Brendan and I got to have lunch and a rat-a-tat gab yesterday with Camille Paglia. We’ll post the highlights in mp3 form by the end of the week. So much has changed in 15 years since her Sexual Personae rocket went up… since I sat in awe for her transfiguration at MIT. We’d barely heard of the Internet then. The Web didn’t exist. Since then we’ve come to terms with gay marriage and the re-churching of the culture; with the modernization of genocide and right-to-life politics. We’ve elected Slick Willy twice, then Dubya twice. But the big-picture news (and it takes Paglia’s brassy grip on history to see and say it) is that the we Americans have slipped half-unawares into a Roman imperial cycle at some rather late and decadent stage, as revealed in our military triumphalism abroad and our popular culture at home.
I remember the critic Christopher Ricks sniffing that Sexual Personae would be filed someday in the history of publicity, not literary criticism. Typical academic envy talking. Paglia’s new book shows off her “close reading” chops on four centuries of English poetry. But she is indeed a performance artist, with an uncanny, risk-taking flair for tracking the Zeitgeist–which is why we’ll always leap at the chance to engage her. She has disparaged the first generation of bloggers and has reservations about what the Internet is doing to education. But she is also an accomplished practitioner in the new media, notably at Salon.com. She had some strong observations on what the Internet has done to her own writing stance, and what its graphics do to our visual imaginations in general. I will post it all soon. Paglia’s free-standing critical iconoclasm and her voracious range have been inspirations in my adult education.
