One of my principal ambitions since my student days has been to develop an interpretative style that could integrate high and popular culture, which had exploded during the 1960s. I call myself a Warholite: Andy Warhol’s improvisational, avant-garde short films (starring gay hustlers and drag queens) and his conversion of publicity photos of Hollywood stars into radiant Byzantine icons provided an inspiring template for my work. In contrast, I detest and oppose academic media studies that monotonously recycle judgmental, politicized terminology from the passé Frankfurt School, which has no feeling whatever for popular culture.
Provocations, I submit, demonstrates the range and flexibility of my system of interpretation, which fiercely attacks when necessary but which respectfully illuminates both the artist and the artwork, from Old Masters like Shakespeare and Leonardo to modern music stars like Prince and Rihanna. In college, I was impatient with the New Criticism, which I felt was too narrow and genteel and had to be urgently expanded with history and psychology. But I have continued to apply the New Critical technique of close textual analysis to everything I write about, as in my pieces here on Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror or on what I call the “psychotic mysticism” of poet Theodore Roethke. One of my long-range goals in college was to break down the barriers between genres, and I believe that my interdisciplinary method has in fact done that—extending the same minute focus and dramatic commentary to all of the arts but also to contemporary politics.
My columns and op-eds on politics over the past quarter century are too numerous to reprint or even catalog. I think I showed special facility for analyzing the horse race of presidential primaries, when my reviews of televised debates, for example, were usually far more attuned than those of the major media to how the candidates were actually being perceived by mainstream voters. I consider the cover-story Salon.com interview (collected here) that I did with editor-in-chief David Talbot in February 2003 to be a supreme highlight of my career: I was virtually alone among political commentators in condemning the imminent invasion of Iraq. Other leading media, including The New York Times and The New Yorker, had shockingly surrendered to tissue-thin government propaganda.
Full columns have been reproduced here on three political figures: Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump. I have written so voluminously and variously about Hillary Clinton since the Clintons’ arrival on the national scene in 1992 that there was no one piece that could be considered representative. Hence I have interwoven excerpts about her from numerous articles in the “Media Chronicle” at the back of the book. (It lists articles in English only. My extensive articles and interviews on politics, art, and other subjects in the foreign press, particularly in Italy and Brazil, have been omitted.) The reader should be forewarned that I began as a Hillary fan but became steadily disillusioned over the years.
I was speaking, writing, and crusading about the first woman president throughout the 1990s, when most other feminists were absorbed with policy issues. Reproduced in this book is a poster advertising my appearance at a 1996 debate at the Yale Political Union (“Resolved: America Needs a Female President”), which was recorded for national TV broadcast by C-SPAN. The “Media Chronicle” also contains excerpts of then-controversial columns or articles where I was notably prescient, as a registered Democrat, about developing problems and evasions in my own party that would eventually lead, many years later, to its stunning surprise defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
Education is a major theme in this book. As a career teacher of nearly half a century, I have watched American universities miss their epochal opportunity for radical curricular reform in the 1970s and descend decade by decade into the balkanized, bureaucratic, therapeutic customer-service operations that they are today. High scholarly standards and deep erudition (as admirably exemplified by the stiff, stuffy, old-guard professors at Yale when I arrived as a graduate student) have so vanished that their value and indeed their very existence are denied by today’s bright, shiny, and shallow academic theorists. The real revolution would have been to smash the departmental structure of the humanities, reunite the fragmented fields of literature and art, and create an authentically multicultural global curriculum.
A principal piece in this volume is “The North American Intellectual Tradition,” which was given as the Second Annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture at Fordham University. There as in my long exposé, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders” (published by Arion in 1991 and reprinted in Sex, Art, and American Culture), I reject European post-structuralism and call for a reorientation toward North American pragmatism, grounded in nature. The academic stampede toward pretentious, abstruse French theorists in the 1970s was a grotesque betrayal of the American 1960s, which was animated by a Romantic return to nature and a reconnection of art with the sensory—the dynamic life of the body. Michel Foucault’s primary influence, by his own admission, was playwright Samuel Beckett—whose depressive postwar nihilism was swept away by the communal music and dance of the 1960s. Today’s jargon-spouting academic postmodernists with their snidely debunking style are not the heirs of ’60s leftism but retrograde bourgeois elitists, still picking through the shards of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land.
This book contains multiple examples of my early involvement with the Web. “Dispatches from the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet” documents the process by which I developed the unique format of my long-running Salon.com column, which debuted on January 13, 1997. Because articles written for the Web are viewed on a screen rather than a page, adjustments must be made in syntax, diction, and visual design. A continuing failure to recognize this has produced the reams of slack, verbose, meandering prose that currently clogs the Web on both news sites and blogs. Historically, it will eventually be recognized that my lengthy, multi-part Salon column, with its variety of tone and topics and its gradual incorporation of reader letters, was the first blog, a new literary genre of the digital age. During the first few years of my column, only Mickey Kaus (whose online profile began after mine) was doing anything comparable, but his Slate.com column and later Web site were wholly focused on politics. My narrative and autobiographical diary approach was so new that Salon’s editor-in-chief relayed complaints from other staffers that there was too much of me in my columns. In retrospect, it is clear that my work for Salon prefigured today’s universal social media.
“Dispatches from the New Frontier” also describes how the geographically scattered, maverick founders of the Web instantly understood and supported my libertarian and multi-media ideas. In the early 1990s, while my work was being ostracized by the academic establishment, the dissidents on The Well were discussing it from coast to coast. Stewart Brand, a co-founder of The Well, interviewed me in 1993 for the premiere issue of Wired, which called me “possibly the next Marshall McLuhan.” I co-hosted early online chats, an innovative interactive genre whose format was, by today’s standards, strikingly primitive.
Included in this book is the transcript of a collaboration I did on “Oscar Style” with Glenn Belverio (in his drag persona as Glennda Orgasm) for an America Online “CyberPlex Auditorium” in 1996. The low-tech print-out format of our dialogue with real-time questioners, on the day after the Academy Awards ceremony, has been reproduced as exactly as possible. Before the Web, people had to wait more than a full day before there could be newspaper coverage of the Oscars, with their climactic late-night finale. Hence I lobbied David Talbot about the Web’s potential for rapid response to the Oscars broadcast, and the result was a yearly feature on Salon, “Camille Does the Oscars.” I also campaigned in Salon and Interview magazine for comprehensive reporting on Oscars fashions—another of my prophetic themes: the red carpet would eventually win epic coverage by Joan Rivers and become a media staple, currently on the verge of excess.
Finally, two interviews here focus on my philosophy and practice as a writer. My writing has always been motivated by the search for a voice—or rather for many voice
s, keyed to the moment. There is nothing more important to me than the power of words to describe, re-create, entrance, and provoke.
POPULAR CULTURE
1
THE GRANDEUR OF OLD HOLLYWOOD*
As a child, I had two pagan high holy days every year. The first was Halloween, where I advertised my transgender soul by masquerading as a matador, a Roman soldier, Napoleon, or Hamlet. The second was Oscars night, when Hollywood put its dazzling glamour on heady display for the whole world.
As I was growing up in the drearily conformist 1950s and early ’60s, it was hard to find information about popular culture, which wasn’t taken seriously. Deep-think European art films were drawing tiny coteries of intellectuals to small, seedy theaters, but flamboyant mainstream Hollywood was still dismissed as crass, commercial trash.
Confidential magazine, a splashy rag specializing in steamy innuendo, was my main news source about all things Hollywood. I avidly followed the lurid adventures of my favorite movie star, Elizabeth Taylor, as she breezily acquired and shed husbands at the drop of a hat. Eventually, my collection of Taylor clippings and photos reached 599.
As a brash Italian-American oppressed by the postwar cult of cheerful, girly blondeness, I celebrated when the voluptuous, brunette Taylor stole singer Eddie Fisher from that petite juggernaut of peppy blonde niceness, Debbie Reynolds. Much later, I learned to deeply respect the indomitable spunk, professionalism, and craft of both Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, but at the time, I darkly viewed them as ruthless tyrants of an ossified WASP establishment.
Most of the country automatically took Debbie’s side in the 1958 Fisher scandal, a sympathy stoked by her shrewd posing for an endless series of upbeat, homey photos with her two small children, Carrie and Todd. Her adulterous rival was publicly excoriated as a vixen and tramp, a heartless home-wrecker.
This was the backstory to the supreme Oscar moment of my lifetime—when Elizabeth Taylor, having just survived a near-death tracheotomy during an episode of pneumonia in London, won the award for Best Actress for her spectacular performance as a sleek Manhattan call girl in Butterfield 8 (1960). Three years after her treacherous adultery, Hollywood was formally forgiving her and welcoming her back to the fold.
Watching the Oscars on TV in upstate New York, I was in near delirium at Taylor’s unexpected win. My breathless state of ecstasy lasted for the entire next school day, where I felt like I was floating on a cloud. In retrospect, I realize that Taylor’s triumph was indeed a huge cultural watershed, a prefiguration of the coming sexual revolution.
But a surprise waited. The 1961 Oscars were still being broadcast in black and white. A week later, a gorgeous full-color photo of Taylor regally seated at the Oscars party appeared on the cover of Life magazine. Her white cigarette holder was elegantly raised above a full champagne glass near a bottle of Dom Perignon resting on ice.
The billowing white skirt of her floral-embellished Christian Dior dress was barely glimpsed. We saw only her starkly simple, pale yellow bodice that seemed to be channeling the golden glow of the Oscar statuette, which was offering her its adoration from amid a burst of red tulips, matching her full, crimson lips.
That night, with her magnetic composure and luminous charisma, Taylor exuded all the pomp and power of old Hollywood, from which she had emerged as a child star just before the decline of the studio system. Even her glossy raven bouffant was a work of art, because surely those intricate petals had been sculpted by her close friend, hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff, one of the creative geniuses of MGM production at its height.
The Life cover also revealed a strange perversity: austerely presenting herself without necklace or brooch, Taylor seemed to be wearing the vertical, white tracheotomy scar on her throat as a fashion accessory. It was a tour de force of ambiguous eroticism, like a Catholic saint’s statue of a martyr flaunting her wounds.
Taylor enthroned with her Butterfield 8 trophy is probably the greatest post-Oscars photo ever taken. Next would be Terry O’Neill’s picture of Faye Dunaway breakfasting at the Beverly Hills Hotel the morning after she won the Best Actress award for Network (1976). Lounging at poolside in her creamy silk dressing gown, newspapers scattered at her feet, Dunaway contemplates her Oscar with a tinge of ironic detachment and fatigue.
This bleak, brilliant photo marks the arrival of a new generation in Hollywood, hip, smart, and cynical. The mythic grandeur of old Hollywood and its pantheon of celestial stars is already gone.
* [“Camille Paglia on Oscar Glamour Then and Now: ‘The Mythic Grandeur of Old Hollywood Is Gone,’ ” The Hollywood Reporter, February 23, 2017.]
2
ART OF SONG LYRIC*
Thirty years ago, during my second year of teaching humanities at the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts (1985–86), I created an elective two-semester course called “Lyric” that began with ancient Greek poetry and ended with modern song lyrics, from Broadway musicals to folk-rock. In the course catalog, I described it as “a study of how contemporary song lyrics developed from the tradition of lyric poetry and folk ballads.” My aim was to demonstrate how poetry had begun as ritual performance, accompanied on the lyre, and how after a half millennium of the Gutenberg print era, poetry had returned to its performance roots and its spiritual bonding with music.
My immediate target was our music majors in both the classical and jazz programs. Many young guitarists and drummers were playing in bar bands and trying to develop their own material, in hopes of landing a record contract. The writing requirement for the course was “critical or creative,” with the option to compose original song lyrics. The second semester, which covered Romanticism to modernism, had a natural organic shape, because Lyrical Ballads, the revolutionary 1798 volume of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was partly inspired by the new interest in folk culture typified by Robert Burns’ collecting of rural Scottish ballads.
I was concerned about the declining quality and prestige of popular song lyrics in the 1980s, when visual flash, tailored to the exciting new genre of music videos, was increasingly dominating music-industry priorities. In hard rock, flamboyant virtuoso guitar solos were replacing the marriage of vivid lyrics with expressive vocals. Working with aspiring songwriters, I found that exposure to major poetry sharpened their awareness of the power and possibilities of language. Simple strategies—such as typing up their own lyrics-in-process to peruse visually—helped them clarify basic issues of theme and form and detect any inconsistencies in point of view.
After a merger in 1987 with our next-door neighbor, the Philadelphia College of Art, to form the University of the Arts, “Lyric” evolved into its present one-semester incarnation, “Art of Song Lyric,” a course of general cultural appreciation for students from all majors. As my coverage of music history expanded, poetry per se was dropped for reasons of time, and the creative writing component was also discontinued. Term papers now focused on popular, jazz, or art song in any time period or world region. Frequent topics remain leading lyricists and vocalists, past or present, as well as musical groups, famous or not. For example, I have periodically gotten intriguing papers about struggling club bands in metropolitan Philadelphia and New Jersey.
My classroom procedure remains the same: I distribute lyric sheets of selected songs, and we methodically analyze them like poems, with close attention paid to voice, tone, imagery, and narrative (if relevant), with its ancillary premises of character, scene, and time. It is crucial to do my own lyric sheets, because published versions of even classic hit songs are often startlingly inaccurate, with misheard words, jumbled-together lines, or missing stanza divisions that obscure a shapely song structure. I play the song twice, before and after our discussion. Ideally, the students on second hearing will experience a sense of pleasurable surprise and revelation, as the song seems to have strangely altered and expanded on its own.
My song choices have st
eadily changed, but one favorite remains fixed because of its resounding success over the decades: I always begin the semester with “Silver Dagger,” the traditional ballad from the Southern Appalachian Mountains with which Joan Baez opened her blockbuster first album in 1960. The economy and compression of this haunting song, streamlined by generations of oral transmission, should stand as an inspiration to any writer.
Don’t sing love songs, you’ll wake my mother,
She’s sleeping here right by my side,
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can’t be your bride.
All men are false, says my mother,
They’ll tell you wicked, lovin’ lies,
And the very next evening, they’ll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.
My daddy is a handsome devil,
He’s got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he’s loved and wronged.
Go court another tender maiden
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I have been warned, and I’ve decided
To sleep alone all of my life.
In this brilliant theater of the here and now, a young woman conducts a tense exchange with her serenading suitor through the open window of what may well be a one-room shack. She urgently hushes him; his song is stifled so that hers can begin—a searing elegy for lost hopes. Poverty cancels out impropriety: she is sitting up in bed, next to her sleeping mother, whose steel dagger gleams silver, as if in moonlight. The mother’s tight grip represents her world of fear, her thirst for vengeance, and ultimately her choking of her daughter’s life.
Provocations Page 2
