Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  Speaking of Madonna, one of the lousiest things Mailer ever wrote was his flimsy cover-story screed on her for Esquire in 1994. It was obvious Mailer knew absolutely nothing about Madonna and was just blowing smoke. I wonder if it’s this debacle that Woody Hochswender, who had worked at Esquire, is describing in a startling letter following Roger Kimball’s scathing Mailer critique, which is posted on that indispensable site, Arts & Letters Daily. Guess what—Esquire’s original proposal was for me to interview Madonna. Mailer was the sub!

  Penthouse magazine had similarly tried to bring Madonna and me together, as had HBO, which proposed filming a My Dinner with André scenario of the two of us chatting in a restaurant. But Madonna, no conversationalist, always refused. When Newsweek asked her in a 1992 cover story whether she would like to meet me, she said, “First, I’d like to see her across the room and then I’d like to decide whether I want to approach her.” (I said when I read it, “What is this, a sorority party?”)

  I attributed Madonna’s skittishness at the time to her uncertainties about her education (she had dropped out of college after one semester to seek fame in New York). But nothing could be further from my respectful and indeed reverential attitude toward artists, particularly performing artists who must capitalize on their youth. The idea that Madonna somehow had to read Sexual Personae (a nightmarish assignment!) was of course preposterous. But so what—little is gained from such jacked-up personal encounters. Art and ideas must operate in their own realm.

  —SALON.COM, NOVEMBER 13, 2007

  * * *

  —

  Speaking of Madonna, Woody Hochswender (author of The Buddha in Your Rearview Mirror) wrote in to confirm that yes, Norman Mailer was indeed hired at mind-boggling expense by Esquire magazine to interview Madonna after she refused to be interviewed by me way back in 1994. The result was a cover story of astonishing emptiness and mediocrity. Hochswender says: “Editorial lapses of this sort are what have led to the downward spiral of men’s magazines, once influential voices in our intellectual life.”

  —SALON.COM, APRIL 8, 2008

  * [Salon.com column, November 13, 2007, and April 8, 2008.]

  40

  DISPATCHES FROM THE NEW FRONTIER:

  WRITING FOR THE INTERNET*

  BIRTH OF A MEDIUM

  Although I had co-hosted public online chats for new Web sites like AOL, my work for the Internet began in earnest in November 1995 with the inaugural issue of Salon, the first general-interest Web-zine. As this essay goes to press, Salon’s financial condition is shaky and its ultimate survival in doubt. It has always had to rely principally on advertising revenue, while its chief rival, Slate, is safely bankrolled by billionaire Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, Inc.

  For my first Salon piece, editor-in-chief David Talbot asked me to comment on conservative social critic William Bennett’s recent attack on “trash TV” as a debasement of moral standards and a bad influence on the young. I charged Bennett in turn with elitism and argued that he seriously misunderstood popular culture: our rowdy daytime talk shows in fact reflect the actual tastes and raw comic energy of the mass audience, whose loyalties translate into sky-high ratings.

  Salon was created during a newspaper strike by Talbot, then arts and features editor of the San Francisco Examiner, with a team of like-minded editors and reporters from the Examiner and KQED-TV. My professional association with him had begun four years earlier when he interviewed me for the Examiner’s weekly magazine, Image, an entire issue of which he devoted to excerpts from my academic exposé, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” which had just appeared in the Spring 1991 issue of Arion, a classics journal at Boston University.

  As a 1960s progressive who had co-written a study of the sexual revolution, Talbot sympathized with my thesis that liberal ’60s principles had become distorted by political correctness in the 1980s, when campus speech codes were threatening free expression. As the son of a Hollywood actor (Lyle Talbot, the “king of B movies”), Talbot also appreciated my respect for popular culture, which my 1990 book, Sexual Personae, meshed with the fine-arts tradition and hailed as a pagan phenomenon connected to classical antiquity.

  In 1990, I had begun writing op-ed pieces on hot-button current affairs for newspapers (an unusual forum at that time for humanities professors). Hence Talbot asked me to contribute to the Examiner: from late 1992 on, I wrote for him on Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita”; comedienne Sandra Bernhard as the heir of Lenny Bruce; and Bill and Hillary Clinton, where I analyzed the pivotal role played by TV in the rise of an obscure Arkansas governor to the White House.

  When Talbot left the Examiner to start Salon, I went with him. He envisioned international editions of Salon as well as an arts-and-ideas Salon TV show that was eventually contracted to Bravo. A Salon radio project was also later announced. For what seemed to be managerial as well as funding and personnel problems (the in-house staff, for example, may have been expanded too rapidly), none of these projects materialized. Reprints of Salon articles, however, do appear abroad via an international syndication service.

  My first fleeting encounter with the Internet occurred in 1991 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after a lecture I gave called “Crisis in the American Universities.” A visitor from the Boston area approached me at the podium and asked, “Are you aware that you’re all over The WELL?” “What is The WELL?” I asked, completely baffled. He promised to send me some information.

  A week later, a packet arrived at my office in Philadelphia. I brandished the thick print-out at my colleagues: “What IS this?” I sputtered. “Look—a person in Boston is arguing about my ideas with someone in Tennessee, and they’re both arguing with someone else in San Francisco!” None of us in the humanities department could decipher the method or rationale of this peculiar document, nor did we guess that it was our first bulletin from a dawning communications revolution.

  The co-creator of The WELL was Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968) and the Whole Earth Review (1985). Much later, when he interviewed me for the premiere 1993 issue of Wired (whose “patron saint” is Marshall McLuhan), I realized that he was another 1960s veteran actively reassessing American cultural history. The WELL had been launched in 1985 by Brand and Larry Brilliant as the first general cyber forum, turning the Internet away from its early orientation as a bulletin-board service for scientific and military exchanges. Like Salon, The WELL was based in Northern California and staffed by independent, tech-savvy thinkers outside both the academic and the East Coast media establishments. They shared my fatigue with the strident polarization of conservatism versus liberalism and were looking for something new, which did in fact materialize in the libertarianism and pro-sex feminism of the 1990s.

  Brand recognized how deeply I had been influenced by McLuhan, who had been swept away in the 1970s by French and German theory. By the 1980s, popular culture was being routinely condemned from two sides: by conservatives on the grounds of immorality and vulgarity and by leftists on the grounds of sexism, racism, and economic exploitation, with capitalism stereotyped as a brutal tool of Western imperialism. Very little in the new academic approaches to media—abstract semiotics, the Frankfurt School, British Marxist cultural studies, or Franco-American postmodernism—made sense to me as a McLuhanite. Furthermore, there seemed to be a willful blindness to the role modern capitalism had played in enhancing individualism, raising the standard of living, and liberating women. And it was capitalism, via the technological marvel of the personal computer, that would make the Internet so powerful a vehicle of free thought and free speech around the world.

  It was in fact via the Internet that the heirs of McLuhan, scattered across North America like defeated soldiers of a civil war, identified each other in the 1990s and regrouped. My commitment to the Internet is partly inspired by gratitude: it was The WELL, I later saw, that had helped spr
ead the word about my controversial and long-delayed first book, a 700-page tome that its publisher (Yale University Press) did not expect would find a wide audience. In an era of political correctness, which had taken root on campus and in the major media, the Internet was operating like an invisible, subterranean resistance movement.

  PROCESS AND PRACTICE

  Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has caused a tremendous cultural shift whose most profound impact has been on young people. It will take another thirty years before the Internet’s effects are clearly understood. The computer has literally reshaped the brain of those who grew up with it, just as television and rock music reshaped the brains of my baby-boom generation and made our thinking so different in form and content from that of writers and critics born just before World War Two.

  College students, even in the Ivy League, may spend from two to five hours a night on the Internet. Most middle-aged professionals, including teachers, have yet to appreciate the scope or depth of what is happening. As late as 1997, for example, a prominent reporter at The Boston Globe tried to discourage my writing for Salon (“No one reads things on the Internet”); he exhorted me to focus on contributing to the major media instead. But one of my primary motivations in writing for Salon was to speak directly to young people, who have no loyalty to newspapers: today’s college students were born in the 1980s, when newspapers, a major melting-pot medium for a century since the start of the immigration era, had already lost ground to television.

  Campus literature departments were caught flat-footed by the sudden rise of the Internet. Throughout the 1990s, elite universities inflicted a cruel cognitive dissonance on their humanities students, who were forced to read antiquated French and German theory (based on premises and methodology predating World War Two), while cyberculture was exploding all around them. This was a principal factor in the decline in prestige and power of humanities departments in that period, when the number of literature majors steadily fell. The young knew perfectly well that the language of the future was now the computer and the Web.

  Some theorists tried to shore up their system by redefining the Internet as a postmodern medium, but the idea was misconceived. The fragmentation or discontinuity they thought they saw was really the proliferation, multiplicity, and rapid pulses of electronic media that McLuhan correctly interpreted in physiological and neurological terms. Surfing the Web (significantly, a nature-sports metaphor) means catching its wave motion and feeling its tides and eddies. The Web has weather, particularly when news events unleash storms of popular sentiment. Though the body is quiet and dormant at the computer, the Web works by sensory overload, through which the surfer navigates along a zigzag track like a sailboat tacking at sea.

  One reason I find writing for the Internet so fulfilling is that the Web’s natural rhythms and strong, personal voices (contradicting the effete post-structuralist doctrine of the “death of the subject”) seem to be in the direct line of the body-oriented, incantatory, anti-academic American poetry of the 1950s and ’60s that influenced me heavily in college. Beat and Black Mountain poems were performance pieces meant to be recited. The fountainhead of this American style was Walt Whitman, whom Allen Ginsberg in particular invoked as an influence.

  Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” as I see it, oddly prefigures Internet style: the poem’s impressionistic sections and cascading verse-paragraphs resemble the way Salon articles are split into pages linked by provocative hypertext grabbers. My columns for Salon have consciously assimilated Whitman’s salutations to the reader; his pluralist dwelling on social class; and his mix of street slang with oracular pronouncements. Whitman shows how to juxtapose the homely minutiae of everyday life with both contemporary politics and grand perspectives on nature.

  But the key to Internet writing for me is visual, not verbal. Ever since computer operating systems progressed from half-mathematical ASCII to today’s lively, colorful, high-resolution graphics HTML format, the Internet has become a mercurial hybrid of word, image, and sound. Television was the key, leading to the personal computer screen and thus the Internet. Nowhere in the world has TV been so dominant a cultural presence as here in the United States. Close to three generations of Americans have learned from childhood not just how to look at TV but how to live with it in virtually every room of the house (and now car).

  More pertinently, only in the United States do commercials intrude at predictable intervals into newscasts, talk shows, sports, and drama. Elsewhere in the world, commercials are grouped at the start or end of programs, which thus may begin at odd times rather than on the hour or half-hour. Visitors to the United States sometimes become confused or lose focus when our commercials burst into a story line every few minutes.

  I submit that the stop-start rhythm of a half-century of commercial TV viewing was Americans’ basic training for Internet communication, active or passive (that is, writing or reading). “And now for a word from our sponsor,” we used to hear; today it’s “Hold that thought,” as the host sternly stops even the most high-ranking guest mid-flight to cut away for a series of eye-assaulting commercials. The jump or truncation is an American specialty; it is precisely our suffusion in mass media that has allowed us to keep identity, thought, and mood intact as we vault over the alleged discontinuities of modern life that have proved so disabling to literati from T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett to the postmodernist theorists who drove aesthetics off the academic map for twenty-five years.

  The puzzling failure of humanities professors to contribute in any substantial way thus far to the leading Web zines stems, I conjecture, from their long ambivalence about TV. Although prominent academics have made occasional appearances in Salon and Slate, they strangely fade away, retreating to the online special-interest groups where they resume the same professional conversation they have at conferences. Their lack of interest in addressing a general audience is remarkable in this period when the “public intellectual” (a questionable and overused term) is so much prized.

  Some academics may feel that Internet writing, like the TV image, is evanescent, but the opposite is true. Ever since it switched from live to tape, TV is the great medium of the re-run, where nothing is ever lost; so with the Web, where the search engines not only net up every obscure, years-old crackpot rant like debris from the sea floor but where on the best-organized Web sites all past articles are miraculously available by push-button access in their archives. The Web is an ever-expanding, if still ill-sorted and error-filled encyclopedia of Alexandrian dimensions.

  Another reason for academics’ reluctance to join the Web-zines may be the blinking marginalia of advertising logos that now adorn every Salon page. Perhaps academics feel that their text is swamped or compromised by so much visual distraction, like the banks of flashing bulbs at a casino or penny arcade. But I feel quite at home in this milieu, which replicates the jump-cuts and blizzard of special effects on commercial TV. Web pages crowned or rimmed by ads sometimes resemble medieval illuminated manuscripts, with their fantastic, embellished lettering, and also Art Nouveau books and prints, with their undulating borders of running tendrils.

  My premises about advertising, in any case, are quite different from those of most academics. Like Andy Warhol, I always regarded ads, logos, and product packaging as an art form and probably for the same reason: as a child, I visually processed them as analogues to the lavish, polychrome iconography of the Italian Catholic church. (Warhol’s Eastern European church was Byzantine and therefore even more ornate.) I remain fascinated by advertising slogans as folk poetry, which over time taught me how to speak in quotable “sound bites.”

  In writing for Salon, I regularly use many more voices and shifts of tone than I do in writing, for example, for The Wall Street Journal: my op-ed pieces for the latter are usually sober in tone and organized in a conventional, linear way, with a timely lead followed by factual evidence and a conclusion. In Salon, on the other
hand, I’ve absorbed the hectoring personae of old-time radio and TV: the host, the stand-up comic, and the pitchman, a descendant of the carnival barker. Even when most of the column addresses serious issues, I often borrow its transitions from the evening talk-show form perfected by Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, where a topical opening monologue yields to a series of guests and where the host may turn up in costume as cranky Aunt Blabby or that caped clairvoyant, Carnac the Magnificent.

  The column began as a strict Q&A, a sequel to the parody “agony aunt” column, “Ask Camille,” that I wrote for Spy magazine in 1993. As Salon reader questions, as well as my replies, got longer, however, the format broadened, so that the “host” voice opens, closes, and directs throughout. Another TV genre helping me organize material is the variety show, a form (descended from vaudeville) that was in its heyday in my adolescence but is now defunct due to sheer expense. At their height, The Ed Sullivan Show and The Carol Burnett Show struck a balance between mainstream offerings and controversial, cutting-edge acts. In writing my column, I try to draw in as many segments of the Web-reading public as possible—no easy task, since political junkies and pop fans, for example, now haunt their own ghettoized sites.

  During the 2000 presidential campaign, I began weaving into the text longer passages than usual from reader letters on incendiary issues like gun control, so that the column began to resemble (as Talbot was the first to observe) a call-in AM radio show. In the media work that I have been invited to do over the past decade, the most dynamic has unquestionably been AM shows in the “drive-time” slots, when commuters are trapped in their cars and craving diversion and relief. The quarrelsome blare of AM radio, born in the obnoxious disc-jockey days of early Top 40 rock, is a truly modern voice, the embodiment of McLuhan’s classification of radio as a “hot” medium. AM’s abrasive high energy contrasts with the repressed mellifluousness of National Public Radio, geared to the velvety FM band. My Salon column consciously taps into AM’s proletarian brashness rather than NPR’s upper-middle-class gentility.