, when he had just been teaching adjunct courses as a staffer there. All of a sudden, he was earning $94,000 a year. There's something deeply corrupt in American academe that was rewarding, in this case, not the color of your skin but a claimed Indian heritage that Churchill can't prove -- and that one American Indian group long ago called fraudulent.

The whole American academic system -- which Europeans can't quite understand -- is shot through with this p.c. stuff that administrations are promoting. It's a marketing tool. "We are for affirmative action, we're for diversity, we give a rainbow education." And so there's been a slow decline in respect for genuine scholarship. Gates' department hasn't yet produced as much high-level work as it should have, but I'm confident that it will because it is grooming the next generation of young scholars. They will presumably fan out into the profession, and then we will see the true fruits of what Gates achieved..........

A: Right, because even though this book might not be as immediately, obviously contentious as "Sexual Personae," it's a shot across the bow of the academy.

A: Oh, yes, and I'm also trying to inspire an insurgency movement of embattled teachers everywhere. I want to say to the adjuncts who are working so hard, going from school to school, without benefits: Your love of literature and art and your teaching students who are not going to be big-shot Manhattan executives but who are just going about their workaday lives -- you belong to a real American cultural movement, and here's a manifesto for you. The way you approach things directly and honestly, that too is a theory! All these people who claim to be so superior to you because they "do" theory -- they're fakes. And they've destroyed the prestige of humanities departments.......

Another thing that I object to, and the media seems to really ignore, is how many books by prominent academics have been supported by graduate assistants and research assistants, often paid for by the university itself. They're the ones doing all the book-running: checking quotes, accumulating examples, assembling the footnotes and bibliography.

As a scholar, I can see it in people's work from major universities. I can tell who are the professors who actually did the reading and gathered the quotes, as opposed to people who are so busy running this or that and exercising academic power that they have to have examples and evidence supplied to them. And what gets me is when a reviewer says in awe, "This is a very erudite person -- there are so many pages of footnotes!" I want to laugh! Well, pages and pages of footnotes in the back of a general interest humanities book usually indicates weakness. You don't need all that if your scholarship is solid. And the idea that the trendy professors of the elite schools have actually read all those books is usually false. Not only haven't they read them, they haven't even gone to the library to get them.

I have no research or clerical assistance whatever. I teach at a small college where I must do every single thing myself. But that is what, I believe, that sympathetic readers are sensing: quality control.

Q: You are trying to pass this on to the adjuncts, the grad students. But you've also mentioned that the poets should do this themselves. How can they do that in a culture where the poetry that does exist comes out through pop music, hip-hop. How do the poets assert themselves?

A: Well, first of all, they better stop talking just to each other in those small groups of the like-minded. I used to like John Ashbery, for example, but he got addicted to critical adulation. Too many people want academic idolization. They want the prizes. I want the poets and all artists to address the general audience again: Stop addressing the like-minded true believers, cut out the partisan politics, stop thinking that the only people you can speak to are those who agree with you already. Writers and artists need to start addressing those who don't agree with them.

That's certainly what I do. I've won a very wide audience in that way. I listen to or monitor a huge range of opinion, including on talk radio, which I love. I want to understand how most people think! That's why I can communicate with large numbers of people. What's the secret? The secret is I cannot stand the coterie mentality, whether it's in downtown Manhattan or in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or in L.A. I cannot stand the cool in-group -- "We are the special people, we are the best people, everyone else is just rubes and hayseeds." Get over that! People who claim they're leftists and who have contempt for ordinary people and how they vote. I voted for Kerry and Clinton, but I don't look down on people who voted for Bush. I try to understand it.

Q: Is there anyone you're surprised did not make the cut?

A: A whole series. Poets I heard reading in college who I thought would naturally be here -- A.R. Ammons, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, John Ashbery, James Merrill -- just name after name. I couldn't get Ginsberg in, unfortunately; what I would have had to do was excerpt "Howl," and I just didn't think it was going to work. Auden -- I found virtually nothing that would work, and it astonished me. I didn't find an Auden poem that I felt I could endorse for the general reader and say, This poem will repay your constant rereading. Example after example -- Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov. I was looking for sports poems, animal poems, war poems, antiwar poems. I was bitterly disappointed.

Q: A whole series. Poets I heard reading in college who I thought would naturally be here -- A.R. Ammons, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, John Ashbery, James Merrill -- just name after name. I couldn't get Ginsberg in, unfortunately; what I would have had to do was excerpt "Howl," and I just didn't think it was going to work. Auden -- I found virtually nothing that would work, and it astonished me. I didn't find an Auden poem that I felt I could endorse for the general reader and say, This poem will repay your constant rereading. Example after example -- Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov. I was looking for sports poems, animal poems, war poems, antiwar poems. I was bitterly disappointed.

A: But no, actually. "Sexual Personae" is about decadence! -- the beautiful decadence of Western civilization. There I say I am a decadent, and I celebrate it, but I don't know how long the West is going to last. If our popular culture is equivalent to Hellenistic culture during the Roman republic and empire, I have no idea if we are going to last 50 years or 500 years. But there is no doubt that there is an end to every civilization, whether it's from some climatological disaster or invasion or something else. I mean, last December's tsunami showed everyone that my vision in "Sexual Personae" of nature was right -- that we just huddle here on the thin, brittle skin of the globe. Civilizations rise and fall. I'm saying it's time for us to reassess our conceptions of the West. In all its failings, the West has produced a great art tradition.

So I'm saying to the left: Stop bad-mouthing your own civilization; get over it, you little twerps. I'm saying to the religious far right: If we are defending Western civilization, as you claimed in the incursion into Iraq, then you'd better realize it's much more than Judeo-Christianity and the Bible. You'd better get real and accept that we have a Greco-Roman tradition of literature and art that started in 700 BC. And yes, some of it deals, quite frankly, with sex and the body; you must deal with it and allow students to deal with it, because that is part of the brilliant strength of our arts. I'm demanding that conservatives support the arts and that liberals stop being so snobby about art and quit celebrating art that is simply cheap sacrilege of other people's beliefs.

Artists have got to get back to studying art history and doing emotionally engaged art. Get over that tired postmodern cynical irony and hip posing, which is such an affliction in the downtown urban elite. We need an artistic and cultural revival. Back to basics!


Here's a link to her new book:

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?i ... 75420843-0

[Zlatko Waterman]

Ah Camille--- always something fresh to say.

It's true that "mainstream" culture ( whatever that is) needs a bit of retro-fitting.

Whatever happened to Stanley Kunitz? Theodore Roethke? Louise Bogan? Elizabeth Bishop? H.L. Mencken? Edgar Allan Poe? Nathaniel Hawthorne? Anne Sexton? James Wright? Denise Levertov? Robert Duncan? Herman Melville? H.D.? Delmore Schwartz?





A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased, Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir


Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore
Or near the bank of a woodland lake
Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely
Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's
Foolish Follies.

They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness
Of their youth and beauty
In the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of
awareness
Heightened, intensified and softened
By the soft and the silk of the waters
Blooded made ready by the energy set afire by the
nakedness of the body,

Electrified: deified: undenied.

A young man of thirty years beholds them from a distance.
He lives in the dungeon of ten million dollars.
He is rich, handsome and empty standing behind the linen curtains
Beholding them.
Which girl does he think most desirable, most beautiful?
They are all equally beautiful and desirable from the gold distance.
For if poverty darkens discrimination and makes
perception too vivid,
The gold of wealth is also a form of blindness.
For has not a Frenchman said, Although this is America...

What he has said is not entirely relevant,
That a naked woman is a proof of the existence of God.

Where is he going?
Is he going to be among them to splash and to laugh with them?
They did not see him although he saw them and was there among them.
He saw them as he would not have seen them had they been conscious
Of him or conscious of men in complete depravation:
This is his enchantment and impoverishment
As he possesses them in gaze only.

. . .He felt the wood secrecy, he knew the June softness
The warmth surrounding him crackled
Held in by the mansard roof mansion
He glimpsed the shadowy light on last year's brittle leaves fallen,
Looked over and overlooked, glimpsed by the fall of death,
Winter's mourning and the May's renewal.

--Delmore Schwartz


( link to more of Schwartz's poems):


http://www.poemhunter.com/delmore-schwartz/poet-9700/







Why can't we read David Daiches?


Only one thing-- for a person who describes herself as " . . .a scholar . . .", it would be nice if CP could transmit the wisdom of making "media" a plural ( singular: " medium") for succeeding generations ( ass-cleavage or not . . .) .See the other thread . . .



--Z

[ZyzxzxzyZ]

Does anyone else, after reading some Paglia, feel an urge to wash one's hands? She's another catty, colloquial pseudo-scholar cum courtesan, putting forth her great themes and literary bon mots, but with little substance or rational ability. Sort of the Heidi Fleiss of academic lit., handing down the dionysian truth for all the plebes to wonder at. Ugh.

[e_dog]

i am not familiar with Paglia's work. what are her basic themes and ideas or orientations and what would be a good and brief intro to her work?