sexual personae

Sexual Personae is a fairly rubbish book. She goes through all the "greats" of literature and philsophy going "sex, sex, it's all sex! Look at all this sex!" until she gets to De Sade and then she goes "Sex? No sex here, this is all about politics. Next!"

then i read vamps and tramps.

This is the King Arthur bookshop in Tintagel, right?

Your customer isn't D3bb13 B3ll3w, is she, by any chance?

If so, I want that Fanclub CD back.

someone gave this to me a few years ago and i never got around to reading it. should i?

I'm suspicious of anyone who hates Sontag so much.

no, it is not 1995 anymore (xpost)

everything paglia says has since been disproven by science.

lol

i do enjoy noodle vague's display name, though.

Camille Paglia is brilliant, has incredible verve, knows what she's talking about and has dismissed several fakers and mediocrities in Academia. Sexual Personae is her best book.

yeah, but she's kind of a nut

No she's not, have the decency to at least provide some basis to your slurs.

Camille Paglia is brilliant, has incredible verve, knows what she's talking about and has dismissed several fakers and mediocrities in Academia.

NOTM / x-post

Who's sockpuppet is Vision?

Lesson number one: criticism is only valid when you know what you're talking about, i.e., please take the trouble to actually read the book.

"I know, right" (oh the irony), two questions:
-what's "sock puppet"?
-do you mean perhaps "whose"?

No she's not, have the decency to at least provide some basis to your slurs.

Allow me:
http://privat.ub.uib.no/BUBSY/burchill.htm

Who's sockpuppet is Vision?

LJ? Tuomas?

http://arts.anu.edu.au/languages/russian/russian_dolls.jpg

lol because those two are responsible for all the idiotic comments/shitty trolling on ilxor.com rite

Everything I've ever read by her is just her harassing you into her "viewpoint". There's never any sense of exploration or discover, just banging the same old nails over the head.

Also, how the fuck is my name supposed to be "ironic"?

Also, why am I arguing with a fucking sockpuppet?

which, by the way, is a fairly self-explanatory term.

Nah, it's the cluelessness. xxpost

If Timi etc, you probably posted that on the off chance nobody would read it thoroughly (which is the way most people go through school and through life, pretending to know what they don't).
Well, I just read everything through those garish colours and I'm glad I did, as it proves my point that Camille Paglia is a destroyer of intellectual mediocrities. This one, btw, calls her a "wop". It was a blunt exchange of faxes where Camille simply exposed the other woman's stupidity. And hey, Camille herself allowed the exchanged to be made published, so it clearly shows how she feels about it. At the end of the day, it's worth repeating: READ!

Lesson number one: criticism is only valid when you know what you're talking about, i.e., please take the trouble to actually read the book.

that seems like a lot of work. also, get off ILX Camile, don't you have a class to teach?

"I know, right", the fact that you can't figure out why your nick is ironic is doubly ironic, is all I can say.

Jesus, this thread has gotten me cranky fast.

Can people stop:

• Stop trolling the shit out of this place

• Stop being assholes

• Just talk about Camille fucking Paglia because that's what this thread is about, well, unless you know a good supplier in the UK.

Hang on, what cluelessness? What's happening? I don't even know anything about this Camile lady.

She's a nut

Can you imagine if you had to work with her, it'd be a fucking nightmare.

Paglia on Palin

Fresh blood for the vampire

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/...lin/index.html

A beady-eyed McCain gets a boost from the charismatic Sarah Palin, a powerful new feminist -- yes, feminist! -- force. Plus: Obama must embrace his dull side.
By Camille Paglia

Sep. 10, 2008 | Rip tide! Is the Obama campaign shooting out to sea like a paper boat?

It's heavy weather for Obama fans, as momentum has suddenly shifted to John McCain -- that hoary, barnacle-encrusted tub that many Democrats like me had thought was full of holes and swirling to its doom in the inky depths of Republican incoherence and fratricide. Gee whilikers, the McCain vampire just won't die! Hit him with a hammer, and he explodes like a jellyfish into a hundred hungry pieces.

Oh, the sadomasochistic tedium of McCain's imprisonment in Hanoi being told over and over and over again at the Republican convention. Do McCain's credentials for the White House really consist only of that horrific ordeal? Americans owe every heroic, wounded veteran an incalculable debt of gratitude, but how do McCain's sufferings in a tiny, squalid cell 40 years ago logically translate into presidential aptitude in the 21st century? Cast him a statue or slap his name on a ship, and let's turn the damned page.

We need a new generation of leadership with fresh ideas and an expansive, cosmopolitan vision -- which is why I support Barack Obama and have contributed to his campaign. My baby-boom generation -- typified by the narcissistic Clintons -- peaked in the 1960s and is seriously past it. But McCain, born before Pearl Harbor, is even older than we are! Why would anyone believe that he holds the key to the future? And why would anyone swallow that preening passel of high-flown rhetoric about "country above all" coming from a seething, short-fused character whose rampant egotism, zigzagging principles, and currying of the gullible press were the distinguishing marks of his senatorial career?

Having said that, I must admit that McCain is currently eating Obama's lunch. McCain's weirdly disconnected persona (beady glowers flashing to frozen grins and back again) has started to look more testosterone-rich than Obama's easy, lanky, reflective candor. What in the world possessed the Obama campaign to let their guy wander like a dazed lamb into a snake pit of religious inquisition like Rick Warren's public forum last month at his Saddleback Church in California? That shambles of a performance -- where a surprisingly unprepared Obama met the inevitable question about abortion with shockingly curt glibness -- began his alarming slide.

As I said in my last column, I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama's efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development and which are painfully wrong for the target audience of rural working-class whites that he has been trying to reach. Obama on the road and even in major interviews has been droppin' his g's like there's no tomorrow. It's analogous to the way stodgy, portly Al Gore (evidently misadvised by the women in his family and their feminist pals) tried to zap himself up on the campaign trail into the happening buff dude that he was not. Both Gore and Obama would have been better advised to pursue a calm, steady, authoritative persona. Forget the jokes -- be boring! That, alas, is what reads as masculine in the U.S.

The over-the-top publicity stunt of a mega-stadium for Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention two weeks ago was a huge risk that worried me sick -- there were too many things that could go wrong, from bad weather to crowd control to technical glitches on the overblown set. But everything went swimmingly. Obama delivered the speech nearly flawlessly -- though I was shocked and disappointed by how little there was about foreign policy, a major area where wavering voters have grave doubts about him. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary event with an overlong but strangely contemplative and spiritually uplifting finale. The music, amid the needlessly extravagant fireworks, morphed into "Star Wars" -- a New Age hymn to cosmic reconciliation and peace.

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars." (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in "The Phantom Menace.") This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.

In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me -- and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).

Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

One reason I live in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington is that, as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life. I frequent fast-food restaurants, shop at the mall, and periodically visit Wal-Mart (its bird-seed section is nonpareil). Like Los Angeles and San Francisco, Manhattan and Washington occupy their own mental zones -- nice to visit but not a place to stay if you value independent thought these days. Ambitious professionals in those cities, if they want to preserve their social networks, are very vulnerable to received opinion. At receptions and parties (which I hate), they're sitting ducks. They have to go along to get along -- poor dears!

It is certainly premature to predict how the Palin saga will go. I may not agree a jot with her about basic principles, but I have immensely enjoyed Palin's boffo performances at her debut and at the Republican convention, where she astonishingly dealt with multiple technical malfunctions without missing a beat. A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit.

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was an all-American version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.

Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Here's another example of the physical fortitude and indomitable spirit that Palin as an Alaskan sportswoman seems to represent right now. Last year, Toronto's Globe and Mail reprinted this remarkable obituary from 1905:

Abigail Becker
Farmer and homemaker born in Frontenac County, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1830

A tall, handsome woman "who feared God greatly and the living or dead not at all," she married a widower with six children and settled in a trapper's cabin on Long Point, Lake Erie. On Nov. 23, 1854, with her husband away, she single-handedly rescued the crew of the schooner Conductor of Buffalo, which had run aground in a storm. The crew had clung to the frozen rigging all night, not daring to enter the raging surf. In the early morning, she waded chin-high into the water (she could not swim) and helped seven men reach shore. She was awarded medals for heroism and received $350 collected by the people of Buffalo, plus a handwritten letter from Queen Victoria that was accompanied by £50, all of which went toward buying a farm. She lost her husband to a storm, raised 17 children alone and died at Walsingham Centre, Ont.

Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today's pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.

But what of Palin's pro-life stand? Creationism taught in schools? Book banning? Gay conversions? The Iraq war as God's plan? Zionism as a prelude to the apocalypse? We'll see how these big issues shake out. Right now, I don't believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances.

Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) Nevertheless, I have criticized the way that abortion became the obsessive idée fixe of the post-1960s women's movement -- leading to feminists' McCarthyite tactics in pitting Anita Hill with her flimsy charges against conservative Clarence Thomas (admittedly not the most qualified candidate possible) during his nomination hearings for the Supreme Court. Similarly, Bill Clinton's support for abortion rights gave him a free pass among leading feminists for his serial exploitation of women -- an abusive pattern that would scream misogyny to any neutral observer.

But the pro-life position, whether or not it is based on religious orthodoxy, is more ethically highly evolved than my own tenet of unconstrained access to abortion on demand. My argument (as in my first book, "Sexual Personae,") has always been that nature has a master plan pushing every species toward procreation and that it is our right and even obligation as rational human beings to defy nature's fascism. Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman's body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman's entrance into society and citizenship.

On the other hand, I support the death penalty for atrocious crimes (such as rape-murder or the murder of children). I have never understood the standard Democratic combo of support for abortion and yet opposition to the death penalty. Surely it is the guilty rather than the innocent who deserve execution?

What I am getting at here is that not until the Democratic Party stringently reexamines its own implicit assumptions and rhetorical formulas will it be able to deal effectively with the enduring and now escalating challenge from the pro-life right wing. Because pro-choice Democrats have been arguing from cold expedience, they have thus far been unable to make an effective ethical case for the right to abortion.

The gigantic, instantaneous coast-to-coast rage directed at Sarah Palin when she was identified as pro-life was, I submit, a psychological response by loyal liberals who on some level do not want to open themselves to deep questioning about abortion and its human consequences. I have written about the eerie silence that fell over campus audiences in the early 1990s when I raised this issue on my book tours. At such moments, everyone in the hall seemed to feel the uneasy conscience of feminism. Naomi Wolf later bravely tried to address this same subject but seems to have given up in the face of the resistance she encountered.

If Sarah Palin tries to intrude her conservative Christian values into secular government, then she must be opposed and stopped. But she has every right to express her views and to argue for society's acceptance of the high principle of the sanctity of human life. If McCain wins the White House and then drops dead, a President Palin would have the power to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court, but she could not control their rulings.

It is nonsensical and counterproductive for Democrats to imagine that pro-life values can be defeated by maliciously destroying their proponents. And it is equally foolish to expect that feminism must for all time be inextricably wed to the pro-choice agenda. There is plenty of room in modern thought for a pro-life feminism -- one in fact that would have far more appeal to third-world cultures where motherhood is still honored and where the Western model of the hard-driving, self-absorbed career woman is less admired.

But the one fundamental precept that Democrats must stand for is independent thought and speech. When they become baying bloodhounds of rigid dogma, Democrats have committed political suicide.

Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month. Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will be published unless you request anonymity.

holy shit that's the worst writing i've ever read in my life i want to rip my eyes out

The authority she believes she has to make this statement is just hysterical:

"...I have become increasingly uneasy about Obama's efforts to sound folksy and approachable by reflexively using inner-city African-American tones and locutions, which as a native of Hawaii he acquired relatively late in his development..."

sexual persongae, amirite?

Vision,

For what it's worth you're being accused of sockpuppetry for noisily espousing rather boring opinions. Around here that tends to be taken as an insincere attempt to get a rise out of people.

Best of luck with your ridiculous opinions!

Wow, that's really dense writing. Does she get paid by the word?

So Palin is good because she's gutsy and feisty, and we shouldn't judge her on her political stands because they are completely distorted by the media (I'd love to know where Paglia gets her information, since she can so easily bypass the normal systems of information).

And what's with that paragraph about Philadelphia? That really looks like she's fillin' out the word count.

Now I gotta change my fucking display name AGAIN?

Walmart and MacDonalds and other places were *REAL* Americans hang out, so she doesn't lose her connection with the populace. That's where she gets her information from, punk.

I always feel like theirs no real rigour in her discourse. Her essays and pieces are littered with self consciously abrasive opinions, hastily formed assumptions and barking orders. I suppose she's earned the right to harangue liberals for their "infexible moral absolutes" by being so ridiculously contrarian with her opinions.

But yeah, what Masonic Boom said about Walmart and McDonalds, I think she kind of shows that in the passage where she lives in the apartment above the Farmhouse. She casts this patronisingly anthropological eye on the farm wife, and then gets to identify with her in her "Men!" dismissal, she gets to have her cake and eat it really.

I always feel like theirs no real rigour in her discourse. Her essays and pieces are littered with self consciously abrasive opinions, hastily formed assumptions and barking orders. I suppose she's earned the right to harangue liberals for their "infexible moral absolutes" by being so ridiculously contrarian with her opinions.

PATRON SAINT OF ILX

: )

Camille paglia is like the patron saint of challops

HOOS, thank you for your inane clarification. Again, if you can, please try to expound on what you mean by "ridiculous" and "boring" opinion. You simply sound uninformed and scared of debating. Again, I would advise people to actually read what they are trying to criticize, otherwise they only expose their intellectual limitations. I also wish you good luck living your life with your current level of argumentative skills and cultural references. Remember: you cannnot fake or whine your way through life. If you want to discuss Paglia's theory of Western literature and the role of classical tradition in shaping the forces of popular culture or her thoughts on contemporary poetry, please feel free to contact me.

"I always feel like theirs no real rigour in her discourse"
I know right, please stop, I feel kind of bad every time I laugh at your less than insightful opinions on Paglia.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/afewgoodmenjacktruth.jpg

Okay, that "dismissal" was pretty much entirely ripped off the Burchill/Paglia thing, so I wish you luck in forming your own arguments in future. Or indeed forming a fucking argument at all. From what I can see, all you've said in this thread is: "Camille Paglia is brilliant, has incredible verve, knows what she's talking about and has dismissed several fakers and mediocrities in Academia. Sexual Personae is her best book." Wow, really expanding your ideas their for us and displaying your "current level of argumentative skills and cultural references".

Seems like you're the one with the ironic nick to me.

Very good I know right, that's a start, you're reading, although you're still not understanding. Remember Burckhardt's famous dictum: bisogna saper leggere. In the correspondence, Paglia completely destroyed that obscure woman's pretentiousness. As to my opinions, why don't you start from there? Say, you could try to criticize Paglia's theory of culture and we'll go from there.

vision is a dapper optometrist by trade.

wow, this thread, the way it starts!

Just because Paglia "destroyed that obscure woman's pretentiousness" doesn't mean you can paraphrase her and claim zing victory. It makes you sound like a tape recorder. Also, the point I thought I made was, we don't know what your opinions are except that everyone else's are boring, apparently. But yeah, thanks for moving on in tone from mindlessly declarative to gratingly patronising. What you're saying remains the same, though, you keep asking everybody else for a fucking bone instead of instigating debate yourself. You keep telling everybody else that they don't know jack shit but you're keeping fairly tight-lipped about what you know, for the almost certain reason that playing your hand will reveal your own arguments as drab and clumsy.

xxpost, hah;, i wanted to say sth similar but less eloquently. alas i lack the elaborate dictionary and how to use it. :-)

vision I am in need of contact lenses perhaps you can help please email me maxr✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧

Vision, when you give people an eye test, do you tell them they're reading but not understanding?

I always feel like theirs no real rigour in her discourse.

please tell me you're not just highlighting the grammar there!

HOOS, thank you for your inane clarification. Again, if you can, please try to expound on what you mean by "ridiculous" and "boring" opinion. You simply sound uninformed and scared of debating. Again, I would advise people to actually read what they are trying to criticize, otherwise they only expose their intellectual limitations. I also wish you good luck living your life with your current level of argumentative skills and cultural references. Remember: you cannnot fake or whine your way through life. If you want to discuss Paglia's theory of Western literature and the role of classical tradition in shaping the forces of popular culture or her thoughts on contemporary poetry, please feel free to contact me.

"I always feel like theirs no real rigour in her discourse"
I know right, please stop, I feel kind of bad every time I laugh at your less than insightful opinions on Paglia.

― Vision, Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:26 PM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I know right, I won't repeat the arguments in the fax exchange because I believe they are self-explanatory even for the most entry-level kind of reader. It's only one page that can be read in three minutes by everyone here.

Now, some arguments:
-Paglia has a theory of culture (you know, Apollonyan androgynes, Dionysian undercurrents, forces of nature and sexuality shaping culture, gender roles in history, crime, popular culture etc etc); what are you thoughts on it?
-Paglia is very incisive in her statements (hence "verve"); several of her most famous phrases have entered the mainstream debate; what do you have to say about them?
-she also has a very original theory of poetry, going from Sappho to Joni Mitchell and again based on the expression of sexual impulse, among other things; do you think she got it wrong? How?

Just out of curiosity, and in good faith, I invite everyone who decided to join this specific thread to state which Paglia books they have read, whether they follow her columns in Salon etc. I'll start: I have read all of her books (including the one on Hitchcock's "The Birds", which is good way to start for those who don't know her). I read SP when it was first released in 1990, and I had the opportunity to follow several public debates in which she engaged. I think her essay "No Law in the Arena" (in Vamps and Tramps) is good starting point on her views on sexuality, culture and society. If anyone wants to comment on any of those particular texts, please do so.

It's also noticeable that, despite her many foes and her profoundly ambitious incursions into scholarly minutae (Spenser, Frazer, Jane Harrison et al), Paglia has never been found to make a major mistake in her assessments, to misquote or to overlook (unlike, say, George Steiner, Derrida and even Bloom).

There you have it. These are just fragments and overall reminders, I'm not really going to make you homework for you. Remember, you were among those who first tried to criticize her, so the obligation to say why was yours in the first place; shoddily linking to a series of exchanged messages or cutting and pasting a Salon column on Palin and Obama is not really proving your point, it's just trying to evade critical reading and critical thinking.
Your dismissal seems to have the boldness of ignorance as a fuel; had you read her in the first place, had you at least gone to Mr.Wikipedia for the big picture, I would not have been so harsh on you, but get this: don't take cliquish consensus for the truth. Don't think your internet pals on a message board can protect you or help you hide your limitations. Form your own opinion. Read.

sex viagra, you know, that's interesting because vision in the sense of image selection and projection is very important for Paglia. I can't help you with the lenses, but I can give you one advice: choose a pair that enables you to see clearer, as opposed to distorting the world around you.

and then when the calf of incisive truth comes careening at full speed toward you, you won't instinctively step back but will trudge to the upper pasture, corner the calf, and carry that massive animal back to the barn in your arms, exclaiming in amused disgust, "internet pals!"

Now, some arguments:
-Paglia has a theory of culture (you know, Apollonyan androgynes, Dionysian undercurrents, forces of nature and sexuality shaping culture, gender roles in history, crime, popular culture etc etc); what are you thoughts on it?

hahahahahaha

Thanks g.grinder, very clever and insightful. Next?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/daftsod.jpg

I may, in my second official act as mod, lock this thread.

I for one already said all I wanted to say. Also a learning experience for me: I didn't know what "challop" meant.

I have never owned or read any of her books, and I don't suppose I ever will.

From media appearances and representation, she has always seemed to me like a rather strained, aggressive, ugly middle-aged woman who mostly talked a lot of nonsense.

On second thought, I do want to say one final thing RE pinefox above: why is it that people feel inclined to judge a woman's looks even though we're talking about her ideas?

Okay, this is a really interesting piece of writing that makes incisive and thoughtful points, and is without the bullying tone I find so off-putting. She also makes several points about the possibilities of a fruitful relationship with the church and the arts in america that I really agree with, so maybe it's easier not to feel, affronted(for want of a better word) by it.

I recently read this interview with Zizek, a writer whose work I enjoy despite frequent fundamental disagreement with. The bit that I want to talk about though is this: "What I despise in America is the studio actors logic, as if there is something good in self expression: do not be oppressed, open yourself, even if you shout and kick the others, everything in order to express and liberate yourself. This stupid idea, that behind the mask there is some truth. In Japan, and I hope that this is not only a myth, even if something is merely an appearance, politeness is not simply insincere. There is a difference between saying 'Hello, how are you?' and the New York taxi drivers who swear at you. Surfaces do matter. If you disturb the surfaces you may lose a lot more than you account. You shouldn't play with rituals. Masks are never simply mere masks.". Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not bringing this up just to childishly criticise Paglia for sheer abrasiveness, so don't immediately act like I am. The connection I just want to point out, a connection I feel about her work, is that she's too hung up on this notion. The mask and the fierce pagan poetry that it constricts. This is how I felt with Sexual Personae, that for her every code and symbol is a constricting element that ties up some surging primeval river or lust or ferocity. I can't really relate to this. I feel like, she misses the point quite a lot because of this gung-ho fixation.

In this case what I mean is, what seems to me anyway, a fundamental misreading of the aesthetic codes of Puritanical aesthetics. She confuses the rejection of ornament and imagery in early protestant religions with a rejection of art. I don't necessarily agree that their "attitude toward art (which) was conditioned by utilitarian principles of frugality and propriety" is necessarily not an aesthetic one. The puritan aesthetic, I believe, is mirrored more illustratively in the work of Joseph Beuys, obviously separated by time and continent. His notions about the spiritual properties of basic materials (through healing or insulating properties, etc.) seem analogous the practical frugal attitude of the early settlers in America. For them aesthetics became sublimated as opposed to eliminated. Their lack of adornment is obviously just as much of an aesthetic choice. Practicality and austerity are a type of beauty, much as nature is only read for its "signs of God's providence". Indeed, it's surprising to me that Paglia chooses not to see the savage beauty of these things, but for her beauty is always tied with decadence.

In the end she decides that art must embrace religion in order to revive itself. For me, though, the relationship between art and religion (and even beauty) was best summed up by Dave Hickey when he said (I paraphrase out of necessity, I don't have the work to hand) "Oil painting was invented as a way to show the inner light of Christ". The reason this is so beautiful is because it embraces how humble materials, gesso on wood panel, overlaid with linseed oil and pigment, could become an equivalent for the formlessness of belief. The frugality of the Puritans was a way of embracing the spirituality and beauty of practicality.

and actually, roxy made the point I've been trying to fucking make with almost every post, which is, YOU are not making arguments, you say you are but you're not. That wasn't an argument. All you said was: "there's a theory, what do you think?". The only point you've made about Paglia is telling us you know loads about her, but you haven't actually shown us you do. At all. Not once.

http://i99.photobucket.com/albums/l288/allskulls/Vision.jpg

vision pls text me

immediately v. urgent pls txt

Also paglia on gay men and prostitution (both things she know all about) are very o_O

Weirdly though, she kindof nails "Bears"

OK I know right, you've made a true effort, so here am I back again to this Paglia thing. There's one academic tradition which goes back to the Middle Ages called the "status quaestionis" which basically means that you're supposed to be familiar with the extent of accumulated knowledge and the current level of debate in any discussion which you decide to join. Nobody is supposed to tell you why they agree with a certain theory inasmuch as you, as a mature person, are the one challenging the ideas or the author under discussion. When you ask me to say why I think Paglia's ideas are sound, you're actually asking me to give you remedial classes.

I will give you three brief (and thoroughly unoriginal, as they've been part of these discussions for years) comments:

-Paglia has gone back to the emotional and sexual urges that induce or influence several of our efforts, including artistic ones. In doing so, she helped rescue culture from a stric, stolid structuralist approach;
-Paglia has built the bridge between ancient tradition, Romanticism and popular culture, giving us wonderful critical tools to perceive a linearity in Western culture; and
-after decades of deconstructionist relativism and obfuscation, Paglia, along with the Sokal/Bricmont book, helped revive the need for true knowledge, that is, to become a scholarly reader, not just a skimmer or a faker.

Your comment above on her text for Arion, where she frequently writes on education, feminism and so on, is good because it is based on you own perception. It should be pointed that puritan aesthetics derives from puritan ethics; she didn't invent it, she just pointed the contrast. There's no denying that the Reform tradition within Christianity produced works of great beauty, but you can just as easily point at a certain drabness in ornamentation which cannot be easily denied either.

About the Zizek quote, he's not really talking about Paglia's personae at all (the concept goes back to Greek drama and has a little Jung and Mario Praz thrown in). Think about it for a moment: you know he's controversial to say the very least, and he also often expresses himself quite unabashedly. When he says "no, don't shed the mask, don't look behind it, don't emphasize self-expression", he's actually trying to prevent you, the gullible reader, from exercising the same right that he uses and abuses, both as a writer and as a public figure. Why shoud he be entitled to define what and how anything may be expressed? Comparing both worldviews, which one empowers you as a person?

I agree with your last paragraph with the Hickey quote, don't see how it contradicts Paglia really except if we are strictly comparative; Paglia has often extolled the beautiful clarity bestowed by a monastic, celibate, rigorous approach to the arts and culture. Her only qualification was that this was an exception rather than the rule.

p.s: yeah, that too about homosexuality, it can be uncomfortable reading about her experiences, the vynil-covered NY bars in the 70s, the onset of AIDS etc. Paglia is very blunt about the aggressiveness of male libido and the counter aggression of nature, I find it educational but it can be very very blunt.She has a famous phrase about advising people not to read Sade before lunch, in a sense the same could be said about some of the sorry details she mentions and her directness whenever she discusses the high price payed by promiscuity. Again, she did't invent anything, she lived through that and she does not idealize it.

sex viagra, what do you mean?

Nobody is supposed to tell you why they agree with a certain theory inasmuch as you, as a mature person, are the one challenging the ideas or the author under discussion.

You brought no ideas up for discussion.

g.grinder, obviously not, because wer're not discussing Vision's theory of culture, we are discussing Camille Paglia's theory of culture. Her ideas are easily accessible to anyone who can read english. So if you try to challenge her ideas, it's always advisable to know at least the basics of what she thinks. Dismissal is often just ignorance.

Yes, you are certainly not being dismissive here.

That's right, because dismissing an unqualified negation improves the signal to noise ratio of the discussion as a whole. In other words: If you say "Paglia is dumb", that is ignorant and dismissive, but if you say "comments such as 'hahaha' or 'Paglia is dumb' are dumb", that is just cleaning the field.

Vision is Pipecock and I claim my £20.

kevin john bozolko i thought

Pretty sure it's the woman in the Youtube vid.

and then when the calf of incisive truth comes careening at full speed toward you...

estela be praised!

Vision, while you no doubt have excellent reasons for holding your opinions on Paglia, your style has all the grace of a person with a neck brace and a dozen fused vertebrae. This impairs the effectiveness of your message. Try bending a bit. It will improve your ability to get where you want to go.

Your may now reram your blunderbuss and aim my way for daring to elevate style over substance, where I am in fact just putting a flea in your ear. They say a word to the wise is sufficient. We'll see where you fall in that scale.

Aimless, sorry I can't do that because I refuse to dumb myself down to your criteria. I'll give a concise, for Dummies recap: whenever you want to comment about anything at all, know what you're talking about. A passing acquaintance with the subject. The Wikipedia entry. Anything except for unaware ignorance is a start.

Grace is dumb? OK. Be that way.

Ok, now for who I am. This is actually another example of defective thinking, this whole ad hominem obsession, but ok.
I am
http://www.gonemovies.com/WWW/XsFilms/SnelPlaatjes/ActDouglasSpartacus.jpg

Any other examples of "defective thinking" you'd like to lecture us upon, Spartacus?

Vision, the first rule of ILX is DON'T BE A DICK. Your towering intellect does not exempt you from that rule.

I haven't really read The Vision's posts, but they look so long and hard-working that I would be inclined to be kinder to him / her than others here are being.

Why judge a woman's looks? Well, there are many things to say about anyone. I said a few of them. I mentioned her looks, and other things. I might do that with all kinds of other people, too, certainly including men.

Hm, I am just imagining someone writing sth like 'Nietzsche - ridiculously moustachioed weed spouting laughable macho rhetoric', which (whether wholly accurate or not) would be partly a statement about his appearance.

Neil, yes, this one really is a final comment for now as my sunday afternoon has been spent here (it was fun, beneath the vitriol I think some real issues have been discussed): real life is a constant intellectual challenge in the sense that the herd mentality is easily shattered.

You may not contradict your friends out of politeness, but the internet is there, in my opinion, to give us a chance to be totally candid without resorting to namecalling or offending people. Their ideas or lack thereof, on the other hand, are fair game. This is intellectually liberating; we are too constrained by PC convention these days. So, it's not a lecture, it's friendly advice, be humble and willing to learn and expect any debate to challenge your convictions and expose some flaws. Stepping out of the comfot zone of uninformed consensus is something we should embrace.

I was talking with a friend the other day telling her how "Time to Pretend" was the quintessential song of our times in the sense of ironically mocking and at the same time dejectedly embracing conventions of success and superficial insincerity. Why not be an individual instead of buying into this boring ethos? A german opera director once said that whoever marries the Zeitgeist is destined to become a widower very soon, so step out of social and academic convention and, like Paglia herself says, let the library be your teacher.

pinefox, sorry, no, the truth is that image is always used against women, and that's really sad. It's either "X is clever but ugly" or "Y is cute but really dumb". People never say anything about Harold Bloom's appearance, for instance, but every single woman in any intellectual or social field has her appearance scrutinized, from Emily Dickinson being too ugly to Sarah Palin being too good-looking. But that's another discussion etc.

Harold Bloom? That fat fuck.

I've read SP and the woman's Salon columns and I still think she has one of the worst styles of writing in the world. It is stiff, meandering, solipsistic, and presumptuous. Does she make good points? About as often as she turns all of Feminist theory into a bunch of strawmen (and women).

And Vision, if her writing is bad, yours is like staring into an abyss. You write like an undergraduate student (or worse, a precocious high schooler). You sound like one of those kids from Dawson's Creek. The truth is that I don't blame you. I have a friend I spent some of the weekend with who is in the middle of SP and he has started to adopt some of the same cadences and the defensive, contrarian rhetoric. I suppose that because Paglia defines herself against other people's theories, her students learn to argue in the same way. So, news flash: Arguing about someone else's text doesn't change your own in any substantive way. Making this thread about another poster only makes you sound like a dick. (In the colloquial sense, not the phallic one.)

Another news flash! Paglia didn't invent the Apollo/Dionysian conflict! OMgz. Lots of philosophers beat her to it. Other philosophers beat to her the role sex has in conflict. Even others beat her to the role that sex has imprinted and inscribed on your body. So she made a lovely mish-mash of Foucalt - Nietzsche - the very early Feminists that she claims to think are shit, and then she called it something new and ahistorical. I know, I know. According to Paglia, Paglia is a genius!

Oh, one more thing: I don't believe for a second that you're not a sockpocket. So I really just wrote this cause I'm venting at my friend who was swooning over Paglia.

I was talking with a friend the other day telling her how "Time to Pretend" was the quintessential song of our times in the sense of ironically mocking and at the same time dejectedly embracing conventions of success and superficial insincerity.

Proof Vision is a sockpocket. This has ILM written all over it.

The Vision, "sorry, no", I realize and agree that all kinds of women are judged on their appearance, in a culture which is in so many ways and dimensions unequal, sexist or misogynist. That doesn't mean that anyone's appearance is necessarily off-limits. I think Sarah Palin looks vile, but perhaps that's because I think she is vile. The same goes, in my case, for John McCain, and George W. Bush (who I oddly feel looks even viler than either of them). I quite like the way Barack Obama looks. I expect that Harold Bloom looks ugly and ridiculous (and his ideas are often ridiculous too). I have never had the impression that Dickinson was ugly, but don't know much about that aspect of her though I like what I know of the poems. George Eliot was arguably unattractive, but she was a magnificently intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable and gifted woman who wrote one of my favourite novels ever; her looks do not really occur to me when I think of these things.

But if I want to say that Paglia, McCain or anyone else is dumb, silly, histrionic, false, vulgar, irritating or, yes, ugly, then I will.

So, it's not a lecture, it's friendly advice, be humble and willing to learn and expect any debate to challenge your convictions and expose some flaws.

This sounds exactly like a lecture to me, and a po-faced ans stilted one at that.

and!

-Paglia has gone back to the emotional and sexual urges that induce or influence several of our efforts, including artistic ones. In doing so, she helped rescue culture from a stric, stolid structuralist approach;
-Paglia has built the bridge between ancient tradition, Romanticism and popular culture, giving us wonderful critical tools to perceive a linearity in Western culture; and
-after decades of deconstructionist relativism and obfuscation, Paglia, along with the Sokal/Bricmont book, helped revive the need for true knowledge, that is, to become a scholarly reader, not just a skimmer or a faker.

http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/899/pagliach6.jpg

Answer: No.

ILX: doing college freshmen's homework for 8 years.

(it was fun, beneath the vitriol I think some real issues have been discussed)

A running monologue with eye-rolling does not a discussion make.

Reading this thread has been like nothing so much as reading a person arguing with themselves to figure out what they believe by dismissing everyone around them. Hope you made some progress with your coursework.

I can imagine that Paglia probably has the OMIGOD, WOW factor if it's the first place one has ever read serious discussion of culture and gender issues. Like I can imagine that MGMT probably sounds amazingly droll if you've never heard ... oh, even something even as intellectually shallow as the Dandy Warhols on the same subject (with better tunes and haircuts.)

Being po-faced and contrarian is not the same thing as being adult.

It's been over 10 years since I read Sexual Personae. I don't remember much beyond the very basics of her argument. Which you might say was down to age and senility, but then again, I can remember other writers and philosophers I read around the same time with far more clarity.

Paglia is a great favourite among right-wing men who find her, as a feminist-hating woman who claims to be a feminist, a great tool for justifying their own attitudes.

I don't have much time for her. There are, quite frankly, other concepts and people I'd rather spend my (albeit limited) intelligence on contemplating.

Not me. Sorry Vizelka.

vision i got ur text!!! glad to hear everything worked out, let me know what else u need ~~

Mordy all kinds of OTM, and that Palin article... man alive.

I don't think Vision is a sock. A really poor troll, but not a sock. ILX is where trolls come to be schooled, and Vision's tuition cheque apparently just cleared.

I somehow missed Mordy's post there. Well said.

^^^nice u should script an action film xp

I didn't think it would be Kevin. Me and Kevin put our differences aside, man.

I won't get into what I think of Paglia's oeuvre generally, but I don't mind the Salon columns so much; the average one is a compendium of one-liners, unintentional parodies of academic locutions, batshit opinions, willful contrarianism, and some good bits.

I'm honestly surprised that anyone thinks that the whole of cultural criticism is any different than romance novels or comic books. It's kinda trashy and fun but it goes in the circular file when y'r finished with it.

I also don't know why I let "Vision" get me so wound up. I know my post wasn't amazingly well-written or anything, but I didn't think it could be so badly misinterpreted. Also, wrt the Zizek quote: a. I know he wasn't talking about Paglia, he was making a point that related to how we perceive Japanese culture, what he said was still relevant to the point I was making. b. Zizek is not saying "put that mask back on" what he's saying is that the mask, and the ceremony of social ritual are important. I mean this in relation to the great thrusting libidinous impulse which she constantly implies to be the be all of everything. Also, I find her comments on Gay men horrific, not because she doesn't flinch from the shocking power of the unsheathed male erotic impulse or whatever, but because it comes across as fake, as the fetishised wank fantasy of some prune who only cares about shocking with her vaguely transgressive and alarmingly touristic observations.

Also, libcrypt just said the truest and funniest thing ever written on ilx, so I hope you were all paying attention!

hey i know right vision just imed me and asked me to tell you that hes sorry for picking on you

If Vision is a troll (which is to say, merely posing as a priggish undergrad with an overblown sense of intellectual accomplishment in an effort to stir up a pointless commotion), then I must congratulate the author on a fine sense of parody.

I'm more inclined to accept Vision's persona as sincere. I interpret the self-concious inflation of Vision's prose and argumentation, as the analog of a toad facing a predator, who inflates itself in an effort to seem more imposing.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2v441_res-they-say-vision_music

http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s71/NathanBernal/pufferfish.jpg

"Hi, I'm Camille Paglia and Sarah Palin is the best thing to happen to feminism since Lynndie England"

He/ she also appears to be of the Geir school of music criticism. From this thread:
A Paler Shade of White---Sasha Frere-Jones Podcast and New Yorker article Criticizing Indie Rock for Failing to Incorporate African-American Influences

Black influence in music can be waaay overrated. Plus, nobody is forced to use anything or to acknowledge any cultural factors that don't mean anything to them. Actually, if anything some kinds of black music should be denounced rather than used, but to each his own.

― Vision, Thursday, 11 September 2008 20:19 (3 days ago) Bookmark

anything anything anything

"Actually, if anything some kinds of black music should be denounced rather than used, but to each his own."

Really feeling stupid for arguing with this guy.

How do you know it's a guy?

Man all I can say is I am glad this debate isn't about Ayn Rand.

haha

Don't say that too loud, you might wake him!

One month before we can't distinguish this dude from Whiney G.

sure do hope mike karnon subscribed to this thread

It's funny how it all kicked off because I said: "she's kind of a nut"

Camille Twobaglia, amirite?

Sorry, I think it's a young woman, on account of the "judging women by their looks" comment.

I could be wrong, though.

Dude says he's a dude on linked thread up yonder.

So, 'till things are brighter, I'm the man uses the word "black".

Prob a wegro.

George Eliot said she was a man now and again, when she was inclined. She was not to be trusted on that head.

It's true, I've seen pictures of him.

I think that's a "The Man" thing, rather than an actual gender thing. But I could be wrong. I hid behind a gender-neutral screen name for years Even when I perved on men, I think it was easier for people to think that I was gay.

Eh, x-posts back to watching Late of the Pier videos to perve over the drummer for me, then.

where the fuck is tehresa?

There we go, judging by looks again! This is all so much ad hominem. What care we if Vision is man, woman or beast? We should all be aware of the state of the question in question and open our mouths accordingly.

Can I see a picture? If he's a schoolboy, maybe he's hott. :-P

I meant I've seen pictures of George Eliot.

He wasn't fooling anybody with that dress, I can tell you.

Also, with that Dave Hickey quote I could just as easily used another by Carl Andre, which has become like a mantra for me: "It's enough to have things in the world". So when you say: "Paglia has often extolled the beautiful clarity bestowed by a monastic, celibate, rigorous approach to the arts and culture. Her only qualification was that this was an exception rather than the rule." I say: "Bullcrap". It's because she has no empathy, I think.

Paglia interviewed by Joan Rivers: "I just have to accept it, I'm a mutant"

"It should be pointed that puritan aesthetics derives from puritan ethics; she didn't invent it, she just pointed the contrast."

What!? Of course they do! I kinda rammed that point home gracelessly, what I'm saying is that they're not anti-aesthetics.

Why am I still doing this?!?!?!?!?!

Let it go, IKR, let it go. :-)

Thanks, I've gone a bit nuts, I'm, like, watching Paglia interviews on youtube! It started with Zizek cos he's so funny and I kinda want to do him, but then...

She's really pissing me off!

Back away from the internets! This way madness lies.

I mean, even I'm going to stop watching videos of pointy nosed ginger haired drummers and go to bed now.

Honest.

Just one more...

NO!

oh oh oh, nsfw very much NSFW drummers!

If I was at work at 11pm on a Sunday, I'd shoot myself.

I really hope that isn't something horrible. (Am I in bed yet? No, I am still looking at pictures.)

good if you like ginger drummers!

Um. WOW!!!!

OK, that was nice.

I think I may have seen that mag before. Perhaps Miss AMP had a copy lying around the flat?

Or maybe she had a straight girl version thereof. (If such a thing existed, she would own it.)

OK, I'm awake now. Thanks.

Zizek is a clown, at best

No he's not, have the decency to at least provide some basis to your slurs.

Zizek is lots of fun. Have you read his piece on the Sound of Music?

want to, i've just seen him outline his theory briefly in interviews, like really briefly

decadent jewish nazis etc, it's pretty funny

i like zizek and im with pinefox

Yes! I knew it! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Ampy's picture of Owen Pallett ass.

I knew I'd seen a copy of BUTT floating around at rehearsal:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ampnet/400005879/

(Though the magazine I was actually thinking of was Jungsheft (PORNO FÜR MÄDCHEN)

Who is he?

Oh yeah, that whole shoot was so so ew....

There is something wrong with this woman. (http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/11/12/palin/):

In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. For example, I had thought for many months that the flap over Obama's birth certificate was a tempest in a teapot. But simple questions about the certificate were never resolved to my satisfaction. Thanks to their own blathering, fanatical overkill, of course, the right-wing challenges to the birth certificate never gained traction.

I like Sarah Palin, and I've heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn't speak the King's English -- big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns -- that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.

There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.

Dear Camille Paglia,

Fuck a bunch of you.

Sincerely,

Charlie Parker

haaa was waiting for that to come up

xp that too, specifically

Camille Paglia is the troll of feminist academia.

You know she just giggles every time someone gets upset by something she writes?

that bebop line is fucking hilarious

hat bebop line is fucking hilariousridiculous.

^^ fixed.

where is the thread where we list her infinite variations on the "as a ...." phrase

"as an unrepetant namecaller"

her and Hitchens should mate and produce some angry drunken contrarian antichrist

Dear Mordy, Camille Paglia is one of the greatest public intellectuals of all time. But you wouldn't know that. Try to step outside the confines of your little world where everybody who says things you disagree with is automatically a "troll".

^^ was waiting for that too

Vision returns! How exciting. You really do stalk this board, don't you?

No, not really. As a matter of fact, last time I posted was sunday or the early hours on monday, if I'm not mistaken.

Dear Mordy, Camille Paglia is one of the greatest public intellectuals of all time. But you wouldn't know that.

Dearest Vision, I would not know that. Perhaps you can offer me some well-thought out remarks about D-A gender struggle and Paglia's brilliant contribution to the role of gender in society. It will likely help me rethink my condemnations of this clearly precious woman. She may be a national treasure and I have besmirched her name in an online forum. Alas.

Sincerely,
Your Dearest Mordy

Though, for all of you following at home, I'd like to point something out:

As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is -- and quite frankly, I think the people who don't see it are the stupid ones,

Try to step outside the confines of your little world where everybody who says things you disagree with is automatically a "troll".

This is what I was writing about the last go around. Paglia cultivates this flippant, alienating contrarianism in her writing and her students all adopt it to a man. The first quote was written in Paglia's piece and the second by Vision. They are practically the same sentence. (Of course, if Vision is a sockpuppet, as I suspect, then kudos. Very well done there.)

1. sarah palin is really smart, and people who do not think she is smart, are stupid and also blinkered by dogma

2. the way sarah palin talks is not incoherent, it's like jazz.

3. people who are have been and will be hostile to any of feminism's goals are the future of femisim

great public intellectuallizing at work

sp 2nd feminism there

This was a great article: http://www.slate.com/id/2201158/

http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/122953/2180638/2201304/081001_GW_sentenceDiagram.gif

http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/122953/2180638/2201304/081001_GW_sentenceDiagram2.gif

I will say two things Mordy:

-read her essay "No Law in the Arena; then read her short book of Hitchcock's "The Birds"; then read the first chapter of "Sexual Personae"; and
-keep this in mind ALWAYS: your liberal teachers may not have your best social and intellectual interest in mind.

Hey kiddo, I've read all of Sexual Personae.

I will say one thing:

the chili i just had, did not have my best gastrointestinal interest in mind

keep this in mind ALWAYS: your liberal teachers may not have your best social and intellectual interest in mind.

You know this is asinine, right? It exposes that you're an undergraduate (or precocious high school student), since you assume everyone who is reading Paglia has liberal professors swaying them.

I'm going to list possibilities in order of most probable to least probable:

1. Sock-Puppet
2. Precocious High Schooler
3. Troll
4. Undergraduate Student
5. Adult

I read Paglia on my own. No professor I ever took a class from was enough of an idiot to have her on the reading list.

but DNFTT and all that

I never took a college course on Feminist theory. I read that stuff on my own. So no professor was whispering in my ear, "Wolfe is good. Beauvoir is good. Paglia is bad." I realized that on my own.

No.I assume most people remain attached to the prejudices, guilt trips and tunnel vision inflicted upon them by their liberal teachers in college (and sometimes high school).

People who attack Paglia in academia have an agenda: to salvage their very fragile reputations, which they pulverized by reading and being deluded by fakers and frauds such as Lacan and Derrida.

yes, nobody gets the credibility from college kids like the FACULTY!! man those kids will follow them into anything, all kinds of crazy things like loving DH Lawrence and hating capitalism and stuff

hating the 'liberal professoriat' is one the oldest and lamest trick in the contrarian book. even if you believe the universities are some kind of indoctrination camp system you'd have to admit they are really shitty at it. still plenty of conservatives around, with college degrees even!

xp wait, so, have you only ever read one book?

Shakey, that's also my point: liberal teachers often try to bowdlerize their reading lists by not including anything by Paglia.

assuming a very personal motive to people to don't like your favorite icon is cute too.

lacan is some bs but derrida has some goods

You know, when I was in high school, I once picked a fight with someone about some literary topic or another on a forum. (Not this forum, another one.) And I thought I was really clever, marshaling quotes from various writers and arguing passionately for my position which I strongly felt to be the correct one. Years later I reread that forum and was humiliated by my lack of knowledge. I really sounded like a teenager (of course, I was one). I did many of the things Vision does here. I lodged personal attacks instead of offering proofs, and when I offered proofs, they tended to be poorly thought out and poorly developed.

Which is to say: Vision, I totally understand the tragic temptation of internet arguing for high schoolers. And: Paglia still writes like I did when I was in high school.

Lacan and Derrida are both bitchin. I'm actually writing about Lacan right now, as we speak. (Extimacy: The leakage of the Other into the Self.) It's awesome stuff.

AH! My night is complete! There comes i know right. Are you asking me or someone else?

Paglia has the virtue of being somewhat entertaining and that's about it. She'd be awesome to hang out and do shots of tequila with 'cause she'd have 'strong' opinions about the color of the bar napkins and the shape of all the modern vodka bottles but she likes heat more than light, clearly. Interestingly, I'd say the same of Lacan and Derrida.

And I'd hope that even Paglia would be humiliating by the idea of someone saying that we should all read Paglia, cause she's amazing, and Derrida and Lacan are worthless. Of course, she seems like an asshole, so maybe she'd agree. (Even tho without those two thinkers Paglia probably wouldn't exist.)

How do you find the time man?

Mordy, I'm telling you now: give up those losers while you can. They teach you nothing. They have no intelligible contribution to society or to individuals. Unless you think stuff like "le nom du père/ le non du père" are really profound insights.

Vision, how old are you?

The problem with Paglia's argument is that she wouldn't hang out with the schoolteachers she professes to love.

BTW Mordy, see what I mean about ignorance: if you had the most superficial knowledge about Paglia, you'd know part of her career is based on destroyed the fakers of post-structuralism etc.

I know right, it's easy: I don't waste time.

I can imagine doing this over some book that may not really stand up but that I really love. You know, getting really pissed off and trying to dismiss all of the criticism, I mean, I really can imagine the shoe being on the other foot and feeling like the only person wearing contacts in a room full of blind people, but I can't imagine being such an ass. I didn't think Vision was a High School student, I just thought he's an idiot, but the more I think about it now....

Also, I meant Mordy.

Vision makes a lot of very funny, totally unfounded assumptions. Beyond that, comic value = nil

How do I find the time to write about Lacan, or to write here? The former is for work. The latter is for a break :)

So Vision, how old are you? I'll go first. I'm 24, married, and working on a thesis that tries to reinvent Adorno's culture industry in terms of music in the age of the internet.

She'd be awesome to hang out and do shots of tequila with 'cause she'd have 'strong' opinions about the color of the bar napkins and the shape of all the modern vodka bottles but she likes heat more than light, clearly.

hahahaha ^^^one of my fave posters right here

Mordy, I'd rather not tell. I can tell you this: I'm no longer in school. I also have never met Paglia or taken one of her classes.

Shakey, quote me please. Last time we chatted you tried to tell me there wer no mathematical foundations to music, remember?

Why would you rather not give your age?

most academics couldn't give a fuck about 'major theorists' or camille paglia or any of that garbage, they want:

1. to have a few students per year who aren't horribly unprepared for coursework and have some energy and will to read and show up on time and do a paper w/o any extensions or plagiarism

2. to get a paper -- real actual research and argument about Gentilesse or some other goddam thing that nobody outside their sub-sub-specialty has the first inkling of interest in -- published, at least to get a little breathing room for another term, jesus.

3. to maybe get another draft on the ol' novel done, if all free time doesn't get sucked into these stupid fucking steering committee meetings, god, why did i agree to any of that shit again?

I'm 21 and trying to paint, but painting is hard and so you have to find different ways of painting, or something.

You're an anonymous commenter on an online message board. The only explanation for not giving your age is that you think it'll subvert your argument. I'm going to guess you're 19.

vision please don't ever stop, there are far too many clueless liberals on this board and we need more intelligent and courageous independent-minded voices like yours

maybe after Vision has excised our liberal tendencies, he can go on to excise the influence of black culture in modern music

Can no-one tame him?

He's such a wild and free spirit!

The bebop line must have been inspired by this, right?

That's really beautiful!

Shakey, quote me please. Last time we chatted you tried to tell me there wer no mathematical foundations to music, remember?

learn to read moron

Don't you think we should move past these structuralist concerns (like: can she speak English) and onto more post-structuralist - though not Derrida and Lacanian! - concerns: like: Would Fap?

can we not talk about Lacan? Sarah Palin would not discuss Lacan, and, ultimately, this is what matters.

Mordy, I'm just really shy, and I'd like you to take my opinions as they are, unattached from a person etc (I'm not Burial though).
Adorno is a worthwhile time investment. Lacan, Derrida, Althusser are all garbage. You do have this, right:

http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/images/P/0520231597.jpg

i know right, Sexual Personae can be an interesting reading to painters. Lots of insights on line, profile, neck exposure etc etc etc.

goole, that's true, but they also have an agenda. How many teachers you know or read about have voted for McCain, for instance?

Palin is more of a Deleuze/Guattari fan

a paglia fan would like adorno

Shakey, it's all written and your name is there. It happened on more than one thread if I'm not mistaken.

Thousand Plateaus ftw. :)

I'm not gonna bother re-re-re-explaining to you something that is plain as day. have fun re-reading it though.

a paglia fan would like adorno

Hey! Adorno rocks! I imagine Vision doesn't actually understand him.

no that's what i mean haha. "like"

(Ie: He probably does a Paglia reading of Adorno; trumping up his dissatisfaction with modernity without acknowledging his very important post-apocalyptic leanings.)

yes u understand my subtext

goole, that's true, but they also have an agenda. How many teachers you know or read about have voted for McCain, for instance?

― Vision, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 6:15 PM (1 minute ago)

nine. i have the number right here, there were nine.

Mordy, I'm just really shy, and I'd like you to take my opinions as they are, unattached from a person etc (I'm not Burial though).

lol'd @ this

you know what philosophy book I just love is the celestine prophecy

Why is that considered an agenda? I voted for Obama. Do I have a secret agenda? Does everyone who votes have a secret agenda? Do McCain voters have secret agendas too? Dude, do you realize how retarded you sound?

Similarities between Paglia and Adorno:
-both are truly well-read;
-both are insightful and highly quotable;
-both understand, albeit in very different ways, the role of art in society.

Paglia is much better, but Adorno (the essays on music and Minima Moralia at least) is an engaging read, just do it selectively.

goole, please give any info you feel comfortable giving about this nine (which school? Which subject etc).

"i know right, Sexual Personae can be an interesting reading to painters. Lots of insights on line, profile, neck exposure etc etc etc."

Actually from this point of view this book is absolutely dreadful. Tenner bets nobody alive making worthwhile paintings has had any sort of "insight" from her inane observations. Have you ever painted Vision? Painting isn't just some convenient hook for you to sling your miscarried cultural theory on, it's actually a whole world of discourses in itself and this book treats it like a shallow pond for hermeneutics.

Vision, please, please tell me that you like Ayn Rand. Because if you do, I think we should move this conversation over there and talk about libertarianism. No conversation can't be improved by the inclusion of a Randian.

"both understand, albeit in very different ways, the role of art in society" this is a string of lines that communicates absolutely nothing. Are you aware?

string of words*

BTW, "understanding" Adorno is still an ongoing debate, from which people who don't read german can be considered excluded to a certain extent.

4) They are both people
5) They both write stuff
6) People read both of them

xp lol

Vision, my thesis advisor did her dissertation with Haverkamp. I assume you know who that is.

that's "objectivist" to you

x-post

Vision is really into Wikipedia

Also, Vision, my undergraduate program was at Yeshiva University. Probably the most right-wing college campus in the country.

And dude, if you are 17, nobody's gonna be cross. We'll hug and say "Doesn't it feel so much better being the real you?".

A survey of the school showed that 80% was voting for McCain. (I don't know off-hand the breakdown between students and faculty in that number, but as I recall, it was quite high for both.)

And even THEY hate Paglia.

(Heh, I don't actually know that they hate Paglia. But I imagine they would.)

i know right, read the book. Do it as an exercise. Read "Sexual Personae" from start to finish with an open mind. The only caveat, as with Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism", are the occasional spoliers from fiction works etc.

Mordy, I don't mind her, but any selfish worldview, Rand included, is self-contradictory.

Oh, they do mean something, you just haven't read enough on the subject. Many great authors saw a lesser if any value in art for their actual or envisioned societies.

Mordy, RE your alma mater: as usual, the exception that justifies the rule.

spoIlers

Sigh, dude. You suck.

spollers

Please leave the thread. I want to continue to make fun of Paglia's attempts to get in Palin's pants and you're killing my fun. XP

Vision, I know you think you're dodging the issues really deftly there, but we just want you to actually say something please.

Mordy, as for yout tutor/college, one of Paglia's best advices: "let the library be your teacher" .

please list all the books you've read o wise one

you just haven't read enough on the subject.

srsly why do you say shit like this? do you know? why would you assume it's true? it's a nasty habit, i hope you don't do it in real life or you for sure come off like a total cock. word to the wise.

Like, actually make a point or an argument at some point rather than referring back to some notion of precedence, where you assume a precedence of knowledge that you've never once displayed here.

Paglia is much better, but Adorno (the essays on music and Minima Moralia at least) is an engaging read, just do it selectively.

Vision: takin' it to the next level

He doesn't even know the right Adorno to read :( It's sad.

Of course, it's predictable that he would pick the Adorno's book that has the questionable homophobic slurs in it.

Vision knows what we've read, what classes we've take, when we're sleeping, when we're awake

If we've been bad or good?

He knows the bias of a syllabus from 2000000000 yards!

I propose that Vision has never actually read Sexual Personae.

Let the library be your teacher is a good line though.

But what about the bias of the library, huh?

i know right, I have written like 10 pages of stuff on this thread (which has just now reached that point where people, out of arguments, resort to "you suck", "shut up" etc).

goole, because some things people say betray a level of ignorance which they try to mask or to disingenuously attribute to others. Life is hard in the world of ideas, you must have thick skin. An example: in the book w/the Nabokov/Edmund Wilson correspondence, Nabokov mentions a certain college friend or something like that whose first dissertation started with the following phrase:

"democracy is a latin word"

That statement alone destroyed this guy's reputation forever. And, it must be said, rightly so.

because some things people say betray a level of ignorance which they try to mask or to disingenuously attribute to others.

^^ you don't say

Vision, you've never actually made an argument. Not once. And I challenge you to produce a quote that says otherwise.

But what about the bias of the library, huh?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4147XH95YSL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

Vision, NO YOU HAVEN"T, in fact you're doing what I tried to call you on as a way of avoiding actually saying something AGAIN.

NOBODY IS FOOLED

There's been a couple of really bad one sentence book reviews....

Don't get upset, IK,R? We're all following along. We know he hasn't made a single argument. Those 10 pages he's written are ten pages of fluff.

Vision don't let these guys bully you into saying something of substance

But maybe he doesn't know what an argument is. I'll help - madlibs style:

Despite saying some things you all disagree with about Sarah Palin, Paglia is actually making an interesting point. This is because her argument that {.....} which you may not have considered because of {.......} shows Palin in a new light. While I admit that textually, Palin can appear to be stupid, if you consider {.......} argument of Paglia's, then that becomes reversed.

Just fill in the {.....} and you'll be well on your way to making an argument.

PS vision I'm really really curious what in Derrida's work you find fake or fraudulent.

all the french

those french think they're so smart, they have a different word for everything

They aren't called French Fries. They are called American fries.

Freedom fries.

Paglia fries.

Mordy, that's ironic, since the essays are more or less self-standing, and Minima Moralia is the entry level Adorno that sums up his analytical slants and his ideas on art and society etc. Adorno was (as german authors usually are) blunt in the way he expressed himself. You can't fully read him retroactively or through a PC lens.

i know right/Mordy, what I say is written, and it seems more than enough to sum up what I think about Paglia. Now, as I said the other day, if you want remedial classes, you should at least know the basics.

Passenger, in the library, you select the bibliography. If you teacher says "nah, don't read Fraser", you can go there, read him and judge for yourself.

max, it's ok, "i know right" is actually my sockpuppet, and I suspect Mordy is actually prof.Paglia under an alias.

She is horribly boring. Her teenage insistence on taking the contrary point to get a rise out of her audience was mildly entertaining when her schtick was new. It's quite not-new now, and her younger self might have known as much, but her older self knows which side the bread's buttered on, so she keeps hauling recycled mothball-stinking crap like "I like Sarah Palin! You people just don't understand!" out and collecting her 3k or so per piece. I do not doubt she's a fine professor; she has that tenacity of focus that can make a semester really adventurous. But continuing to read her thought, which does not grow or find new directions, is like taking the same course every semester for over a decade after you've graduated.

It's true, I am a sockpuppet.

Is this the "writing" you're talking about?

Now, some arguments:
-Paglia has a theory of culture (you know, Apollonyan androgynes, Dionysian undercurrents, forces of nature and sexuality shaping culture, gender roles in history, crime, popular culture etc etc); what are you thoughts on it?
-Paglia is very incisive in her statements (hence "verve"); several of her most famous phrases have entered the mainstream debate; what do you have to say about them?
-she also has a very original theory of poetry, going from Sappho to Joni Mitchell and again based on the expression of sexual impulse, among other things; do you think she got it wrong? How?

hahah man I hate it when teachers tell me NOT to read things wtf

seriously cannot think of a single instance of a professor/teacher saying that to me

vision canyou text me again I lost your number...

So it was quiet, quiet, up there in the mountains. It wasn't quiet for long, because when one Jew comes along and meets another, then it's goodbye silence, even in the mountains. Because the Jew and Nature, that's two very different things, as always, even today, even here.

My favorite Celan quote.

i must not be jewish

So, I'm going to bed. Someone email me when Vision makes an argument.

vision text me on my personal cell not my work cell k

i must not be jewish

It took you that quote to figure that out?

Can I just take this moment to share how much pleasure I get from Blanchot?

http://www.coconutstudio.com/Fishing%20Methods%203%20-%20The%20Payaw%20Men_files/Bangsi_troll_bait.jpg

funny how both my mom and dad are

so how many people on this thread should be suggest banned? 2 or 3?

gabbneb, why don't you go back to one of your politics threads?

Wait, what just happened?

Who's gabbneb?

I know, right?

gabbneb just sows loathing and misery wherever he appears.

???

Well? Shall we go? Yes, let's go.

Passenger, Derrida's methodological con games, deliberate misreadings and convoluted/mystifying style are present everywhere in his work like a virus. The only thing being deconstructed if you take this guy for his word is your own common sense. Besides Paglia, I recommend the Sokal/Bricmont book and Merquior's "From Prague to Paris".

i know right, not just that, you are Vision's sockpuppet. Whenever people talk to you, it's actually me on the other side. max, I don't text (I really don't).

Mordy, sorry, you have not. You think you did, perhaps out of intellectual vanity, but how can you offer a counterargument to an author you clearly have not read? Paglia is not the Salon column, Paglia is "Sexual Personae".

Shakey, whenever they select a bibliography, they're doing just that- telling you what to read and what not to read. Also, you never had teachers try to attack certain authors in class? Were you self-schooled or something?

this thread looks like a lotta fun, i gotta say

DUDE READ MY FUCKING COMMENTS: I HAVE READ ALL OF SEXUAL PERSONAE.

don't you mean I HAVE READ ALL THIS SEXUAL PERSONAE

So a reading list is actually compiled to specifically exclude all books not on it?

Hey kiddo, I've read all of Sexual Personae.

― Mordy, Wednesday, November 12, 2008 11:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

If you can't even read this thread, how can we believe you've read anything?

gabbneb, I don't know who you are but I have not understood one comment you've made on this thread even a tiny amount.

gabbneb is the misanthropic House of ILX.

Vision, ad hominem attack =/= argument - you've called Derrida a bunch of names but have come up with exactly jack shit to back it up. I'm beginning to wonder if you've even read Derrida.

ps sometimes it's hard to figure out whether sokal's, like, super-obtuse or just stupid. because he should have been a really fun troll but failed due to sheer witlessness

I'll say this now, I've never read Derrida or Lacan. I've read other stuff, but I'm not gonna pretend I've read things I haven't. You wanna join me Vision? Its easier not to lie all the time.

People will love you for the real you, I swear!

gotta really love that "Derrida doesn't actually deconstruct" line - comedy gold in that particular hill

Here's another madlibs for Vision:

Derrida wrote {.....}. It is a con game because {.....}.

That's an actual argument dude. Not your vague nonsense.

http://www.haverodwilltravel.com/images/Trolling%202.jpg

Shocking. The Corner loves Paglia: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZmIyMmU2Mzg2NjAxNTFkMDA0NDZiMThjMTIwM2EwODI=

Derrida wrote Of Grammatology. It is a con game because it's not popcrit like Paglia, who watches the same TV shows as us.

gabbneb is the misanthropic House of ILX.

you say that like it's an insult

srsly though anybody who thinks Paglia's a more interesting thinker than Derrida is to be pitied, not engaged

she's less interesting but at least she doesn't come with that fraudulent shit

I want to argue that Derrida's whole point, which he picks up from De Man, is that you're coming with fraudulent shit whether you admit it or not, but I doubt that thirteen years past graduation my chops are up to snuff on this one

Mordy, cmon, you have not. You'd know better. Passenger, I attack Derrida's worldview, not him, therefore, no ad hominem, which is precisely what you do do by calling Sokal "super-obtuse", "stupid" and a "troll". See how Derrida throws his readers in a world of bad logic and contradiction?

Unfortunately, I have read professionally Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, Roland Barthes and others of the same ilk. The difference is: I never took their ramblings at face value and I didn't content myself on reading just these outdated slaves of structure with their lack of center or sense.

I'm going, if you have any questions I refer you to my alter ego i know right.

let's talk about actual sexual personae.

read professionally

you do books on tape?

Vision, Sokal quite literally made whatever bones he's made by trolling Social Text. How is that ad hominem?

Derrida's methodological con games, deliberate misreadings and convoluted/mystifying style are present everywhere in his work like a virus.

i think derrida would call this a pretty accurate description, as these things go

I want to argue that Derrida's whole point, which he picks up from De Man, is that you're coming with fraudulent shit whether you admit it or not, but I doubt that thirteen years past graduation my chops are up to snuff on this one

It's maybe even gentler than that...

axiom: structure [always already] > speaker, corollaries follow

i think derrida would call this a pretty accurate description, as these things go

dunno... he's not really that convoluted/mystifying in French... it's usually the translation that's nasty

Certainly the one book I looked at (Spurs, which was published in a bilingual edition) is indeed horribly and confusingly translated.

that bilingual edition of spurs is a notoriously bad translation

the other published translation is good enough to see his point (lol) but not great

that is a hella dope essay btw

Mordy, cmon, you have not. You'd know better. Passenger, I attack Derrida's worldview, not him, therefore, no ad hominem, which is precisely what you do do by calling Sokal "super-obtuse", "stupid" and a "troll". See how Derrida throws his readers in a world of bad logic and contradiction?

just want to point out that the guy who claims intimate acquaintance with the great thinkers of our time is using the term "worldview" in describing their ideas, "worldview" being righty dogwhistle for "suspect ideology"

xpost I can't read French but if I ever read Derrida and didn't have to slow down to flesh out what he was saying, I'd feel cheated

Oh good.

Whoever translated Mal d'archive did fine. Or, at least, it read fine.

Also, I was thinking about this thread earlier today. Because I saw a guy who looked like IK,R? on the subway. Except this guy was older and taller and a little less scruffy.

The concept of "misreading" is fascinating. You can't misread a text, you can only disagree with someone else's reading of a text. But you can misunderstand someone you're taking to.

Most of what Derrida says is in Augustine, anyways.

Most of what Derrida says is in Augustine, anyways.

a line likes this counts as flirting in my neighborhood

Mordy, there's no way you read Paglia, because if you had you wouldn't disagree with me!

"If you had read her you would believe that she is right about everything."

J0hn: Oh, mine too.

Someone sent me a collection of horrible puns. My friend said, "does he realize that's foreplay to you"?

That's not relevant, unless it is? I'm writing a paper about epistemology and puns in the middle ages. I am thinking a bit about Augustine and Derrida. But mostly about sweet sweet Isidore.

All of them are more funsies than Paglia, who seems to think that Obama's birth certificate issue was actually the sort of thing that should disqualify someone from being president, whereas -- well, I didn't read the article, but I assume she thinks Palin's rape kit ploy is laudable? Kooky fun, that!

ps most of what Derrida says is in Nagarjuna, anyways

more like most of what derrida says is in marijuana, am i right

Paglian

;)

I am being told that the rape kit thing is shakier than I had realized! Well, well. Perhaps we all misjudged Palin. Or not.

Great, I overslept thanks to this shit. This throws my schedule right off by the way.

She had a little bit more responsibility than a community organizer, so as a decider who had already dropped one sheriff for cause, she can be held accountable for what the next sheriff publicly did under her direct command. not shaky at all.

And if you lose control of your barn yard animals I will not stop and help you corral them. You are a grown stable lady and you will handle your livestock or suffer the consequences. I will also accept no derision from the hired help on this matter.

wait scruffy?

Free advice: this thread is great reading if you imagine Vision as The Vision from the Avengers.

I don't know if that sounds like a neighborhood I'd want to live in or not.

This really is the best opening two posts on ILX ever, plus hottt troll action! What in the world is better? Besides Camille Paglia's incredible geniusosity, I mean. (OK, Elizabeth Wurtzel. Nothing else.)

"Less scruffy" in that his beard and hair were more carefully trimmed and set than yours, as if he were headed off to an office job where such things were important.

http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/cpc/pag-astr.html

Something is happening. It's a twenty-year astrological cycle that happened.

LOL

Did we ever get Randroid confirmation on Vision?

That barking mad sound you hear isn't the true call of the Objectivist. No, it's some dude in the tall grass in camo with a .22.

Huh. Makes sense re Paglia and astrology. Big sweeping jungian bullshit.

Say kids, what time is it?
It's Camille Paglia Time!

(It's Camille Paglia Time,
It's Camille Paglia Time!)

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/12/10/hillary_mumbai/

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin's rehabilitation has been well launched. Step by step over the past five weeks since the election, headlines about Palin in the mainstream media and some Web news sites have become more neutral and even laudatory, signifying that a shift toward reality is already at hand. My confidence about Palin's political future continues, as does my disgust at the provincial snobbery and amoral trashing of her reputation by the media and liberal elite, along with some conservative insiders.

You guys know the drill. Paste the funniest moments in her column, mock her, and then, when Vision inevitably enters the thread, listen to him berate us for not taking this "brilliant" woman seriously enough.

You're really doing this, aren't you?

(I can't see what you are doing there)

Vision baiting

http://www.gothic.org.au/forum/images/smilies/popcorn.gif

So ridiculous:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/05/13/7_days_in_may/index.html

i'd pull out quotes, but the whole thing is idiotic. The basic thrust is that Paglia thinks right-wing radio has gone a tad bit over the top and she's slightly disappointed.

Here, here's one quote:

"The degree to which Obama is or is not a stealth socialist remains to be seen."

Here's another:

"Well, the one-year anniversary is approaching in late May of my slide lecture ("Varieties of the Erotic in 20th Century Art") at the Teatro Castro Alves in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil"

Whenever I've read her, starting all those years ago, I could never tell if she was joking or not - I still can't.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2009/07/08/reader_letters/

Callers coming fresh from her rallies are always heady with infectious enthusiasm.

Of course you'd never know that from reading hit jobs like Todd Purdum's sepulchral piece on Palin in the current Vanity Fair. Scurrying around Alaska with his notepad, Purdum still managed to find comically little to indict her with. Anyone with a gripe is given the floor; fans are shut out. This exercise in faux objectivity is exposed at key points such as Purdum's failure to identify the actual instigator of Palin's extravagant clothing bills (a crazed, credit-card-abusing stylist appointed by the McCain campaign) and his prissy characterization of Palin's performance at the vice-presidential debate as merely "adequate." Hey, wake up -- Palin cleaned Biden's clock! By the end, Biden was sighing and itching to split.

Whether Palin has a national future or not will depend on her willingness to hit the books at some point and absorb more information about international history and politics than she has needed to know in her role as governor. She also needs a shrewder, cooler take on the mainstream media, with its preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags. The Northeastern media establishment is in decline, and everyone knows it. Palin should not have gotten into a slanging match with David Letterman or anyone else who has been obsessively defaming her or her family. Let surrogates do that stuff.

Hey, wake up!

god salon is so awful

preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags

hmmm who does this remind me of...

The Beatles?

"Ringo was always the preening one."

preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags

Ringo, George, John, Paul...

still lollin @ HI I AM THE AMAZING RANDY

I forgot how loco this thread got.

RIP Vision

camille paglia's the political and social version of chck delcaring amy grant's heart in motion better than nevermind

challopae

sauteed challops

Glad to see much-loved poster "Vision" back under a newly portentous moniker

are you sure the quotation marks are around the right word?

please don't be serious, what do I need to killfile?

lol I'm not being serious but what is it with ppl called things like Vision or Freedom or Spectrum or thirdalternative

I'm sure if you start a thread about this it will go exceptionally well. ...

Breitbart also began to reconsider the education that he had received in Tulane’s American Studies department, where, in his off-hours from partying, he had been exposed to critical theory. “I wanted to read Mark Twain and Emerson and Thoreau,” he says. “And I remember moments in class where I thought my head was going to explode, going, What the fuck are these people talking about? I don’t understand what this deconstructive semiotic bullshit is. Who the fuck is Michel Foucault?” He came across the work of Camille Paglia, and was captivated by her analysis of the takeover of academia by the left.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_mead?currentPage=5#ixzz0oDZlrFwc

preening bullies, cackling witches, twisted cynics and pompous windbags

paul, yoko, john, george

Breitbart, who is Jewish, grew up in Brentwood, an affluent part of Los Angeles. He seems a familiar bicoastal type until he starts explaining his conviction that President Barack Obama’s election was the culmination of a plot, set in place in the nineteen-thirties by émigré members of the Frankfurt School, to take over Hollywood, the media, the academy, and the government, with the aim of imposing socialism. “He’s a Marxist,” Breitbart says of Obama. “His life work, his life experience, his life writings, and now his legislative legacy speak to his ideological point of view.”

the frankfurt school won, guys. but now, thanks to camille paglia, and andrew breitbart, it will lose.

breitbart and justin beiber should form a policy think-tank.

one doesn't get the concept of german, the other doesn't get german concepts

if paglia is responsible for breitbart, it could be she's the worst human being in the world

we don't have a breitbart thread i guess?

anyway this article is a treasure trove

His companions were similarly urbane. One of them was Kurt Loder, the former MTV News anchor, with whom Breitbart found intellectual kinship after discovering that Loder had participated in an event hosted by Reason, the libertarian magazine

"hahaha i am stupid and a terrible writer" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27Paglia.html

this piece is so bad

not to mention sort of racist

every sentence of this is a piece of shit. what a dimwit.

never read any of paglia's books, was she always just a troll basically or did she get stupid later?

i couldn't tell you tbh, i've never read her book-length stuff either, just her opinion work over the years.

my sense is, like a lot of old people, she writes as if the positions she's been arguing for years have to be accepted as true. "as i conclusively proved in my magnum opus years ago..." is the invisible clause beginning each paragraph, basically.

don't understand how the piece ended up talking about rock music

I read bits of Sexual Personae in college, but yeah she's always been a troll

I do wonder if Mike Karnon ever found his book.

Best one-time poster we ever had?

man i hate camille paglia

she's always been a troll

― has arlen specter never heard clarence thomas's laugh? (Shakey Mo Collier), Thursday, July 1, 2010 3:18 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this, basically

calling her a troll is giving her too much credit imo. the kids on 4chan are more provocative than she is.

no, i think calling her a troll is pretty accurate.

oh hai, sarahel

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/dailyloaf/files/2010/01/tommy.jpg

i mean, trolls can be effective or shitty ... but for most of the 90s she made a career out of trolling the Ivy League

I just wouldn't overstate the influence she's had on the Ivy League (or graduate humanities in general). I've never run into her thoughts in a classroom or even in a discussion with a colleague. The first time I heard about her was from a friend who had majored in Lit in undergrad, but never pursued any kind of graduate work and I haven't seen her impact elsewhere. Tho I wasn't in the academe in the 90s, so maybe she was floating around the discourse more then.

I just wouldn't overstate the influence she's had on the Ivy League (or graduate humanities in general).

Agreed. She was more about ridicule and attempts at discrediting it in the court of popular opinion. Her name and ideas didn't really have much traction in the classroom, kinda like canonical rockism on ilx in a way. Maybe?

she owes her entire career to the 90s mania re: "political correctness"

basically, on the rare occasions someone would bring her up, the professor would roll his/her eyes, and say something diplomatic along the lines of, "I'm sorry, we only have a limited amount of time here. If you sincerely feel Camille Paglia merits discussion, you can do so outside of class."

sex viagra, what do you mean?

― Vision, Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:44 PM (1 year ago)

good ol sex viagra

Can someone provide (write/link to) a concise summation of what Camille Paglia/Sexual Personae is all about? She has what I call "Ayn Rand syndrome": I don't know anything about her because I've never read her, and I'll never read her because I know just enough to never actually want to. I only know to hate her, but not why.

The full thing is behind a pay-wall, but if you can hunt it down, I'd read this to start: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1990/may/31/feminism-and-literature/

Also there's a long response that NYRB published too -- I just realized I have access to both, so if you can't get them, shoot me a webmail and I'll email you a txt.

Iiiiiiiiiiiii like her!

lol, no u don't

http://thisdistractedglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/children-of-men-2006-michael-caine-pic-4.jpg

@EDB, two other pieces to look at are from Kenyan Review; a book review of SP by Sandra Gilbert and a kind of retrospective of Paglia by Allison Booth.

(The super super short synopsis: In Paglia-land, the world+history is men/art/seeing/penises/Apollo/etc V. women/nature/feeling/vaginas/Dionysus/etc. Gender isn't a construction but something real and definitive, and feminist moves to equalize relationships between men + women are doomed to failure because they fail to acknowledge how intrinsically dissimilar men and women are.)

also like earth v. air, paganism v. christianity, other stupid dialectical cliches about how women drive like this and men drive like this

If only academia had a suggest ban function.

Thanks a lot.

yeah Paglia is all about the challops

This could well be a contender for the best first (including thread creator) two posts ever.

i haven't read it yet but i'm sure it's jam-packed full of lulz

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece

It's pretty tedious, one-note and pub-bore-y actually. I tried, but couldn't make it through the article. It is terribly written, and has no point that I can see beyond space-filler.

I couldn't make it through more than a few paragraphs. Reads like a parody of that RIPfork site, like, that poorly written. Hardly "demolishing" - more like an angry little person stamping their feet at a new pop phenomenon they just! don't! understand!

Camille's Madonna fandom makes this more poignant in a way.

fuck this generation for letting someone become famous without checking if Camille Paglia fancied them, imo

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltk460YLFZ1r4vn34o1_r1_500.jpg

oops i mean http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltk460YLFZ1r4vn34o1_r1_500.jpg

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christina-patterson/camille-pagila-interview_b_1842500.html

i am a chump and clicked on that. lols at the title.

she sounds pretty sad

she's sad all right

counting up old grudges and calling herself ugly

i was reading some old paglia essays this week bc they are very easy to read and sometimes provocative - but they're all really terrible! her so-called erudition consists entirely of namedropping writers and directors w/out any close reading.

Academic feminism is lost in a fog of social constructionism. It believes we are totally the product of our environment. This idea was invented by Rousseau. He was wrong. Emboldened by dumb French language theory, academic feminists repeat the same hollow slogans over and over to each other. Their view of sex is naive and prudish. Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist's.

that's from an essay on rape in Sex, Art, and American Culture. putting aside the feminism strawmanning, the bizarre metaphor (feminists embalm sex like taxidermists embalm dogs? what does that even mean?) - it is so telling that this is the most critical piece of her essay. "This idea was invented by Rousseau" - oh okay, I guess I'll just take your word for it no quotes or argument or anything. "He was wrong." thanks for setting us straight!

sometimes she can come off like the Ann Coulter of culture, only w/ a somewhat more unpredictable shtick.

rousseau does not think we are totally the product of our environment.

But if there is a state where the soul can find a position solid enough to allow it to remain there entirely and gather together its whole being, without needing to recall the past or encroach upon the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present lasts for ever, albeit imperceptibly and giving no sign of its passing, with no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than simply that of our existence, a feeling that completely fills our soul; as long as this state lasts, the person who is in it can call himself happy, not with an imperfect, poor, and relative happiness, such as one finds in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, perfect, and full happiness, which leaves in the soul no void needing to be filled. Such is the state in which I often found myself on the Ile de St Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I was lying in my boat as it drifted wherever the water took it, or sitting on the banks of the choppy lake, or elsewhere beside a beautiful river or a stream gurgling over the stones

What does one enjoy in such a situation? Nothing external to the self, nothing but oneself and one's own existence: as long as this state lasts, one is self-sufficient like God. The feeling of existence stripped of all other affections is in itself a precious feeling of contentment and peace which alone would be enough to make this existence prized and cherished by anyone who could banish all the sensual and earthly impressions which constantly distract us from it and upset the joy of it in this world. But most men, being constantly stirred by passion, know little of this state, and, having only ever experienced it imperfectly and briefly, they have only a vague and confused idea of it, which gives them no sense of its charm. It would not even be good in the present circumstances for them, avidly desiring these sweet ecstasies, to take a dislike to the active life which their constantly recurring needs impose upon them. But an unfortunate man who has been cut off from human society and who can no longer do anything useful or good in this world either for others or for himself, may find in this state compensation for human joys which neither fortune nor men could take away from him.

peoepl are sexual mosnters!

her BFI book on 'the birds' actually isn't bad, definitely don't bother with anything else though.

she is so terrible. do rapists tend to like her? normally I'd feel a question like that would be unfair, but some of this is just rape apologetics.

"Women have menstruation to tell them they are women. Men must do or risk something to be men. Men become masculine only when other men say they are. Having sex with a woman is one way a boy becomes a man."

"A girl who lets herself get dead drunk at a fraternity party is a fool. A girl who goes upstairs alone with a brother at a fraternity party is an idiot. Feminists call this 'blaming the victim.' I call it common sense."

"Aggression and eroticism are deeply intertwined. Hunt, pursuit, and capture are biologically programmed into male sexuality."

"Feminism, with its solemn Carry Nation repressiveness, does not see what it is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape."

THE FUN ELEMENT IN RAPE. ok, moving on.

"Today's young women don't know what they want."

"The theatrics of public rage over date rape are their way of restoring the old sexual rules that were shattered by my generation."

"There never was and never will be sexual harmony."

"She must be prudent and cautious about where she goes and with whom. When she makes a mistake, she must accept the consequences and, through self-criticism, resolve never to make that mistake again. Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women. Posting lists of guilty men in the toilet is cowardly, infantile stuff."

"Beware of the deep manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern."

"Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history."

truly one of those rare authors whose bad reputation is not just deserved but maybe not bad enough

holy smokes. did you find all of those quotes in her writings yourself?

yes, this week

tough week. but worthy.

I scanned back through this thread and, boy howdy, if a writer's worth could be judged by the quality of their defenders, Vision's methods of arguing would force me to think that the only people who like Paglia must be smug, pedantic, wannabe intellectuals who lack the breadth to deserve that designation and the sense to recognize their deficiencies.

Looking at Mordy's collection of quotes, I'd pick the final one as the least defensible, no matter what context has been lost. The three characteristics of masculinity she selects are not the salient ones. Unstable? In contrast to what? Femininity?

Then, to name masculinity as "the most creative force in human history" is so baseless a declaration as to defy analysis. Can she have failed to notice that masculinity is massively more abundant than creativity? Or that creativity is not exclusive to the masculine? Among ex cathedra pronouncements, this rates as one of the stupidest I have ever encountered.

i'll cop to not really being aware of paglia in anything other than the vaguest academic sense (i went to college!) but those quotes are amazingly, monumentally, awful

also the opening of this thread is all-time

from that interview i think "crazy old dyke" is dead on. a crazy old dyke in the right place at the right time. i'm not familiar with who it was that bought her horseshit though. confused women and men both? is her stuff on a pua / ayn rand / misogynistic nerd continuum? how did people take it seriously (did they)? xp

yeah those first two posts are basically alpha and omega

xp "dyke" is unfortunate i guess. more like hyper-closeted / repressed.

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/camille_paglias_glittering_images/

I haven't read it yet but I'm looking forward to it! (The interview, not the book. I'm done reading Paglia books forever, I think.)

HI I AM THE AMAZING RANDY