Provocations

by Camille Paglia

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, February 23, 2000. “In the three weeks since my last column, Hillary Rodham Clinton has been up hill and down dale, beating the bushes in upstate New York to try to convince someone somewhere that she is a woman of substance rather than a raisin-eyed, carrot-nosed, twig-armed, straw-stuffed mannequin trundled in on a go-cart by the mentally bereft powerbrokers of the state Democratic Party.” This passage was picked up by the wire services and startlingly reprinted all over the world. As a native of upstate New York, Paglia was outraged by Hillary’s upstate “listening tour,” as she ran for Senate in a state where she had never lived (pushing out Bronx-born U.S. Representative Nita Lowey in the process). Cocooned by the Secret Service, Hillary was insulated from unscripted engagement with either voters or the media.

  In response to a flood of reader letters supporting Paglia’s protest about Kate Winslet losing the Academy Award for Best Actress for Titanic: “The Winslet Brigade is taking arms across the globe. I issue an appeal to my fellow warriors: whoever first sees Helen Hunt in public, whether at the grocery store or on the red carpet, please sing out, ‘Give back Kate Winslet’s Oscar!’ ”

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  Paglia, reply, “What Will, or Should Be, the Purpose of Art in This New Century?,” The Art Newspaper (U.K.), March 2000.

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  “I’m Peter, Hear Me Roar,” Family Guy, Fox Broadcasting Company animated TV series, Season 2, Episode 8, aired March 28, 2000. Peter’s sexist joke at work leads to a sexual harassment lawsuit and a clash with feminist attorney Gloria Ironbox (voiced by Candice Bergen). For sensitivity training, he is forced to undergo a week at a women’s retreat. Peter tells his wife he doesn’t want to leave a feminist banquet because “Gloria Ironbox and Camille Paglia are gonna whip it out to see whose is bigger.”

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  Paglia, The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.), June 25, 2000. “Revised Editions: Which authors, or books, do not enjoy the standing they deserve?” Series on “underrated reputations.” Paglia nominates Rod Serling, whom she calls “the true heir of Edgar Allan Poe”: as a Jew, Serling was “an alien” in conservative upstate New York, and his early experiences inspired his political liberalism and his searing defense of the individual against dogma and conformism.” Paglia says that “in artistic style,” Serling was “a clairvoyant surrealist.”

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  Paglia, “Women Behind the Throne: Today’s female politicians can learn a lot from the women of the eighteenth century French court” (on Madame Pompadour and Madame du Barry), Cigar Aficionado magazine, June 2000. “Our first female president, who may still be in diapers, will need to study all the achievements and missteps of prominent women from Hatshepsut and Cleopatra to Elizabeth Dole and Hillary Clinton, all of whom have lurched from pothole to pothole on the rocky road to high office.”

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  Heather Findlay, “Paglia 101: Confessions of a campus radical,” cover story, Girlfriends magazine, September 2000.

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, October 25, 2000. “As a libertarian, I must also express my opposition yet again to hate crimes legislation, which is not progressive but authoritarian. The government should enforce and even reduce existent laws, not pile on more and more regulation and surveillance, which increase the size and intrusiveness of the state. Hate-crimes bills formalize ideological inquiries into motive that smack of the totalitarian thought police. In a democracy, government has no business singling out one or several groups as more worthy of protection than any other individual or group. Justice should be blind.”

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, November 15, 2000. After a lecture on “The Internet Revolution” at the Chicago Humanities Festival: “My quick visit to Chicago impressed me anew with this pressing national question: Why can’t the U.S. guarantee a first-rate, fast-food hot dog to every citizen?…The taxi rides in and out of the city were tantalizing torture as an endless series of beckoning, neon-lit, hot dog emporia flew by. The classic American hot dog fell in prestige after the health-food movement of the late 1960s and ’70s and can still be savored in its original glory only in scattered regions of the U.S. I lamented this cultural disaster in a feature I did with host Bill Boggs for ‘Talking Food’ on the TV Food Network in 1995, where we sampled sizzling hot dogs at the upper Broadway branch of Papaya King in New York City.”

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  Paglia, column, in conversation with Ingrid Sischy, “Blonde by Choice,” Interview magazine, December 2000. “Camille Paglia, Professor of Blonde.” Paglia: “As an Italian-American, I have to say that blondeness has been one of the most oppressive themes of my entire life! My Italian immigrant family were aliens in upstate New York, which was still very conservative and Protestant. These local pressures were reinforced by the national messages about blondes coming from ads and the media. It was the period when Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, and then Sandra Dee absolutely ruled….I think blondeness in America is certainly politically reactionary insofar as it posits the supremacy of the old WASP elite.”

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, December 6, 2000. “At a moment of maximum tension in the election standoff [Al Gore’s Florida recount after the November 2000 presidential election], the Drudge Report posted a newswire alert about a massive outbreak of solar flares and the possible disruption of world telecommunications and power grids. I view Matt Drudge’s pioneering Web site as performance art, a surrealist collage and Warholian series of hour-by-hour Polaroids of modern culture. His startling solar flares posting was literally hair-raising, reminding me of Ulysses’ speech about ‘degree’ in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: ‘But when the planets / In evil mixture to disorder wander, / What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny, / What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, / Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, / Divert and crack, rend and deracinate / The unity and married calm of states / Quite from their fixture?’ (I.iii.94–101).”

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, January 17, 2001 (three days before the first inauguration of George W. Bush): “If only one had the exhilarating sense of new beginnings that normally comes with a changing of the guard. But out of some strange psychological stagnancy, Bush has lazily surrounded himself with advisors and appointees from long-gone Republican administrations. It’s baffling why someone who urgently needs to prove to the world that he has a political identity separate from that of his president father wouldn’t make a more vigorous effort to bring in fresh blood. Bush has simply played into the hands of critics who claim he wasn’t ready for the presidency….

  “But a bland, bumbling Bush may be better for this country than the hysterical chameleon and monstrous panderer that Democratic nominee Al Gore turned into last year. Given the upsurge in partisan warfare and racial animosity fomented in Florida by Democratic operatives after the election, I wish history could be rewritten: if only we could return to the height of the Monica Lewinsky crisis in 1998 and this time firmly force Clinton out. The Democratic establishment was cowardly and irresponsible in backing off from insisting that Clinton resign. The nation would have been spared two horrendous years of inquests, divisiveness, and legislative paralysis.

  “Furthermore, Vice President Al Gore could have assumed the presidency before being overwhelmed by a national campaign and unraveling before our eyes. Had he risen to the presidency by default in 1998, Gore would have gained in stature and experience in the job and, without the burden of the Clinton scandals, might have been easily reelected.”

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, February 28, 2001. “That feminism, despite the triumph in the 1990s of the pro-sex wing to which I belong, is not yet out of the woods is shown by the garish visibility of Eve Ensler and her Vagina Monologues, which have apparently spawned copy-cat cells on many campuses….With her obsession with male evil and her claimed history of physical abuse and mental breakdowns, Ensler is the new
Andrea Dworkin, minus Medusan hair and rumpled farm overalls. Wasn’t one Dworkin quite enough?

  “Today’s genteel ladies would learn a lot more about life if they would cut the crap and get out of their gilded ghettos. A day at a potato farm or crab-picking plant would do a hell of a lot more for them than an evening at Madison Square Garden with Eve Ensler and her pack of giddy celebrity lemmings in hot-pink suits….

  “Here’s my kind of role model: Antoinette Cannuli, the Sicilian matriarch of Cannuli’s House of Pork in Philadelphia’s Italian Market. She was profiled by Rita Giordano in the January 31 Philadelphia Inquirer under this headline: ‘Vendor is a tough customer: At age 91, South Ninth Street’s oldest merchant stays busy. And she still takes no guff.’ Celeste Morello, an expert on South Philadelphia, says of Antoinette, who goes to work in her white coat every day at the family butcher shop, ‘She is the boss, and the most macho guy in the place shakes when she starts in.’

  During the Depression, Antoinette was helping out at her husband’s butcher shop when a customer wouldn’t pay the full price for an order of chopped goat. The man told her what she could do with the meat. It wasn’t nice. “I had a leg of lamb,” Antoinette recalled. “I went boof! Right over the counter. He was bleeding.” When she was 14, she insisted on getting a paying job and began work at a Philadelphia tailor shop. Her first day, the boss came by—and gave her a pat on the bottom. “I went Pow, right in the face! I said, ‘You touch me again and I’ll poke your eyes out!’ ”

  “The energy and ferocity of Italian women, whose power came from the land itself, are the ultimate source of my take-charge philosophy of sexual harassment, which emphasizes personal responsibility rather than external regulation and paternalistic oversight. Too many women have confused feminism, which should be about equal opportunity, with the preservation of bourgeois niceties. Antoinette Cannuli’s code of life has infinitely more wisdom than what American students are getting from their politicized textbooks.”

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  “Happy Birthday, Bob: An appreciation of Dylan at 60,” Rolling Stone magazine, June 7, 2001. “Birthday tributes” from a roundtable including Joni Mitchell, Tom Petty, Bono, and Lucinda Williams. Paglia: “Despite his pose as a Woody Guthrie–type country drifter, Dylan was a total product of Jewish culture, where the word is sacred. In his three surrealistic electric albums of 1965–66 (which remain massive influences on my thinking and writing), Dylan betrayed his wide reading, sensitivity to language, mastery of irony and satire, and acute observation of society….Dylan is a perfect role model to present to aspiring artists. As a young man, he had blazing vision and tenacity. He rejected creature comforts and lived on pure will and instinct. He catered to no one but preserved his testy eccentricity and defiance. And his best work shows how creative imagination operates—in a hallucinatory stream of sensations and emotions that perhaps even the embattled artist does not fully understand.”

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  “Encyclopaedia Anderson,” The New Yorker, July 16, 2001. The Encyclopaedia Britannica commissions articles on American cities and towns: Laurie Anderson on New York, David Mamet on Chicago, Camille Paglia on Syracuse, and Annie Proulx on Rock Springs, Wyoming.

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  “Camille Paglia’s Top 25 Wicked Women in History,” Talk magazine, September 2001. Photos with thumbnail profiles.

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  Paglia’s blurb for new Broadway Books edition of Patrick Dennis’ Auntie Mame (2001): “Auntie Mame is the American Alice in Wonderland. It is also, incidentally, one of the most important books in my life. Its witty Wildean phrases ring in my mind, and its flamboyant characters still enamor me. Like Tennessee Williams, Patrick Dennis caught the boldness, vitality, and iridescent theatricality of modern American personality. In Mame’s mercurial metamorphoses we see American optimism and self-invention writ large.”

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  Murray Dubin, “Newsmakers: ‘Sopranos’ and its fans are criticized,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 3, 2001. “Author and cultural critic Camille Paglia skewered The Sopranos and the critics who have acclaimed it at a lecture at Penn Thursday night….‘It’s a travesty. It’s a debased characterization of Italians.’ ” Paglia described the storyline about a mob boss consulting a psychiatrist: “No Italian I know wants to be seen as a victim.” She attacked New York media critics for being “full of designer Marxism” and “having no interest in the working class.”

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  “Camille Paglia Gets in Tony Soprano’s Face,” The Pennsylvania Gazette (University of Pennsylvania alumni magazine), January/February 2002. Panel discussion, “Tony Soprano, the Media, and Popular Culture,” the Gay Talese Lecture Series at Kelly Writers House. Paglia attacked “the haute bourgeoisie in New York” for overpraise of The Sopranos, which she said was “a cryptic version of dealing with race issues”: “Italian-Americans are literally the last group that people are free to libel.”

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  Paglia, column, in conversation with Ingrid Sischy, “Winning and Losing,” Interview magazine, April 2002. IS: “If you were producing the Oscars, what would you do?” CP: “Well, I think the Oscar organizers are stupidly undercutting what should be the big moment of people getting out of their cars. Why don’t producers of pre-show coverage realize that people are tuning in for that? Everyone around the world would watch the stars’ arrival, as in the old days, as they grandly pause to wave to the crowd. If I could, I’d lead a rebel movement to get TV to pay full attention to the fashion and limo parade. Nothing but that—cinema verité for two hours, with stable cameras and no choppy cutting or yakking reporters….Ceremony and procession are ancient ritual forms. The Oscars’ red carpet should be pure spectacle, an epic extravaganza….The restoration of Oscars night to prestige as performance art was achieved by Sharon Stone in 1994. She stepped from the car swathed in this gorgeous, almost Hindu, black veil, and she just stood there—thanks to her modeling experience—and glittered. From that moment forward, everyone went berserk. In fact, for a few years, actresses were laden down with so many jewels and chokers that they looked like camels hauling treasure across the Sahara.”

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  Richard Corliss, “Girls Just Wanna Have Guns: Thrillers with female stars are hot. But is playing victim-heroes a victory for women?,” Time magazine, April 22, 2002. Paglia: “The problem with current women-in-peril films is they’ve got the peril but not the deep emotional resonance. They’re driven by gimmicky, high-concept plots. But the center of great women’s pictures is the long close-up of a woman’s soulful, suffering face as her eyes brim with tears. Today’s actresses are too buff and brittle to take that kind of scrutiny. Too many know how to do everything but play real women.”

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  Alessandra Stanley and Constance L. Hays, “Martha Stewart’s To-Do List May Include Image Polishing,” The New York Times, June 23, 2002. Camille Paglia wrote after the Stewarts’ divorce: “She cut her hair. Now she’s a self-complete man/woman on her estate, run by invisible serfs.”

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  Paglia, “Gisela Richter: 1882–1972,” in Invisible Giants: 50 Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books (2002). “Gisela Richter has inspired me since I first encountered her work on Greek sculpture in college. Like Jane Harrison, the pioneering British classical anthropologist, Richter belonged to a fertile period when enterprising women of great distinction accepted and honored the highest scholarly standards of the male tradition. I admire Richter for her clarity and rigor of mind; her fineness of sensibility and connoisseurship; her attention to detail and her power of observation and deduction; her mastery of form and design. She revered art and viewed herself as its custodian and transmitter to a wider public.”

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  Paglia, “American Babylon” (on New York City), Foreword, Sex in the City: An Illustrated History by Alison Maddex (2002).

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  Thom Jones, “Expanding the Western Mind: Camille P
aglia interview,” Urthona: Journal of Buddhism and the Arts (U.K.) 17 (2002).

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  Paglia, “The Left Has Lost Its Way and Lost Its Voice,” The Times (U.K.), August 17, 2002. “The language of leftism is out of date. It desperately needs reconstruction and revitalization, if the Left is ever to regain its proper status as a voice of ethical critique of materialistic modern society….Leftist analysis has been slow to adjust to the massive expansion of the service sector after the Second World War.”