The Books: “Vamps and Tramps” (Camille Paglia)

Next book in my Daily Excerpt:

Next book on my culture bookshelf is:

Vamps & Tramps: New Essays , by Camille Paglia.

I think this might be my favorite of her books – even beating out Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. It’s another compilation of essays, another book with a wide wide lens. There are essays on Woody Allen, and essays on porn (Camille loves porn). Her essay called “Sontag, Bloody Sontag” is a classic to me. Honestly. Paglia once thought Sontag was great (as many people did). Not only great, but IMPORTANT, in terms of cultural commentary and critical abilities. This woman was a heavyweight. Paglia’s essay is a bitch-slap about Sontag’s graduating descent into irrelevance. It is an indictment of Sontag’s kind of 1960s thinking, more and more out of touch. She could have been a leader. But she opted out of relevance. She and Sontag were in the same generation. Paglia is unforgiving towards the failures of the radicals in that generation. It’s a GREAT little essay. Also … uhm: “Sontag, Bloody Sontag”? hahaha Mitchell and I both read this book, and just laughed about that title.

We’ve also got book reviews in Vamps and Tramps, and the books reviewed range from a biography of Judy Garland to Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism. There are rambling long essays on Madonna.

But anyway. I highly recommend the book. The first “essay” is actually a short book, and it is called: “No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality”, and I think it’s masterful. In it, she takes on a couple of the different issues of our day, all having to do with sex: the increasingly fascistic atmosphere on college campuses in terms of how it handles rape, sexual harassment laws, prostitution, laws about pornography, gay rights … It’s sweeping, and angry – she thinks the entire world has gone mad, and prudistic … letting prissy fascists like Catherine MacKinnon dictate to us what we should and should not like. Camille Paglia is on a crusade against sexual fascists like that beeyotch. Having gone to college during the 80s, and having experienced first-hand what I would call the “date-rape hysteria” on college campuses, I found Paglia’s words about it SO empowering. SO invigorating. Nobody writes about this stuff like Paglia. Nobody. She’s also such a nut. The cover of the book is her, in what looks like some kind of military uniform, with a knife attached to her belt. Like, she’s literally taking on the world.

The excerpt I’m going to post today is from her essay “The Nursery-School Campus: The Corrupting of the Humanities in the US”, which originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplemtn, in London, on May 22, 1992.

No shit, Camille. Interesting, too: everyone is now talking about the politically correct hiring practices of universities, and the lack of diversity on college campuses, in terms of politics. It’s hip to talk about that. Well, Camille has been yammering on about this from way back when, when it was, quite frankly, NOT hip to talk about this stuff … She is the lesbian kindred spirit of David Horowitz. She was saying the un-sayable, she was revealing the nasty little secret … and she has, to this date, not been forgiven for it. Which is fine with her.

Also, only a deranged politically-correct mob who conduct all of their conversations in a stifled atmosphere of complete rhetorical agreement could classify Camille – a radical lesbian, a pop culture obsessive, a woman who considers “prostitutes” to be modern-day heroines and warriors – as a member of the far right. Nuts.

Her most recent book on analyzing poetry, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems, is part of her own personal crusade against what has happened to humanities departments in this country. With that book, she wants to bring back good old-fashioned literary analysis, literary analysis that doesn’t have a big CHIP on its shoulder.

EXCERPT FROM Vamps & Tramps: New Essays , by Camille Paglia.

The effect upon American universities of the student rebellions was fleeting. Genuine radicals did not go on to graduate school. If they did, they soon dropped out, or were later defeated by the faculty recruitment and promotion process, which rewards conformism and sycophancy. The universities were abandoned to the time-servers and mercenaries who now hold many of the senior positions there. Ideas had been relegated to the universities, but the universities belonged to the drudges.

There is a widespread notion that these people are dangerout leftists, “tenured radicals” in Roger Kimball’s phrase, who have invaded the American establishment with subversive ideas. In fact, they are not radicals at all. Authentic leftism is nowhere to be seen in our major universities. The “multiculturalists” and the “politically correct” on the subjects of race, class, and gender actually represent a continuation of the genteel tradition of respectability and conformity. They have institutionalized American niceness, which seeks, above all, not to offend and must therefore pretend not to notice any differences or distinctions among people or cultures.

The politically correct professors, with their hostility to the “canon” of great European writesr and artists, have done serious damage to the quality of undergraduate education at the best American colleges and universities. Yet they are people without deep beliefs. Real radicals stand for something and risk something; these academics are very pampered fat cats who have never stood on principle at any point in their careers. Nothing has happened to them in their lives. They never went to war; they were never out of work or broke. They have no experience or knowledge of anything outside the university, least of all working-class life. Their politics are a trendy tissue of sentimental fantasy and unsupported verbal categories. Guilt over their own privilege has frozen their political discourse into a simplistic world melodrama of privilege versus deprivation.

Intellecutal debate in the humanities has also suffered because of the narrowness of training of those who emerged from the overdepartmentalized and overspecialized universities of the postwar period. The New Criticism, casting off the old historicism of German philolopgy, produced a generation of academics trained to think of literature as largely detached from historical context. This was ideal breeding ground for French theory, a Saussurean paradigm dating from the 1940s and 50s that was already long passe when American academics got hold of it in the early 1970s. French theory, far from being a symbol of the 1960s, was on the contrary a useful defensive strategy for well-positioned, pedantic professors actively resisting the ethnic and cultural revolution of that subversive decade. Foucault, a glib game-player who took very little research a very long way, was especially attractive to literary academics in search of a short cut to understanding world history, anthropology and political economy.

The 1960s failed, I believe, partly because of unclear thinking about institutions, which it portrayed in dark, conspiratorial Kafkaesque terms. The positive role of institutions in economically complex societies was neglected. The vast capitalist distribution network is so efficient in America that it is invisible to our affluent, middle-class humanists. Capitalism’s contribution to the emergence of modern individualism, and therefore feminism, has been blindly suppressed. This snide ahistoricism is the norm these days in women’s studies programs and chi-chi, Foucault-afflicted literature departments. Leftists have damaged their own cause, with whose basic principles I as a 1960s libertarian generally agree, by their indifference to fact, their carelessness and sloth, their unforgivable lack of professionalism as scholars. The Sixties world-view, which integrated both nature and culture, has degenerated into clamorous, competitive special-interest groups.

The universities led the way by creating a ghetto of black studies, which begat women’s studies, which in turn begat gay studies. Not one of these makeshift, would-be disciplines has shown itself capable of re-creating the broad humane picture of Sixties thought. Each has simply made up its own rules and fostered its own selfish clientele, who have created a closed system in which scholarship is inseparable from politics. It is, indeed, questionable whether or not the best interests of blacks, women, and gays have been served by these political fiefdoms. The evidence about women’s studies suggest the opposite: that these programs have hatched the new thought-police on political correctness. No conservative presently in or out of government has the power of intimidation wielded by these ruthless forces. The silencing of minority opinoin has been systematic in faculty recruitment and promotion. The winners of that rat-race seem genuinely baffled by such charges, since, of course, their conventional, fashionable opinions have never been stifled.

While lecturing at major American universities this year, I have come into direct conflict with the politically correct establishment. At Harvard and elsewhere I was boycotted by the feminist faculty, and at several colleges leaflets were distributed, inaccurately denouncing me as a voice of the far right. Following my lecture at Brown, I was screamed at by soft, inexperienced, but seethingly neurotic middle-class white girls, whose feminist party-line views on rape I have rejected in my writings. Rational discourse is not possible in an atmosphere of such mob derangement.