I liked Sexual Persona.

Hell is other people. Specifically, hell is Camile Paglia, Mickey Kaus, Gregg Easterbrook and Christopher Hitchens competing in Who Wants to Be A Contrarian? in every fucking publication I like. I've really come to hate these people.

Hell is other people. Specifically, hell is Camile Paglia, Mickey Kaus, Gregg Easterbrook and Christopher Hitchens competing in Who Wants to Be A Contrarian? in every fucking publication I like.

I have this image of Jean Paul Sarte holding his head in his hands and screaming -- like the famous painting by Edvard Munch.

I too subjected myself to that interview. She's unbearably self-important, and to hear her rave about Limbaugh! It's incredible to me that an academic would show such disregard for Limbaugh's history of lies and hypocrisy. I guess she prizes bloviation and self-aggrandizement over truth.

Not to be a contrarian, but I did not like Sexual Personae. Just more of the same sexed-up pseudo-intellectualism that plays right into the hands of the right-wingers and all those convinced a liberal arts education is the surest path to hell. Paglia and her ilk are precisely why academia and in particular the humanities come under such fire. Unfortunately for the integrity of the institution, she probably has tenure.

I'm not sure which is more galling--Paglia's ode to Limbaugh or her claim to be the first blogger (and a disciplined one at that). ::gag!::

Camille Paglia is an "academic" in the sense that Charles Murray is an academic.

As for putting her out of her misery, that would be an act of kindness -- for which there are recipients far more deserving than she.

so typical...when all else fails attack them on their superficial antics and make up the rest. i think her flame has long gone out, she doesn't even piss me off anymore, just bores me...i guess it is up to ann coulter to carry the torch.

I honestly thought she was a giant troll, knowing nothing about her past writings.

Camille Paglia? Cultural left?

She always has been a rightwinger -- of the libertarian stripe, of course -- but a rightwinger nevertheless. Her "scholarship" is probably worse than Murray's and that's saying something.

She's just another whore with no real talents who was famous once for being controversial and is trying to rehash the past. It reminds me of all the rock singers who jumped on the disco trend in the late 70's. All of these pundits do the same. They could care less about the real consequences of what they say so long as it gets them their next interview or cable appearance.

The most salient aspect of that interview was its near-total pot-calling-the-kettle-black projection. Rumsfeld is guilty of grand-standing narcissism, journalists are snide, Mo Dowd is a catty, third-rate wannabe sorority queen. Letterman is smirky and smarmy. Hannity is drunk on himself. Maddona is schizophrenic. Bloggers dump out reams and reams of bad prose. etc.

Madonna, not "maddona". ugh

"Sexual Personae" is always good for a laugh - I mean, men invented civilization because they can aim their piss? Priceless.

I always like it when, just as I'm thinking about subscribing to Salon, they go and publish something like this. It reminds me why I've never subscribed and can continue to spend my hard-earned money on more worthwhile and life-affirming things, like ale and whores.

In what alternative universe was Camille Paglia ever considered part of the left. Or an intellectual, for that matter.

I thought Sexual Personae was one vague insight stretched over a great deal of twaddle to make a not-hopelessly-thin book with some nonsense in it.

Unfortunately she's kept stretching it since, until now an average cross-section of her career can be measured in particles we haven't proved the existence of yet.

I found Camille Paglia intriguing at first. But her interminable columns in Salon bagging Hillary Clinton: what a recipe for boredom. I stopped reading them when Hillary became a Senator for Paglia's home state. I guess you can't get rid of tar babies that easily. :-)

Camille Paglia's rhetorical strategy has always been intimidation via pedantry. Few people have the time to amass equivalently huge compost piles of historical and cultural references, so her grandiose interpretational collages often go unchallenged. I'm sure she has said some true and insightful things in her day, but they are lost in her diarrhagic whirlwind.

Sorry, that was a little Pagliaesque, but I had fun writing it.

She is rush's loveslave.

The FLA lady in a vegatative state for 13 years has days better than her.

Phlsphr,
"diahhragic". Niiiice.

I struggled through the Salon piece, six pages worth, thinking she might eventually say something insightful.

All she said was,"Everybody is a suckass hypocrite except me and Rush". I think she made her point, but it wasn't the one she set out to make.

I can't decide who is more of an irrelevant windbag: Paglia or Chris Hitchens.

I know. We should have a contest!

On the topic of mercy killing, who else is for pulling Dubya's feed tube?

how many people get influenced by people like paglia, friedman and matthews who take their criticism too much to heart because they suffer under the mistaken assumption that theyre left leaning?

why is it you dont see a reverse of the above? why is it you dont see commentators who drop hints that suggests they might be rightists but turn around and espouse left leaning ideology?

Alas, Paglia is reflective of the cultural left in a very real way----60's lefty intellectual lefties had nothing bit contempt for feminism---Hurricane Camille continues that grand old tradition......

I did like the fact that she took on the NYT etc. for whining about museum looting in Baghdad after making no efforts at all prior to the looting at informing the ill-informed American populace that we were about to risk destroying aftifacts and buildings from a very old civilization. Older than the oldest fast-food outlet, even.

I'm with Ted B. in that I reflexively despise contrarians. As far as I'm concerned, the contrarian stance is a cheap rhetorical trick that a writer uses to artificially boost their credibility with the reader. It's just one more besotting vice in our current cultural age of irony.

I'm with Ted B. in that I reflexively despise contrarians. As far as I'm concerned, the contrarian stance is a cheap rhetorical trick that a writer uses to artificially boost their credibility with the reader. It's just one more besotting vice in our current cultural age of irony.

Me three.

Isn't it weird how the person Paglia most reminds one of these days is Lucianne Goldberg?

Come now, people! Paglia's books are not to be put aside lightly. They are rather to be thrown aside violently, preferably towards an open window or a trash can.

It is astonishing that people like Paglia and Hitchens are called "intellectuals." They are mere pundits and middlebrow entertainers. Meanwhile, real intellectuals (in the fully dignified sense of the word) such as Michel Serres are little known, or not known at all.

America is dumb.

Could not stand to waste a precious "guest pass" to Salon on Paglia's tripefest:

However, I did get a giggle from the front snippet thus:
"She also cast a disapproving eye on ... bloggers ("endless reams of bad prose!")."

heh heh

almost as good as "diarrhagic whirlwind" penned upthread by Phlsphr.... but not as effective!

She wants to be Ayn Rand when she grows up. Nuf said.

Some of these comments remind me of Normal Finkelstein's take on Christopher Hitchens, "the master at this pose of maverick unpredictability".