Friday, May 9, 2008
Camille Paglia slams bloggers and trendy academics for degrading language -- and calls for a passionate revival of the great artistic tradition of the West.
Apr 7, 2005 | Camille Paglia's first major work since "Sexual Personae," the 1990 bestseller that cracked a bullwhip over the heads of dogmatic feminists and a p.c. academe and turned its author into our favorite provocateur, appears, at first glance, to be a surprisingly demure offering. "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads 43 of the World's Best Poems," in fact, was almost titled something as modest as "Readings"; she says she didn't want anything to overshadow the poems (from Shakespeare to Plath) that she chose to honor.
But, true to Paglia's form, there's an incendiary call to arms inside "Break, Blow, Burn" (a phrase taken from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV"). Her celebration of these poems -- each reprinted and electrically interpreted -- is paired with a blistering critique of what she sees as the cultural and academic forces that have conspired to undermine our enjoyment of poetry, lessening its importance in the process. She demands reform and believes it will be up to graduate students and poets themselves to lead the way. "In an era ruled by materialism and unstable geopolitics, art must be restored to the center of public education," she writes.
We caught up with Paglia, a founding Salon contributor, as she commenced her book tour. Our talk covered a range of topics, from lazy college elites, poets who didn't make her cut (sorry, Ginsberg, Bishop, Eliot, Ashbery) to raising a son while refusing to act like Rosie O'Donnell.
This is your first big book since "Sexual Personae."
Well, there was my 1998 book on Alfred Hitchcock's film "The Birds." And I did always write original material within my two essay collections. But writing requires time, and I do give it time. This one took an exorbitant amount of time, to the extent that, as you know, I had to resign as a columnist from Salon to work on "Break, Blow, Burn." The problem really wasn't the time required to write the column. It was the amount of filtering I had to do of other people's columns to keep the Salon column fresh.
And you had to absorb a lot of it. I mean, a week like this -- Terri Schiavo, the pope -- would have been tough.
Yes, exactly. And of course I was always in competition with the other big-name columnists -- who would shamelessly rob from me. You know, it's like I would be in Salon on Thursday, and something from it would show up in Maureen Dowd's weekend column, and so on. But I had to make sure that when people went to it that it didn't just seem to be a rehash of someone else's column. And that's the problem now, of course. I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.
The blogs, for example, are becoming so self-referential. If people want to be better writers, they can't just read the blogs! You've got to look at something that's outside this rushing world of evanescent words. Nowhere in blog pages does anyone pay attention to the individual word -- things are moving too fast. Someone like Emily Dickinson was working with the dictionary and looking at the etymology of the word, so that you have all this tremendous stuff going on within a single word!
My publisher forwarded this amusing thing from Gawker.com the other day -- it was reporting on the review of my book in the New York Times Book Review. It really was quite revealing. It was written by a young woman who said she was a recent graduate of Yale. And she said that as she was reading that long, three-page review by Clive James, her eyes glazed over because it was about poetry. And I thought, Oh, my God -- if this isn't a testament to what's gone wrong in the Ivy League!
Here you have a smart young aspiring writer who's saying that somehow she has not been educated in a way that allows her to appreciate poetry. She's never been shown that you can become a better prose writer through reading poetry. I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore -- tracking words down to their roots. It's hopelessly old-fashioned. But that's the whole basis of the power of English as a literary language.
I say in my introduction that I'm in love with English -- it's a phenomenal instrument. People who like my work recognize that I have many styles as a writer -- the high academic style, the newspaper style, the conversational style. My sense of English comes from the fact that I was born into an Italian immigrant family which was still discovering America.
I read where you said you tried to make yourself as invisible as possible for this book. To most of your readers, the idea of rendering yourself invisible sounds like quite a feat.
I felt it was important that I submerge myself because in the four-year period from "Sexual Personae" to "Vamps & Tramps" in the early '90s I had as much publicity as any person could ever want. You have to remember, my first book wasn't published until I was 43, and that book had been rejected by seven publishers and five agents. I came on the scene without any publicity. But when "Sexual Personae" started to get publicity, which was almost a year later after it was published, it started to get viciously attacked. And I counterattacked!
And so there was a period there -- when I had three bestselling paperback books from Vintage in a row -- that represented a whole uprising by a very repressed wing of feminism. When my work was criticized, people went: "Oh, she's antifeminist! She's a neocon." For heaven's sakes -- I had just voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 primary! An insurgency was going on -- a major conflict with smug and self-satisfied and exploitative feminist leaders. We were just coming out of the era ruled by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and so I was in battle for years. But that was it -- after 1994, I went back to my usual private ways. People say, "She's everywhere!" But I'm not -- it just seems that way because of the Web and the many documentaries I've been interviewed for.
When you were doing this book, it's clear you felt you needed to ratchet back that persona.
Yes, because it's irrelevant to this book. The people who were really reading me seriously would recognize the real me -- I'm a classroom teacher, and I've never changed my lifestyle. People nagged me: "Oh, you should quit that job." Are you kidding? This is my vocation! And I never let media into my classroom, ever. And because I never let any reporters into my classes (and they were demanding it), that professional life has remained invisible. Some people think I must be some sort of a flibbertigibbet, running around the world in front of cameras. But if film crews want to interview me, they must come to Philadelphia and meet me after my classes are over for the day. That's my life, and it will continue to be my life.
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