Provocations

by Camille Paglia

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, June 9, 2009. “Barack Obama was elected to do exactly what he did last week at Cairo University—to open a dialogue with the Muslim world. Or at least that was why I, for one, voted for him, contributed to his campaign, and continue to support him….The Cairo speech is well-organized, ticking off central thorny issues region by region. But there is an unsettling slackness and even sentimentality in its view of history….It is also puzzling how a major statement about religion could be so detached from religion.”

  Paglia calls Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s reference to herself as “a wise Latina” (whose Supreme Court deliberations would trump those of “a white male”) “a vestige of the bad old days of male-bashing feminism when even the doughty Ann Richards was saying [in her keynote address] to the 1988 Democratic National Convention: ‘Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.’ What flatulent canards mainstream feminism used to traffic in! Fred Astaire, idolized even by Mikhail Baryshnikov, was one of the most brilliant and peerless dancers and choreographers of the twentieth century. The agile but limited Ginger Rogers, a spunky, smart-mouthed comedienne, is only a footnote. Get real, girls! This is the kind of mushy balderdash I doggedly had to plow through for five years in trying to find a good feminist poem for my collection, Break, Blow, Burn. I never found one. Rule of art: cant kills creativity!”

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  Cathal Kelly, “Contrarian Queen: The gospel according to Paglia,” The Toronto Star, June 13, 2009. Paglia interviewed as the third and final speaker in a lecture series on the Ten Commandments at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, marking an exhibit on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Christopher Hitchens was the first speaker two weeks earlier. Paglia: “Hitchens is a cynic, and he knows nothing about religion. It’s one thing to attack it from the basis of knowledge. I thought that book [Hitchens’ God Is Not Great] was awful. Awful book! That could have been a great book. He’s lazy! He just wants to sit around and have dinner parties and drink in Washington. The book is like, chatted….Unlike Christopher Hitchens, I take books seriously.”

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, August 12, 2009. “Obama’s aggressive endorsement of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land….You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you’re happy with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh, really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly-up because of undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it: virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to rationing. I just don’t get it. Why this insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in three weeks?…Somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills.”

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, September 8, 2009. “Why has the Democratic party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics, and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills)….Affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote ‘critical thinking,’ which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (‘racism, sexism, homophobia’) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

  “Throughout this fractious summer, I was dismayed not just at the self-defeating silence of Democrats at the gaping holes or evasions in the healthcare bills but also at the fogginess or insipidity of articles and op-eds about the controversy emanating from liberal mainstream media and Web sources….There was a glaring inability in most Democratic commentary to think ahead and forecast what would or could be the actual snarled consequences—in terms of delays, denial of services, errors, miscommunications, and gross invasions of privacy—of a massive single-payer overhaul of the healthcare system in a nation as large and populous as ours. It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management….

  “Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women’s control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants, Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought.”

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  Margaret Wente, interview, “It’s a Landscape of Death in the Humanities,” The Globe and Mail, May 1, 2010. Paglia (scheduled to talk about education at the Open House Festival in Toronto): “The long view of history is absolutely crucial. There are long patterns of history. Civilizations rose and fell, and guess what! It’s not a fiction. I believe in chronology, and I believe it’s our obligation to teach it….The problem today is that professors feel they are far too sophisticated and important to do something as mundane as teach a foundation course. So what the heck are parents paying all that money for?”

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  Sarah Kaufman, “Books That Inspired Art, from Sculpture to Rap,” The Washington Post, August 15, 2010. Septime Webre, Artistic Director of the Washington Ballet, “created a ballet called ‘Fluctuating Hemlines’ after reading Camille Paglia’s provocative dissection of what drives Western culture, Sexual Personae. ‘It was a very incendiary, outrageous book,’ says Webre. ‘The central thesis is that we are essentially raw, animalistic beings….I was starting to feel we all had an underground life, inaccessible to anyone else. That seemed like an interesting notion for a dance.’…‘I’m interested in theatricality,’ Webre says. ‘I come from this big Cuban family where there was lots of drama, so heightened drama is a natural state.’ ”

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  Roundtable (23 contributors), “Defining Idea of the Next Decade,” The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 3, 2010. Paglia: “Revalorizing the Trades.”

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  Paglia, “Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex: An erotic breaker of taboos or an asexual copycat? Camille Paglia, America’s foremost cultural critic, demolishes an icon,” cover story, The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), September 12, 2010. “Lady Gaga is the first major star of the digital age….Since her rise, Gaga has remained almost continually on tour. Hence she is a moving target who has escaped serious scrutiny….How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?” Paglia on the contributors’ page: “For two years her publicity juggernaut has rolled over supine journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Why was there so little protest and even less analysis? Has cultural criticism gone moribund?”

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  “Op-Ed a
t 40: Four Decades of Argument and Illustration,” The New York Times, September 25, 2010. Paglia’s “Madonna—Finally a Real Feminist” (December 14, 1990) is republished as one of the most significant op-eds in The New York Times since it invented that editorial format 40 years earlier. A video interview with Paglia (taped in Philadelphia) is also posted in the online package: “For Op-Ed’s 40th Anniversary, author and professor Camille Paglia recounts the story behind her 1990 op-ed about feminism, Madonna, and the music video ‘Justify My Love.’ ” [It was this hugely controversial op-ed, commissioned by The New York Times, that catapulted Paglia from obscurity to infamy, after the publication of her first book, Sexual Personae, earlier that year. In discussion with a skeptical editorial board, editor David Shipley boldly supported the article’s pioneering use of slang, which broke traditional protocols at the august New York Times.]

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  Paglia, “So Bold, Bad, and Beautiful: Elizabeth Taylor was brazenly sexual in an era of ponytails and bobby socks. She thrilled Camille Paglia, the feminist and culture critic, who says we will not see her like again” (photo of fetchingly half-dressed Taylor on the set of Giant taking up entire front page), cover story, News Review, The Sunday Times (U.K.), March 27, 2011. Reprint of Paglia’s tribute to Taylor in Salon.com after her death that week.

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  Paglia, “A Cry of Lost Womanhood,” The Sunday Times (U.K.), June 12, 2011. Photo of Slutwalk marchers the prior day in London. Paglia: “Prostitutes, strippers, pornographers—these are my Babylonian ideals….The swift global spread of Slutwalk strikingly demonstrates the energy and aspirations of young feminists. But its confused message is a symptom of the sexual chaos and anomie of the Western bourgeoisie. Don’t call yourself a slut unless you are prepared to live and defend yourself like one. My creed is street-smart feminism, alert, wary, and militant—the harsh survival code of streetwalkers and drag queens. Sex is a force of nature, not just a social construct. Monsters stalk its midnight realm.”

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  Paglia, review, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years by Greil Marcus, The New York Times Book Review, December 4, 2011.

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  Paglia, “The True Voice of America—Adele from Tottenham,” News Review, The Sunday Times (U.K.), February 19, 2012. “The singer swept all before her at the Grammys. You Brits have found us a genuine new superstar, says the cultural critic Camille Paglia.”

  “With her armload of six trophies, Adele was the golden girl of the Grammys last weekend, matching Beyoncé’s record for the most awards received by a female artist in one night. Adele’s performance of ‘Rolling in the Deep,’ which won Grammys for record of the year and song of the year, triggered one of the biggest, loudest standing ovations in the history of award shows….Partly energizing the audience’s response to Adele’s performance was its subliminal recognition that ‘Rolling in the Deep’ (co-written and produced by Paul Epworth) belongs to the magnificent tradition of African-American music that produced Whitney Houston.

  “From its opening raw guitar strum to its soaring, thunderous climax, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ recapitulates the entire history of black music. We hear the percussive accents of early rural Southern blues, with its hand-clapping and foot-stomping, along with a defiant touch of Native American war drums. Next is Adele’s incarnation as a voluptuous belter in the ‘big mama’ style of rowdy roadhouse blues, typified by Bessie Smith. As an agonized torch song, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ also evokes the subsequent phase in musical style, the urban jazz sophistication of Billie Holiday and Lena Horne.

  “Black gospel music, originating in 19th-century negro spirituals, is wonderfully captured in ‘Rolling in the Deep,’ with its commenting background voices, the ‘call and response’ format that has been traced from field songs under slavery all the way back to West African communal ritual….At the Grammys, Adele was a revelation, bringing back to America one of our authentic native genres: the spiritual power and purity of the unadorned human voice. It wasn’t just the live audience who leapt to their feet and shouted in ecstasy: it was music-loving television viewers from coast to coast.”

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  Paglia, “Mad About the Girl: Henpecked misogynist or fearless visionary who bottled the very essence of womanhood? As two new films put Alfred Hitchcock in the spotlight, Paglia reappraises the director’s obsession with blondes,” The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), July 15, 2012. Cover line: “Camille Paglia on Hitchcock’s Obsession with Blondes.”

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  Matthew Reisz, interview, “Voluble Radical Gives Old and New Puritans a Tongue-Lashing,” Times Higher Education (U.K.), August 30, 2012. “Camille Paglia talks to Matthew Reisz about the U.S. academy’s prejudices and what the secular and the religious fail to understand about art.” Paglia rejects “the male gaze” in feminist film theory.

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  Carol Kino, interview, “Always Ready with a Barb: Camille Paglia scowls at the Metropolitan Museum,” The New York Times, September 28, 2012. Paglia calls the Met’s current Egyptian wing “underwhelming”: “Talk about wasted space!” As a child, she had been electrified by the Met’s Egyptian galleries, which have “lost their drama.” She blames it on “the blockbuster mentality” and curators “underestimating the appetite of the public for detail.”

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  Roundtable, “007 Deconstructed,” The Washington Post, October 2, 2012. Paglia, “The Women”: “The James Bond films were the vanguard of the sexual revolution….But Bond’s cavalier womanizing, as well as the overt sexuality of the Bond girls, rubbed second-wave feminism the wrong way. One reason I got drummed out of the women’s movement from the start was my embrace of the vampy, Amazonian Bond girls and of the spunky TV characters they inspired on Charlie’s Angels, a show denounced by feminists as degrading to women. But in the 1990s, both the Bond girls and Charlie’s Angels returned in triumph during the Madonna-inspired pro-sex feminist insurgency that swept the puritanical old guard into the dustbin of history.”

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  Paglia, “Gender Roles: Motherhood gets a raw deal from feminists,” The Globe and Mail, October 6, 2012. Working mothers: the controversy over the quick maternity leave of Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo. Paglia calls for “massive adjustment of our tyrannically rigid system of higher education”: “Universities must adapt to women students who choose to have children early.” Married students in the classroom “would revolutionize” the current academic discourse of gender studies, which is “arrogantly divorced from practical reality.”

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  Paglia, “How Capitalism Can Save Art,” The Wall Street Journal, October 6–7, 2012. “Camille Paglia on why a new generation has chosen iPhones and other glittering gadgets as its canvas.” Starts: “Does art have a future?”

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  “Powell’s Q&A: Camille Paglia,” PowellsBooks.Blog, October 11, 2012.

  What’s the strangest or most interesting job you’ve ever had?

  Night-shift ward secretary of the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital in downtown Syracuse, New York. This was a summer job when I was in college. I wore a uniform and sat at a little table inside the emergency room, right next to all the action. When an ambulance brought in a patient—often with bullet wounds on the night shift—the medical staff would rapidly evaluate his or her condition and shout out to me which specialist I should contact. I had a list of doctors on call for that night and immediately dialed the answering service. Of course it was highly stressful when people arrived dead or dying and there was a great outcry from their families in the hallway. But most of the time it was quiet, and I used the pre-dawn hours to read through the shelf of medical textbooks.

  Why do you write?

  Ever since childhood, I have always felt that the number and intensity of my observations exceed my ability to express them in conversation. People cannot be burdened with a constant flood of commentary on life and the universe! My Joan R
ivers fast-talking can only go so far before audience fatigue sets in. So I write! Readers can turn me on and off at will. But I’m always there on the shelf—like a jack-in-the-box, ready to rumble.

  If you could have been someone else, who would that be and why?

  David Hemmings as the ultra-cool Mod London photographer based on David Bailey in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, Blow-Up. So deft yet so robust. Such oscillation between brooding thought and explosive action. Professional mastery. Detachment, wandering, discovery, obsession. And what’s not to like about playing cat-and-mouse games with Jane Birkin, Veruschka, and Vanessa Redgrave?

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  Paglia, “George Lucas’ Force,” The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 19, 2012. Essay adapted from last chapter of Glittering Images.

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  Paglia, “Beauty: The pursuit of beauty leads in unexpected directions,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2012.

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  Brian Kellow, “Coda: Listeners of Note: Camille Paglia,” Opera News, November 2012. Paglia talks about her favorite operas: Madame Butterfly strongly influenced her Emily Dickinson chapter in Sexual Personae. Of Wagner: “My anthem as a writer (I’ve loved swords since childhood) is the Nothung motif—Siegfried calling his sword, and the hammering sound of the forging. To this day, my hair stands on end when I hear it. That is so me.” On opera radio broadcasts: “But I hate this intrusive business of talking to the stars in between acts. It kills the magic! Never, ever should outsiders speak to a performer in the middle of the dream. It’s so reductive! It’s vandalism—dragging these virtuoso performers back to mundane reality.”