NEXT BOOK on the essays shelf:
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
I’ve got strong feelings about Camille Paglia. I suppose everyone does, pro or con. I’ve been seeking out this woman’s columns since my post-college years, her cultural stuff, music columns, book reviews, and then – also – her cultural broadsides. She has been banging on the same damn drum for almost 30 years now: but hell, if people aren’t listening, keep on banging. The problem with a lot of social commentary now (or at least the audience for social commentary) is that it eagerly dismisses those who don’t line up with their precious 21st century line of thinking. (Which then makes it almost impossible for these people to read books that pre-date the year 2000 without being outraged. I will not concede ground to people who want to limit their minds, and – worse – want to narrow what is deemed “acceptable” for everyone else. Meaning Jane Austen is written off as an example of internalized-patriarchy or whatever. Of course Ovid doesn’t HAVE to have trigger warnings, and that’s just an extreme example, but the mere REQUEST sets a dangerous precedent. If you are triggered by Ovid, see a doctor. I say that with no disrespect. We all have to take care of ourselves. I’ve got Triggers too, baby, and I talk about them and try to navigate around them as best I can. I don’t ask that everyone else tiptoe around my own personal issues – which are of no importance to anyone other than myself – and that’s as it should be. If you cut yourself off from the wellspring of artistic tradition that pre-dates your existence on the planet … well, just admit that you want to resurrect the “Know Nothing” political party of the 1800s and call it a day.
I think the problem I have is the inevitable reaction of dismissing someone totally if you disagree with some of their positions, or even one of their positions. “Christopher Hitchens wrote that horrible article about how women aren’t funny. Therefore, I don’t need to hear one other thing that that man has to say.” Everyone has their limits: if someone is a white supremacist or a homophobe, then I will ignore everything else that person says. However, there are exceptions, and that mainly has to do with time period. If you’re a white supremacist or a homophobe now, I will not listen to you. You are a Dinosaur and you are worthless. But some of my favorite writers from the past were misogynists to a practically hallucinatory degree. If you want to know how some men feel about you, ladies, Strindberg would be a good place to start. It’s excellent enemy-territory commentary. Or should I dismiss Shakespeare because his plays are littered with insulting comments about women’s emotionality and weak physicality? Shakespeare also wrote some of the greatest women characters of all time. And every actress I know wants to take a crack at “Miss Julie.”
Some of my favorite writers were jingoistic propagandists for the British Empire, including vicious hatred of the Irish. Some great writers in the 30s were willing to ignore the warning signs coming out of Stalin’s Russia. Or Hitler’s Germany. Some people don’t like John Wayne or Charlton Heston’s ACTING because of politics. They can’t and won’t separate. We all have to work out these disconnects for ourselves. You do you, I’ll do me. Where we will run into problems is if you want to tell ME what my limits should be. This is not how it goes. This is a free society and I believe in freedom of thought. Ezra Pound was a wack-job, and an anti-Semite, but he also did more to help struggling/obscure artists find their light than almost anyone else in the 20th century. Some people find this both/and attitude craven and disgusting. I just can’t help that. I also don’t care.
A lot of these social commentators have no interest in Art. They want Art to be social instruction. In many cases, bizarrely, right and left join hands in calls for censorship (the pornography wars in the 80s a perfect example, where right-wing Christians joined hands with radical feminists to condemn pornography. It was through the looking-glass. As a matter of fact, any time the hard-right and the hard-left join hands like that … my advice would be, do your best to claw your way to the middle, and stand your ground. Even if you don’t know why you’re doing it. By all means, choose a side, but when those sides align … something stinks to high hell in Denmark, and you’d best wash your hands of all of them.)
Camille Paglia comes at things from her cherished status as Total Outsider. Maybe she relates more to gay men and drag queens, because they revere pop culture and art like no other demographic. She’s working-class. To many women of color, her commentary is a welcome corrective to the “they just don’t get it” feminism of white girls who leave out minorities from their discussions, who don’t even realize their privileged status. Paglia sticks up for those who have no time for the “issues” that white mainstream feminism hold dear … and also sticks up for artists and sex workers and sexual outlaws and outsiders, her tribe, who also find no place in that establishment.
Paglia has her “pet” topics, her revered public figures, people she comes back to again and again. She’s like Lester Bangs, who wrote about four pieces on The Rolling Stones in one year, and in each one he veered wildly from scorn to adoration, so much so that it feels like an ongoing nervous breakdown. Paglia LOVES Madonna, loves the Italian-ness, the Catholic-ness, the sexual provocateur-ness, the thumbing her nose at the prudes thing, the destruction (or partial destruction) of a rigid binary sexuality, plus the beats and grooves and the working-class-ness, and all that. But she is also willing to call Madonna on her bullshit, and willing to say, “Stop it, Madonna. Don’t go that route. PLEASE I BEG YOU.”
In “Madonna II: Venus of the Radio Waves”, a 1991 article that appeared in London’s Independent Sunday Review, Paglia discusses Madonna’s music videos, how they changed everything, injected something new into the culture, but that something “new” was also connected to the past, a past that Paglia also reveres. (The past of 1930s movie goddesses, and the past of secret drag clubs, and the past of Dionysian iconography.)
I was in high school when Madonna exploded onto the scene, vaporizing Cyndi Lauper in what felt like a matter of months. I loved Cyndi. I didn’t want Madonna to take over. I WAS a virgin, and I felt like “Like a Virgin” was making fun of me. (Irony is not often a characteristic common to pudgy 15-year-old girls.) I felt threatened by the sexuality because I wasn’t playing around with my persona like that. (Give it 2 years, Sheila. You’ll get it then.) I basically dressed like Madonna in the “Vogue” performance in her Blond Ambition tour for the entire time I was living in Chicago. It mixed perfectly with the kinder-whore thing I loved from the grunge world. Those “costumes” were perfectly representative of what I felt like inside … sometimes the Mask reveals rather than conceals. Camille Paglia gets that. That’s what Sexual Personae is all about.
We NEED our contrarians. We need them desperately! Not to agree with 100%, but to push against conformity of thought, to provoke conversation (even outrage), to examine sacred cows rather than blindly worship them.
In the excerpt below, she discusses two Madonna videos, to “Open Your Heart” and “Justify My Love.” Here they are, for reference purposes.
Excerpt from Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
In 1985 the cultural resistance to Madonna became overt. Despite the fact that her “Into the Groove,” the mesmerizing theme song of Desperately Seeking Susan, had saturated our lives for nearly a year, the Grammy Awards outrageously ignored her. The feminist and moralist sniping began in earnest. Madonna “degraded” womanhood; she was vulgar, sacrilegious, stupid, shallow, opportunistic. A nasty mass quarrel broke out in one of my classes between the dancers, who adored Madonna, and the actresses, who scorned her.
I knew the quality of what I was seeing: “Open Your Heart,” with its risqué peep-show format, remains for me not only Madonna’s greatest video but one of the three or four best videos ever made. In the black bustier she made famous (transforming the American lingerie industry overnight), Madonna, bathed in blue-white light, plays Marlene Dietrich straddling a chair. Her eyes are cold, distant, all-seeing. She is ringed, as if in a sea-green aquarium, by windows of lewd or longing voyeurs: sad sacks, brooding misfits, rowdy studs, dreamy gay twins, a melancholy lesbian.
“Open Your Heart” is a brilliant mimed psychodrama of the interconnection between art and pornography, love and lust. Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its puerile, paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy. Madonna, role model to millions of girls worldwide, has cured the ills of feminism by reasserting women’s command of the sexual realm.
Responding to the spiritual tensions within Italian Catholicism, Madonna discovered the buried paganism within the church. The torture of Christ and the martyrdom of the saints, represented in lurid polychrome images, dramatize the passions of the body, repressed in art-fearing puritan Protestantism of the kind that still lingers inAmerica. Playing with the outlaw personae of prostitute and dominatrix, Madonna has made a major history to the history of women. She has rejoined and healed the split halves of women: Mary, the Blessed Virgin and holy mother, and Mary Magdalene, the harlot.
The old-guard establishment feminists who still loathe Madonna have a sexual ideology problem. I am radically pro-pornography and pro-prostitution. Hence I perceive Madonna’s strutting sexual exhibitionism not as cheapness or triviality but as the full, florid expression of the whore’s ancient rule over men. Incompetent amateurs have given prostitution a bad name. In my university office in Philadelphia hangs a pagan shrine: a life-size full-color cardboard display of Joanne Whaley-Kilmer and Bridget Fonda naughtily smiling in scanty, skintight gowns as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies in the film Scandal. I tell visitors it is “my political science exhibit.” For me, the Profumo affair symbolizes the evanescence of male government compared to woman’s cosmic power.
In a number of videos, Madonna has played with bisexual innuendos, reaching their culmination in the solemn woman-to-woman kiss of “Justify My Love,” a deliciously decadent sarabande of transvestite and sadomasochistic personae that was banned by MTV. Madonna is again pioneering here, this time in restoring lesbian eroticism to the continuum of heterosexual response, from which it was unfortunately removed twenty years ago by lesbian feminist separatists of the most boring, humorless, strident kind. “Justify My Love” springs from the sophisticated European art films of the Fifties and Sixties that shaped my sexual imagination in college. It shows bisexuality and all experimentation as a liberation from false, narrow categories.
I agree with what you wrote about the need for contrarians. They do make us think at their best, and they live up to the demands of Franz Kafka:
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
That said, much as my first thought of Richard III will be of Shakespeare’s play and not of Tey’s *Daughter of Time,* should I ever read Paglia for myself it will be hard not to think of Molly Ivins’s critique of her in “I Am the Cosmos.”
// “But she is also willing to call Madonna on her bullshit, and willing to say, “Stop it, Madonna. Don’t go that route. PLEASE I BEG YOU.”//
Hi Sheila, do you have a link to the article or quote you’re referring to here where she criticizes Madonna? Thanks, I’d like to read her take on the Madonna of today or whichever she was referring to.
Well she does it a bit in this essay as you can see. She did a review of Athens Sex book, if I recall.
She liked working-class trashy iconic Madonna. So I’m not sure her take now but I’m sure she’s still writing about her. Google their names together and see what comes up!
Damn Autocorrect;
I am pretty sure she reviewed her Sex book but I can’t remember the verdict!
I did Google it, the two names together, that is, (should have thought of it myself!)and found this article which sums up some of my thoughts on the current Madonna. http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/19/celebrity.women
I guess it’s that she hasn’t changed and doesn’t reflect the fans of hers who are also her age any more, disappointing them by continuing to hammer on appearance and sex, which seems to indicate that there isn’t much else to her except an insane discipline for exercise and diet. She was quoted as saying the deepest loss she’s felt “more than any romantic loss” was when her daughter moved out. I, too, have a teenage daughter who recently moved out and isn’t there a way for a female artist to reflect the normal emotions of life as a middle-age woman that doesn’t revolve around staying forever young? And yet, I do respect her for doing her thing. She is who she is. Especially considering the backlash she still gets.
Bainer – thanks for the link, I will read it!
// isn’t there a way for a female artist to reflect the normal emotions of life as a middle-age woman that doesn’t revolve around staying forever young? //
I know. It is a conundrum. I admire the women who pull it off but it takes guts. And I think it’s extremely hard for those who made their name using their sexuality to re-invent themselves as someone else. Madonna’s point may be “Just because I’m in my 50s does not mean I am not still a sexual being” – which is a topic close to my own heart, and many other womens’ hearts so I appreciate that … but I’m not sure that’s all there is to it.
I had a good friend who read some piece in Fitness magazine about Madonna’s workout regimen. This was about 10 years ago. And so my friend (who’s very fit anyway) decided to follow it for one day only just to see how much time it took. She was a newlywed, which is even funnier, because her husband was like, “I didn’t marry you to lose you to the gym.”
She wrote a post about what it was like to be Madonna for one day and it was insane! She literally worked out from morning till night. And she felt GREAT at the end of the day, and in pain in that great way that a good workout provides, but she barely saw her husband, and had no time to do anything else.
I don’t judge people for how they want to spend their free time, even if it’s something that doesn’t appeal to me.
and I understand all too well the anxiety about losing your looks.
And Madonna was always a fanatical workaholic. (I think that was Roger Ebert’s main impression of her in his review of Truth or Dare. Not that she was a controversial performer, a great performer, or anything like that – his main takeaway was how much she worked, how devoted she was to work, and how much she put into it. This was not a ‘diss on her, just an observation.)
Anyway, thanks for the link – I’ll check it out.
Hi, Sheila,
I’ve been lurking for the past week, enjoying the discussion re SPN and Folsom Prison Blues. There are such smart people in these discussions who appreciated the density that is the SPN universe. That conversation has been going on for almost two weeks on essentially one episode. God help us when you get to season 11. But I digress. I haven’t read Paglia’s work in decades, not since I was a young, fire-breathing raging feminist in my 30’s. I am now a much more mature, smoldering humanist and I think I’m better for it and maybe a little calmer, but maybe it’s time to go back to Paglia.
I’ve also always admired Madonna for her audacity and respected her for using her talents as well as she has. It will be interesting to see what happens to her about 40 years from now. Will she still have the presence that she has now? Will people remember her for her music, her breasts or her audacity?
//God, we NEED our contrarians. We need them desperately! Not to agree with 100%, but to push against conformity, to provoke conversation (even outrage), to examine sacred cows rather than blindly worship them.// I agree with you 100% on that one and we do have them, but in this day and age with so much input bombarding you at every turn, it’s hard to find them. I was rereading Molly Ivins today (one of my favorites) and I realized that if she published today, she might get a week of late night talk show appearances, a couple of morning show chats and then she would disappear like so many of them do. It’s so sad and scary and it makes it even more important to seek out the contrarians no matter how obnoxious and irritating they may be.
I
// mature, smoldering humanist //
Carolyn – I love this phrase!! I would love to be a mature smoldering humanist myself!
// I was rereading Molly Ivins today (one of my favorites) and I realized that if she published today, she might get a week of late night talk show appearances, a couple of morning show chats and then she would disappear like so many of them do. It’s so sad and scary and it makes it even more important to seek out the contrarians no matter how obnoxious and irritating they may be. //
God, I love Molly Ivins, too.
Yes, once upon a time people could develop a body of work in a more meaningful way. You’re right: it’s still happening but it requires us in the audience to tune so much else out in order to find these people. There’s just so much NOISE.
And: in my old-fogey opinion: a lot of the so-called contrarian writers now should work harder on their writing skills. So much of it feels like propaganda for their “side,” as opposed to a unique VOICE telling it like it is (or if not “like it is” then how THEY see it.)
Paglia is a messier writer than Hitchens or Sontag (one of her fallen idols) – it feels like she writes powered by Red Bull and jelly beans … but the points she makes (annoying, helpful, enraged, enthusiastic) are so entertainingly written that I’ll read it all, even if she’s going after something I hold dear.
Although I am in sync with most of her opinions, I do admit. And there was a time in the 90s – and I suppose it’s true now – where you if you said you loved Camille Paglia people would practically re-coil from you. The date-rape hysteria was so insane on my campus that when I read her piece on it (years later) I thought, “God, yes, that was what it was like.”
Her critics insist on characterizing it as Paglia diminishing the trauma of sexual assault – but she never ever did that. She distinguished between sexual assault and unpleasant sexual experiences. You know, sleeping with someone and then regretting it the next morning. Two totally different things. TMI coming up: I slept with someone once in my 20s and it went so badly that I regretted it AS it was happening. And yeah, I felt pressured a little bit. We had been dating for about a month and I thought, “Oh well, it’s probably time.” (Not a good attitude to have, but I was young – and didn’t trust my instincts yet.) He didn’t rape me though. I consented. And then immediately was like, “Oh shit, I wish I could take that one back. And now I have to break up with him and now I am going to look like an asshole.” I broke up with him and I did look like an asshole but the whole thing was a mistake on MY part, not his. But you hear these horror stories of boys being accused of raping a woman because of a situation like THAT. College boys now can get on the Sex Offender database for their whole lives because of something like that. The Sex Offender database does not distinguish between predators, pedophiles, and drunken boys who don’t know what they’re doing yet. People get so so upset when you take this attitude – and I get it. Being actually sexually assaulted is such a serious thing, but the date-rape thing ends up diminishing accusations of actual physical assault.
Paglia’s fearless at going after this stuff – I’ve never written about it (except right now, and even now I feel slightly anxious about it) – but I found her pieces in the 90s refreshing, because I thought I was alone in sensing that something was really really off about the vibe on my campus in regards to how involved universities were in the private lives of their students, negotiating sex for the first time.
Of COURSE campuses need to care about keeping their students safe. And informing kids of the dangers of binge-drinking, or hazing rituals (my college campus got rid of the Greek system altogether), or taking responsibility for yourself. Don’t get too drunk. Use the buddy-system when walking home. Etc.
In re: Madonna: I know, it will be so interesting to see what her legacy will be, and what will happen as she gets older. And already, she’s practically a senior citizen. I kind of love that she continues to make music – Tina Turner helped create the model for a senior citizen FEMALE rock star. And now we have the geriatric set like Keith Richards and all the rest … still out there doing their thing.
I prefer the Madonna of the Blond Ambition era and before … I kind of lost interest when she developed a British accent. But still: every album she puts out has some killer track that you can’t get out of your mind!
//And: in my old-fogey opinion: a lot of the so-called contrarian writers now should work harder on their writing skills. So much of it feels like propaganda for their “side,” as opposed to a unique VOICE telling it like it is (or if not “like it is” then how THEY see it.)//
If you are an old fogey, then I am in serious trouble, but you are so right. Learn to write, people! Writing well is a hard-won skill, as you so gloriously demonstrate IMO. I have been so disappointed in some writers who might have a good point somewhere in their writings but I simply don’t have the time nor the inclination to find it. Entertain me, enrage me, engage me, but do something or else I won’t bother.
//People get so so upset when you take this attitude – and I get it. //
Sex is such a loaded topic. Anything having to do with it makes people lose their minds. We walked out of the Garden with sex on our minds and guilt in our heart. We can’t help it, we’re human.
//the date-rape hysteria on campus in the ’90’s// Yes. My response was to write a novel about it wherein the P.I. prevents a young woman from setting up a known date-rapist in order to find “justice”. I’m not here to self promote but I remember feeling deeply about what I felt was hysteria, too. We, as women, have to take responsibility for bad encounters that don’t qualify as “rape”. It’s a fine line sometimes and that needs to be talked about, too.
Bainer –
// My response was to write a novel about it wherein the P.I. prevents a young woman from setting up a known date-rapist in order to find “justice”. //
Wow !! It sounds amazing!
My whole issue with the date-rape thing, and the “consent wars” going on now – is that it makes women even MORE un-safe because there’s an over-reliance on authority figures to “keep women safe” – as opposed to women stepping up to the plate and becoming their own Warriors. Self-defense classes should be required for young women. It changes your attitude.
Yes, you may still be raped. This is the reality. But your mindset is different. You’re not just a sitting duck waiting for it to happen, and waiting for the authority figures to somehow protect you from it …
There’s a deeper issue too and maybe it’s a class issue. Yeah, it would be great to be safe at every moment of every day. But … duh … that’s not the world we live in, and that’s NEVER been the world we live in. But these young women seem to feel like they have a “right” to feel safe 24/7. And these are the same women who lecture everyone else about “privilege” – when their comments about their own safety show blinding privilege.
I get it. We all want to be safe. Nobody WANTS to be un-safe.
But grow up, girls.
If you sleep with someone and it’s bad, or you were a little too drunk, then please take responsibility for making a poor choice. It’s OKAY to make poor choices when you’re first navigating sex. It happens to everyone. Bad sex isn’t rape. Caving to pressure also isn’t rape. Yeah, maybe he shouldn’t have pressured you. But YOU ARE SEPARATE FROM HIM. It’s not HIS responsibility to take care of you – you have to take care of yourself – and you let yourself cave to the pressure. Take responsibility for that. It happened to me – and I learned my lesson. Never again. And it sucked, and I wish I could take it back because … gross … but it was an important lesson and I am very careful about who/what/how, etc. That’s on ME.
Sex is murky waters, and people aren’t always in control of themselves. (It’s sex. That’s the whole point.) There will always be assholes out there who want to take advantage of you. So protect yourself, don’t wait for someone else to do it, don’t expect other people to protect you – especially the guy who’s trying to get into your pants right now – take care of yourself, protect yourself, get strong, be smart.
There’s something patriarchal and Victorian about all of this.
It’s a throwback to: Women are fragile flowers who need official protection from above, because the world is just too dangerous for them. I don’t WANT someone to protect me. I want to do it myself. If I’m mugged or raped, then yes, I will call the police – but I will navigate all that other personal/social shit all on my own, thankyouverymuch.
I cannot believe the outrage about cat-calls, for example.
I understand that different people have different thresholds of trauma – and being cat-called may feel like a serious threat to some people with a specific background of experience – but that’s not what I’m seeing out there, generally, in the cat-call conversation.
I’ve been cat-called. Every woman probably has. There are horrible versions of it (where I will go a block out of my way to avoid a certain construction crew) and then there are super nice versions of it. Maybe it’s the tone that makes the difference. I’ve had stuff shouted at me about my tits and my ass that feel like compliments from the Age of Chivalry.
Complaining about cat-calls and wanting something to be DONE about cat-calls feels like a couple of steps away from deciding that the world is just too dangerous and rough and MALE for delicate females, and we need to stay at home for our own protection.
If you are cat-called and you don’t like it:
1. Flip them off.
2. Shout, “FUCK YOU”
3. Stalk by with your head held high. Pretend you’re Angelina Jolie. Or Joan Jett. You’re gonna let those horny bozos define you for yourself?? TOUGHEN UP.
4. Or smile and say “Thank you!”
Also: if you’re wearing an attention-getting outfit and then are enraged that it generates attention … again, I question that you understand how the world works. You don’t want to take responsibility for who you are being out there in the world. Why are you wearing an eye-catching outfit then? To be ignored?
You say stuff like that and people act as though you have said, “Well, what was she wearing?” when you hear of a rape.
The fact that I am not saying that at ALL doesn’t even seem to matter …
and that alone is evidence of hysteria in the air.
There’s a moment in an early scene in Magic Mike (the first one), where Mike takes out his young protege to a bar. Mike is going to circulate, handing out promos for the strip show later that night. Mike is confident and funny and manages to hit on all of those women in such a friendly way that men should study his moves to see how to do it. Mike gives the protege an assignment: to go up to two women sitting at the bar, strike up a conversation. Protege is shy. He doesn’t want to do it.
Mike says, “Look at their outfits. They want to be noticed. Go over there and tell them you noticed.”
And he doesn’t say it in a judgmental way, or a leering way, or like: “They’re wearing short skirts. Fair game for harassment.”
He’s like, “Come on! They’re pretty girls being pretty – they didn’t dress up like that to be ignored.”
The fact that this seems radical to me shows how insanely hysterical the dialogue is right now about the mating dance between men and women. Harmful to everyone on both sides of the fence.
//Patriarchal and Victorian// As though the man/boy/male in the scenario is supposed to guide the weak, fragile woman through the sexual encounter to a safe and satisfying ending for both. And, if he doesn’t, woe on him. The supposition being the man/boy/male knows what they’re doing any more than anyone else. Sex is messy and “murky waters” for all.
I like when she addresses Nicki Minaj’s essential question: What’s good? My favorite Camille is the one trying to educate you and convince you that something is great. To some extent, I think she’s doing the same thing when she mentions the time Gloria gave her stink-eye, or the various times she ridiculed Andrea Dworkin or Hillary: trying to convince you that she’s cool. It’s an affirmation of her worth (no small enemies for her!), though a bit annoying for those of us who try to read everything she writes. I wonder how much physical size plays a role in her feeling compelled to do that. She’s physically small, 5′ 3″ per a quick googling, so she may just feel the need to project. Fortunately, she wasn’t born in Corsica, or she might have tried to get Pennsylvania to invade Russia. I can picture her taking the crown from the pope (Susan Sontag in robes and mitre) and putting it on her own head.
I think there’s a lot of artful performance in what she does, and she’s at her best when she brings her erudition into play to make vivid connections: the Elvis/Lord Byron one you mentioned recently, Auntie Mame/Cleopatra and Lewis Carroll/Oscar Wilde in Sexual Persona. The good old Apollo and Dionysus dichotomy (I think chthonian is her second-favorite word, it occurs more than 200 times in SP).
What did you think of her recent comments about Taylor Swift? I have strongly mixed feelings about the “bring out the special guests” aspects of Taylor’s tour – I want to think it’s her effort to custom-tailor each show for the audience. But I also understand the folks who think it was just a show of power. Yes and. Camille calling her a Nazi Barbie and saying that writing about Taylor was “a horrific ordeal for me because her twinkly persona is such a scary flashback to the fascist blondes who ruled the social scene during my youth” seemed a case of her getting “the vapors” the way she accuses her enemies when they find her opinions overwhelming.
// Fortunately, she wasn’t born in Corsica, or she might have tried to get Pennsylvania to invade Russia. //
hahahaha
I sense that a lot of her rage comes from her Catholicism and her anger at how so many movements she holds dear have been co-opted by fanatical prudish Protestants. She was pretty vicious about ACT UP too. I’m amazed she wasn’t murdered for some of her comments.
// I think there’s a lot of artful performance in what she does, and she’s at her best when she brings her erudition into play to make vivid connections: the Elvis/Lord Byron one you mentioned recently, Auntie Mame/Cleopatra and Lewis Carroll/Oscar Wilde in Sexual Persona. The good old Apollo and Dionysus dichotomy (I think chthonian is her second-favorite word, it occurs more than 200 times in SP). //
Absolutely – I totally agree.
Glittering Images was one of the first books I read this year – and it made me miss my Art Survey course that I took in college (one of my favorite courses, and it still informs my writing and my sense of the continuum of Art.) I loved her Revenge of the Sith comments! I really have no memory of that film – although I think I even wrote about it here – but she makes me want to re-visit it.
I haven’t read the Taylor Swift piece – I will. I’m not surprised she despises Taylor Swift. One of the things that is entertaining (and annoying – at the same time!) about Paglia’s commentary is how sometimes it is so personal. Like, who cares that “fascist blondes” ruled the roost in your youth, Camille? The same was true for most of us. And?
But that “getting the vapors” thing is also what makes her such an entertaining writer.
I really enjoyed Glittering Images. I had no idea Caspar David Friedrich inspired Magritte, or that he inspired the staging of Beckett’s Waiting For Gogot. Or that Magritte was a fan of Edgar Allen Poe and visited his home in the Bronx. Once again, Camille is great with those connections.
There was even a section on The Book of Kells – perhaps that inspired a recent dream of yours!
Her section on Revenge of the Sith: wow. I had no idea Lucas was so uninterested in plot, or that he considered dialogue as simply a sound effect.When I first read that essay I thought it would give me an in, a way to enjoy that movie (and Phantom Menace) on the terms that Lucas had made them. No such luck. I can watch the climactic battles at the end, and they are wonderful when no one is speaking. But I didn’t grow any affection for the movies.
It’s odd that I enjoyed a similarly vaguely plotted movie: The Assassin. Perhaps part of the difference is that there was so much ambiguity: what was real, what was a fearful dream, who’s the woman in the gold mask. Ambiguity allows you to savor and re-experience the images in a more open way, I think. But with Star Wars there’s the feeling that everything is on the screen, or will be when some big reveal in needed. That leads to more of an “is that all there is” reaction that pokes away at the plotting and dialogue.
Hey, both Crimson Peak and By The Sea were downloadable this week. Those are glittering images I’m looking forward to re-experiencing.
Yes, I loved the connections Paglia made too – giving a sense of the continuum. And there were a lot of artists there I really knew nothing about.
Or, I knew one or two of the paintings – but not the background of the artist and the time.
I really enjoyed it!
and yes, Book of Kells!! I grew up with pages from the Book on my parents’ walls – and I had seen it in person when I was 10, 11. Every time I go to Dublin I visit it. I love that the monks would add their own little drawings in the margins sometimes (a la Metatron?) – or little snarky notes about getting drunk or something. I guess the monks had to let off steam somehow.
Great discussion!! I’m ashamed that I don’t think strongly about feminism these days. I was obsessed in my early 20s, which is perhaps as it should be, but I didn’t even realize that Camille Paglia was controversial. Phyllis Schlafly, yes, I was aware. But Camille Paglia, Joan Didion and Simone de Beavoir FORMED, 30 years ago, everything that’s still important about me.
Kate – I know, Camille Paglia is really important to me too (plus those other two ladies you mention).
Sheila
Great post! I wasn’t going to write in. because I haven’t read much of Paglia, and it’s been a while, but this post when on to so many interesting related tangents, and agreeing with Kate, great discussions too!
I don’t know where to begin. Hitchens. I read Hitch 22 (upon your recommendation) was loving it and when I got up to his stuff on the Iraq war I thought surprised, “Oh I don’t agree with him at all! How interesting!” And continued reading. Or reading Henry Miller, who I love, but at times I would think, “Oh Henry come on!” when he would say some off comment on women. And I could almost imagine him laughing “Oh I know, I was pissed at my first wife with Tropic of Capricorn.” Like Hitchens I don’t discount him because I don’t agree with everything.
I hate knee-jerk anything.
“I got triggers too baby” HaHa! I know.
Really briefly, but someone from nyc is famous for making a garden 5 city blocks long that was taken down by the city in the 80’s. It was fabulous and out there, I loved it and mourned it’s loss. It came out recently this person after he died in an account by his own children not only sexually abused them, but sexualized them at an early age and passed them around to his friends. This was not the words of an ex-wife. These were his children at 50 years old finally being able to tell this horrific tale. A lot of people defended this man. Everything rang true to me in his children’s story. To me, it’s fuck this monster and I don’t give a shit about his fucking garden anymore.
But I’ll watch Woody Allen movies, Roman Polanski, and I don’t care about John Wayne’s politics, etc.
Another tangent, Paglia loves The Housewives?! Full disclosure: I love Mob Wives and Jersey! How I fell into this I don’t know. But they remind me of my family growing up and when they look like they are heading into a rumble I get nervous, my heart beats hard and yell out “Oh no, no, don’t do it, don’t take the bait!” Or I love when the new young gorgeous one comes on Mob Wives and they all hate her and I think it’s hilarious. Husband: “What are you watching, and who the hell are you?!”
Recently meeting my new in-laws who I knew was way over on the right and I worried how we would get along. Turned out us Moms clicked unexpectedly like crazy, laughing fits like I never had since 5th grade, running gag jokes from the beginning, and on their wedding day, the two of us are cackling together in the corner about stupid stuff to everyone’s surprise. I really don’t care about her politics. But I’m told she has a whole room devoted to Ronald Reagan. I can’t wait to see it and hear how she feels about him! I want to hear different opinions then my own. And I don’t have to force my tired old opinions on everyone all the time.
Another aside, I love David Bowie’s list of books! Also, Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester is the reason I became a painter. It went right to my imagination and it appealed to me to paint that way.