Shifting gears into pop, I must apologize to the many readers who were aghast that my last column made no mention of Madonna's new album, "Music." Alas, I must sheepishly confess that I'm still struggling to get through it. While there are several good songs, too many others cannibalize Madonna's past work or tart things up with grating, hackneyed special effects. Considering how Madonna has been boasting in every magazine of her newfound fulfillment as a mother and a gal with a steady beau, the CD's overall mood is amazingly dreary. I was often reminded of Helen Kallianiotes' star turn as the hilariously negative, neurotic, lesbian hitchhiker in "Five Easy Pieces" (1970).

All that Ashtanga yoga hasn't made a dent in what appears to be Madonna's fundamental depressiveness -- ordinarily a great spur to art-making. "Music's" cluttered cover design is oddly gimmicky: the waxworks rhinestone-cowgirl persona, which bears little relation to the album's contents, is a rare example of Madonna's iconic instinct failing her. Nonetheless, her talent will surely rebound. This is a great star with much more to contribute to culture.

Cardinal media moments since my last column: Lifetime cable TV's "Movie Mini-thon," alternately introduced by Meredith Baxter and the still-divine Donna Mills (the deliciously vampy Abby Ewing of CBS's "Knots Landing"). Baxter's 1992 performance as a real-life San Diego murderess in the two parts of "The Betty Broderick Story," "A Woman Scorned" and "Her Final Fury," remains one of the most impressive pieces of work by an American actress in the last 20 years. Though I've watched rebroadcasts of that tense docudrama times without number, I still thrill with admiration at Baxter's tough energy, pinpoint vocal work and insight into both sexual relations and American character. "The Betty Broderick Story" should be required viewing at every acting school.

Other highlights: MSNBC's "Headliners & Legends" is to be commended for its absorbing profiles of Barbara Eden and Valerie Bertinelli. Who knew that Eden, sexpot star of NBC's classic "I Dream of Jeannie," was a homely wallflower in adolescence, or that the perky Bertinelli of CBS's "One Day at a Time" was such a dynamo of bossy Italian-American power? The archival photos and family interviews in both programs were superb.

My partner Alison and I were knocked out by HBO's wonderfully photographed and edited series, "G-String Divas," which is as X-rated as anything ever seen on commercial television. My reverence for the sexual persona of the stripper is well-known. But it was a revelation to see the notorious "Summer" up close and in action. (She's a Philadelphia dancer with an unexpectedly wholesome manner who was caught up in a scandal after an obsessed customer murdered his wife for her sake.) On HBO, Summer's fluid, acrobatic skills and slow, serene taunting of the audience were riveting and, distanced by TV, approached abstract art. The only parallel is Bella Darvi's hypnotic performance as the regal Babylonian harlot in the haunting 1954 film, "The Egyptian."

Turner Classic Movies cable channel should be applauded for its airing of classic, subtitled films from the French New Wave. Thirty years ago, with my taste for decadent sagas like Roger Vadim's "Les Liaisons dangereuses," I scorned two of TCM's recent features -- Eric Rohmer's "Ma Nuit Chez Maud" (1969) and Jacques Demy's "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" (1964) -- as rank sentimentality. But now, in these dark ages of Hollywood decline, how beguiling they seem! The patience with which Rohmer's camera focuses on Marie-Christine Barrault's intelligent, sensual changes of expression in "Maud"; the emotional purity and ravishing use of proto-psychedelic color in "Cherbourg": how lucky my generation was to be immersed in these rich, protean films. European art films were an enormous part of my education outside the classroom, and it is tragic that they have dropped so far off the radar screen for today's American students, marooned in their sterile mall culture.

Thanks to Salon reader Robert W. Holzbach for his kind words about the surprising fact that Lingua Franca -- a magazine that began as a voice of educational reform but gradually drifted off toward the campus elite -- has in its October issue declared, after a survey, that my 700-page book "Sexual Personae," published in 1990 by Yale University Press, was the No. 1 academic book of the decade.

There is also a hilarious pullout poster parodying contemporary academe as Raphael's "The School of Athens" (one of my favorite paintings) with my mentor Harold Bloom depicted as Aristotle and me as Plato. We are promenading and discoursing beneath Raphael's grand Roman arches, while the rest of the campus luminaries are crowded to the side and below. The irony, of course, is that I am completely ostracized in high-level American academe, whose careerist mechanism has elevated so many plodding mediocrities, breathless fad-followers and jabbering mynah birds.

Lingua Franca's turnaround should encourage every embattled teacher out there. The winds of change are abroad. The foundation of my work is my enduring respect for greatness, a currently unfashionable idea. Whatever power I may have as a scholar and cultural commentator comes from my lifelong subordination to great artists and writers, whom I raptly studied and drew from.

Great art, like sublime nature, is inexhaustible.

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