“Who is impious enough to believe that earth’s contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began Sexual Personae (parodying the New Testament), ‘In the beginning was nature.’ And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe….Environmentalism is a noble cause. It is damaged by propaganda and half-truths.”
Response to reader question about the publishing by Susan Sontag’s former lover Annie Leibovitz of “the photos and details of her final days”: “Last fall, I was astonished at the inert lack of response by cultural commentators to Annie Leibovitz’s gross publication of her photos of Sontag’s corpse, as well as of the bloated Sontag hospitalized before her death. When Newsweek posted the weird corpse photo online (to accompany its October 2, 2006, cover story on Leibovitz), I could find very little intelligent reaction on the blogosphere—which is one reason I decided it was time to return to Salon.
“For Leibovitz to use those photos to sell a new book seemed callously exploitative to me—though I have been one of Sontag’s most outspoken critics. The major media, presumably cowed by Leibovitz, raised no questions about longstanding reports of a bitter ending to her relationship with Sontag years before. Were no red flags raised for editors or journalists at Leibovitz’s sudden candor and exhibitionism when Sontag was safely dead?
“Nor did anyone seem to blink at Leibovitz boasting about buying Sontag an apartment in Paris and helping maintain Sontag’s lifestyle in her private Manhattan penthouse with a gigantic wraparound terrace (pictured in the book; Leibovitz lived elsewhere)….What does it say about so prominent a leftist intellectual that she was being effectively supported by Vanity Fair magazine (Leibovitz’s employer)?—whose orientation is toward an entertainment and celebrity culture that the public Sontag ostentatiously opposed….
“And as long as I am lodging complaints, what about the excessive number of friends and acquaintances who were allowed to write Sontag’s major obituaries two years ago? Their personal anecdotes were naïvely vain enough to unintentionally reveal what a party animal she was. Parties were Sontag’s element: it was there that she played the philosopher queen bee, dazzling with her Delphic pronouncements and curtly giving the cold shoulder to the unworthy. And it was there that she embedded herself with the powers that be in the publishing and literary world, which closed ranks around her. (In contrast, I avoid parties wherever possible and have even declined my publisher’s offer of book parties.)
Over time, Sontag’s reputation will stand or fall not on her compulsive socializing and networking (which should raise doubts about her putative seriousness) but on her writing. Others will make those judgments. I myself feel that Sontag was a serial name-dropper who made gestures at subjects rather than saying something new, true, or memorable about them. Except for a few essays, when she was a witness to the surging avant-garde scene in downtown New York, Sontag rarely delivered what she advertised.”
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“Go Hillary: Camille Paglia on the remarkable reinvention of Mrs. Clinton” (cover line), Harper’s Bazaar (U.K.), May 2007. Paglia describes how she was “a huge fan of Hillary” at the start: “I thought she embodied the feisty, outspoken spirit of my generation of postwar American women. However, I became swiftly disillusioned when she mishandled her first assignment: healthcare reform.” A huge opportunity for bipartisan consensus was lost because of Hillary’s “arrogance and obsession with secrecy.” Paglia says that she was the first to compare Hillary to Eva Perón (“the analogy became standard after that”) and that she considered Hillary’s behavior during the Lewinsky scandal to be “reprehensible.” However, “my views moderated when The Times [U.K.] asked me to review Hillary’s memoir, Living History, in 2003. I was pleasantly surprised at the case made in it for Hillary’s lifetime of political commitment.”
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Paglia, review, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture by Jon Savage, The New York Times Book Review, May 6, 2007. Reprinted in the International Herald Tribune.
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Margaret Wente, interview, “Camille Paglia: Hillary can’t win—and shouldn’t. The kids are all right, but academia is not,” The Globe and Mail, September 15, 2007. Paglia responds to Wente’s description of Hillary having done “pretty well on her own” as a U.S. senator from New York: “She was able to succeed as a carpetbagger in New York State because she’s the very image of the corporate-legal meritocracy of Manhattan. I cannot stand the snobbery and elitism of this lawyer-heavy superclass. Hillary and her friends are symptomatic of that class. She can glide through those corridors extremely well. But one feels that she has no real pleasures. There’s something about Hillary that’s anhedonic—the inability to take pleasure in the moment. Everything for her is this beady-eyed scheming for the future, combined with this mass of resentments for the past, the people who have done them wrong.”
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Paglia, “Gender Studies and Male Sexuality,” The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 21, 2007. Inside headline: “Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality.” Pull quote: “When any field becomes a closed circle, the result is groupthink and cant.” Generally negative review of three books from university presses: Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning by Murat Aydemir; Impotence: A Cultural History by Angus McLaren; Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid by Lisa Jean Moore. “All three of these books, in different ways, share the same dourly judgmental gender-studies doctrine….The stultifying clichés of gender studies must end.”
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Roundtable, “Can Politicians Solve Climate Change?,” Democracy Special, The Observer (U.K.), September 30, 2007. Paglia: “Whether we are presently experiencing genuine climate change, or whether the global weather system, powered by the sun, is simply undergoing a transient fluctuation of the convection patterns of average temperatures, remains ambiguous. Politicians hawking hysterical global-warming dogma do a disservice to science.”
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Kerry Reid, “Hell in a Handbag takes ‘Birds’ on Wild Flight,” Chicago Tribune, October 12, 2007. Theater review of the remount of a 2001 show originally staged by Sweetback Productions: an “astute and hilarious deconstruction of Hitchcock’s 1963 ornithological nightmare” by David Cerda and Pauline Pang. The script was inspired by Paglia’s 1998 book on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds for the British Film Institute. Paglia is a character in the play, “the on-set acting coach/therapist” for Tippi Hedren. The fictive Paglia also “pursues an affair with doomed schoolteacher Annie Hayworth,” played by “a brilliant Cerda” in drag.
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Liz Smith, Celebrity News, The Baltimore Sun, December 19, 2007. “ ‘I revere Norman Mailer as a unique modern voice. Shrewd, sly, and oddly cherubic, he was like a garrulous blogger, tirelessly processing the stream of contemporary events through his brilliantly scintillating intellect.’ So writes Camille Paglia in the year-end issue of Rolling Stone” [after Mailer’s death].
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Paglia, Salon.com column, on the presidential primaries, January 9, 2008. “Hillary’s feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm’s length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham’s abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage—the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.
“Hillary’s willingness to tolerate Bill’s compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause—which, unlike her self-sa
crificing mother, she identifies with near-messianic personal ambition….Hillary’s disdain for masculinity fits right into the classic feminazi package, which is why Hillary acts on Gloria Steinem like catnip….The Clintons live to campaign. It’s what holds them together and gives them a glowing sense of meaning and value.”
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Gary Kramer, “Horror Comedy ‘Teeth’ Glistens,” The San Francisco Bay Times, January 24, 2008. Interview with writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein, whose new film was inspired by the myth of the vagina dentata: “I learned about it years ago in college [Bennington] from Camille Paglia, who referenced it in late-nineteenth-century literature. It was fruitful territory. The myth is pervasive in ancient cultures and religions. It deals with fears men had about women. It had not been addressed much in pop culture, and I thought it would be informative and fun.” [Paglia rewrote the passage in Lichtenstein’s script where the heroine intently surfs the Web to inform herself about the vagina dentata. However, in a piquant surprise, the Writers Guild overruled Lichtenstein’s granting Paglia a writing credit in the final cut because she is not a Guild member. So he simply thanked her in the closing credits.]
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Paglia, Culture Klatsch column, “Why the Melting-Pot Ideal Must Not Melt,” in conversation with Ingrid Sischy about immigrants and immigration, Interview magazine, February 2008.
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Paglia, “Why Women Shouldn’t Vote for Hillary,” The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.), April 20, 2008. “Is Hillary Clinton the savior of feminism? Or its albatross, dragging feminism backward under a weary weight of old-guard victimology and male-bashing?…Any woman with the temerity to endorse Barack Obama (as I do) is condemned as a ‘traitor’ to her sex….Hillary has always been a policy wonk, a functionary attuned to bureaucratic process, but she has never shown executive ability, which makes her quest for the presidency problematic….Well into her second term as a U.S. senator, Hillary lacks a single example of major legislative achievement.”
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Paglia, Salon.com column, May 14, 2008. “Most of the media fell hook, line, and sinker for the ‘Iron my shirt!’ stunt at a Hillary campaign event in January in New Hampshire, where two scruffy male hecklers were clearly in collusion with her staff. (The signs—including one suspiciously permitted on the stage itself—were carefully positioned and lit, and Hillary had a pat prepared line to draw camera attention to them.) Those dorky guys, at least one with a link to a radio station, are far too young to have the slightest knowledge of an era when women ironed men’s shirts—or when shirts needed ironing at all! Businessmen’s shirts go to the cleaners nowadays, and everyone else’s gear is just tossed into the dryer. That hoax was designed to reawaken the atavistic resentments of older women voters—and it worked.”
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Kate Ward, interviewer, “In Defense of the Working Girl,” in cover story package on Sex and the City (at release of the first Sex and the City movie), Entertainment Weekly, May 23, 2008. Paglia: “Sex and the City is extremely important in entertainment history because of the way it foregrounded the pro-sex feminist movement of the 1990s that I was part of. The show is the most visible result of that generational shift away from the anti-pornography crusade that had dominated feminism in the 1970s and ’80s. It was a tremendous explosion, proclaiming that the young modern woman was no longer afraid of sex and was an independent agent who actively embraced it. On the one hand, Sex and the City is a love poem to New York and to the glitter of Manhattan. But on the other hand, there’s a chilliness to it because it starkly shows how young, unmarried women are at the mercy of men who have more wealth and power….Over time, the show really turned into an accurate anthropological chronicle of the bittersweet dilemma faced by the modern career woman. For every big career gain she makes, there’s a trade-off in her personal life.”
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Paglia, “Hillary Clinton’s Candidacy Has Done Feminism No Favors,” The Telegraph (U.K.), May 24, 2008. “Hillary has tried to have it both ways: to batten on her husband’s nostalgic popularity while simultaneously claiming to be a victim of sexism. Well, which is it? Are men convenient sugar daddies or condescending oppressors?”
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Paglia, Salon.com column, June 11, 2008. “And here’s another whopping female advantage: Hillary could jet around the country with an elaborate, color-keyed wardrobe and a professional hair and makeup crew, who plastered and insta-lifted her with dewy salon uber-ointments and cutting-edge technology before every appearance. No male candidate has ever had that theatrical privilege. (John Edwards, in contrast, was heaped with scorn for his simple yet pricey haircut.) When the mega-prep for some reason failed—as on a frigid morning in Iowa—the resultant photo of Hillary in realistically wrinkled 60-year-old mode caused repercussions around the world. Golda Meir, with her robustly lived-in face and matriarchal jowls, would have given ever-primping Hollywood Hillary a derisive Bronx cheer.”
Paglia describes receiving a backstage gift of DVDs from the staff of Brazilian superstar Daniela Mercury after an illustrated lecture on “Varieties of the Erotic in 20th Century Art” in the Frontiers of Thought series at the Teatro Castro Alves in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. “Watching Daniela Mercury in action, I realized just how bored and disillusioned I have become by American popular entertainment over the past fifteen years, when Madonna went corporate and lost her grip on the Zeitgeist. All that passionate, improvisational, open-air vitality has been going on in Brazil while American music fans have been trapped like doped steers in the commercial stockyard of overpriced, over-packaged arena concerts, where performers trot out canned patter in between the computerized special-effects lighting. Low-budget ‘alternative’ musicians are just as programmatic, with their rote political bromides or their dated affectations of urban irony.”
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Paglia, preface to Camp Nest (Place Space), book series produced by American designer Todd Oldham (2008). “Located near a small pond in the Hudson River valley between the Catskill and Berkshire mountains, Joseph Holtzman’s Camp Nest is a singular fusion of several antecedents in American architectural history….The British town-and-country shuttle of the rich and famous was mimicked by U.S. tycoons in the Gilded Age….As a country retreat, Camp Nest rejects the pomp and circumstance of America’s landed gentry and opts instead for a more casual, vernacular idiom. It aligns itself with Adirondack Mountain cabins, with their rustic local materials and humble display of natural wood.”
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Paglia, Salon.com column, August 13, 2008. “On the pop front, Madonna’s life has been passing before our eyes like a decadent German expressionist film….Sex for sternly workaholic Madonna has become a brittle concept rather than a sensual reality….What happened to Madonna? I have had a series of revelations about this since my trip to Brazil in May….Thinking about Daniela Mercury [dubbed ‘Brazil’s Madonna’], I suddenly realized that Madonna is a displaced person, a refugee. She has lost her roots—Motown, the city of Detroit (called the Motor City because of its auto industry), outside of which she grew up. Detroit had been a major capital of black music in her youth, but its vitality ebbed, partly because of the economic recession that devastated so many Midwestern industrial cities. Madonna would be instrumental in giving artistic legitimacy to disco music, once an underground style of black and gay clubs. As a dancer, she zeroed in on the propulsive, percussive African rhythms at disco’s heart.
“Second, the immigrant Italian-American culture from which Madonna emerged also disintegrated over time. I too am a product of it, and I am heartsick that, because of social assimilation, very little is left (except for the vulgar libels of The Sopranos)….Daniela Mercury, in contrast, has never left her roots [in her native city of Salvador da Bahia.]…Bahia is the most Africanized region in Brazil. Up to 80 percent of its inhabitants have been estimated to have some African lineage.” Discusses “religious syncretism” and the survival of Yoruba cults in modern Candombl�
� in Bahia. Annotated list of video links illustrating Daniela’s artistic superiority to current work by Madonna.
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Paglia, “Why Philly Matters: Ribbons in the Skyline. Springsteen famously sang about the streets of Philadelphia, but our most stunning achievement lies a bit higher. Touring the city’s breathtaking, sadly unheralded architecture, Camille Paglia offers a simple piece of advice: Look up, people,” Philadelphia magazine, December 2, 2008.
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Roundtable, “Women on the Verge: The real meaning of heels,” cover story, The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), December 13, 2008. Among the contributors: Germaine Greer, Vivienne Westwood, Antonia Fraser. Paglia: “In our time of amplified bosoms, liposuction, and Botox, pretty feet are the one thing that can’t be faked. Male-to-female transsexuals can get it all chopped off, but they’re often still stuck with those big, bony feet. Today’s ultra-high heels are unforgivingly candid about legs too—showing off great ones and cruelly exposing thick ankles and knock knees. Height does indeed equal power in a man’s world—which is how shrimpy Napoleon’s name ended up on a complex.”
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“Pleasure Is My Business,” Criminal Minds, CBS crime-drama series, Season 4, Episode 16, aired February 25, 2009. Directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton. A high-priced call girl is killing top corporate executives in Dallas. FBI agent Aaron Hotchner (Thomas Gibson) in opening voiceover: “The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men but rather their conqueror, an outlaw who controls the sexual channel between nature and culture—Camille Paglia.”
Provocations Page 68
