The Camille Paglia IMterview
An email exchange with Andrew Sullivan
(The following is the result of email exchanges between Camille
Paglia and me. She hasn't gotten around to readers' questions yet,
so feel free to send more in.)
Andrew Sullivan: Camille, I should really start by asking you a
question so many of my readers have been asking me for the last
nine months. What have you been up to lately? Was there some
reason that you kept your own counsel during the tumultuous 9/11
period?
Camille Paglia: It's great to talk to you, Andrew. For the past two
years, in addition to teaching full-time as usual at the University
of the Arts in Philadelphia, I've been writing a book about poetry
that will be released next year by Pantheon Books. It distills my
30 years of classroom teaching and is intended for a general
audience.
Next I'll be pulling together materials for my third essay collection
for Vintage Books. I'm also working on the second volume to
"Sexual Personae", which is under contract to Yale University
Press.
I've written the foreword for a book by my significant other,
Alison Maddex, that will be published this fall by
Universe/Rizzoli. It's called "Sex in the City: An Illustrated
History" and traces the history of sex in New York from the
seventeenth century to the present. As an arts curator, Alison has a
phenomenal eye for images, and she's found some amazing things.
I resigned from Salon.com last year to focus on my book projects
and lectures. For example, a lecture I gave on multiculturalism
and education at Santa Clara University in May 2001 was
published last fall by Arion. This fall Arion will publish a lecture I
gave at Yale University in March on American religion in the
1960s.
I'd been writing for Salon for six years since their inaugural issue
in 1995. If I could have written for them every week, I would
have. They were very generous in letting me go down to a
triweekly schedule, but finally it just became impossible.
It wasn't the actual writing of the column that was onerous: it was
the constant processing of news articles and commentaries from
the U.S. and abroad that was taking its toll. That much bad prose
is toxic! What was hardest was giving up the connection I had
with Salon readers all over the world. Their messages, jammed
with information and vivid opinion, were a revelation.
Whatever its financial problems, Salon will go down in history as
one of the most influential publications of our time. Its tone, style,
and format have been massively imitated by web sites across the
political spectrum. I'm very proud to have played a role in that
pioneering operation from the start.
Last fall I joined Interview magazine as a contributing editor. It
was founded by Andy Warhol, and I'm thrilled to be part of it. I've
been a disciple of Warhol since college in the 1960s, when I saw
his early black and white films. Warhol and Oscar Wilde were the
two major figures in the development of my aesthetics.
I commented at length on the horrifying attack on the World
Trade Center in my Interview column in the last
December/January issue. Aside from that, I've stayed out of the
fray. Political debate has gotten extraordinarily divisive in the
United States. There's a level of bitterness and hysteria that I've
never seen in my lifetime. In the 1960s, the arguments at least had
substance. Today's quarrels are petty turf wars - fiddling while
Rome burns.
I'm monitoring the international news, which is the only thing that
matters. As always, I'm reading ancient history, whose paradigms
we are fated to relive again and again. The lessons in the rise and
fall of glorious empires are not very reassuring, I'm afraid, to our
present situation.
AS: I'm interested by your thoughts about Salon. What do you
think of Slate? Did they ever ask you to write for them? Or were
you too unpredictable for them? My own view is that the first
internet magazines opened up the terrain but failed to see the real
potential of the medium - which is its radical democracy!
Imagine, a few years ago, if an ego-mad, self-righteous bully had
taken over the New York Times and skewed its coverage to lies
and propaganda, it would have been very very hard to hold him to
account. In fact, Abe Rosenthal's reign of terror was never fully
held to account. Now, all sorts of entities and non-entities can
reveal to mass audiences the agendas of these media machers.
That's a huge gain. A reader pointed out recently that one of
Tocqueville's deepest worries about America was its herd
mentality, especially in intellectual matters. The internet is like a
car-horn in the middle of a pack of lemmings. It disperses the
throng; and some of the poor schmucks even avoid going over the
cliff.
CP: As for Slate, merciful Minerva! Can anyone imagine that
shrinking violet, Michael Kinsley, dealing with an Italian-
American Amazon? James Wolcott, my favorite culture critic, has
a piquant story about Kinsley's vapors toward me, but I'll leave
him to tell it.
Slate has improved greatly since it took cultural lessons from
Salon, but I rarely look at it. I'm too busy watching reruns of
Knots Landing on Soap Net channel. The problem with early Slate
was that it was slow to adjust to the transition from the printed
page to the computer screen, a visual medium. It was effete in
syntax and tediously verbose (like literary articles in the New
Republic).
We insurgents at Salon identified, in contrast, with the punchiness
of the populist press. David Talbot and the other founders of
Salon were working for West Coast dailies or local TV. I had
been writing articles for Talbot when he was arts and culture
editor at the San Francisco Examiner. When he left to create
Salon in 1995, I went with him. Salon at its height was a mirror of
David Talbot's avant-garde sensibility. Unfortunately, financing
has been a constant, draining problem. I've written about my
practical work for Salon in an article called "Dispatches from the
New Frontier: Writing for the Internet" in "Communication and
Cyberspace", a forthcoming book co-edited by Lance Strate of
Fordham University. I say there that Salon has already outlasted
two short-lived, eighteenth-century London periodicals of
equivalent importance and influence, the Tatler and the Spectator.
AS: You mentioned "the fall of glorious empires," as pertinent to
our times. But I see no real evidence of traumatic decline here.
One of the things that most struck me last September was the
extraordinary resilience of American patriotism, and the depth
and strength of popular American morality. Three decades of the
nihilist left slowly eroding our universities and public discourse
didn't seem to have wrought too much havoc among the people
who really matter. I know many young students whose heads are
filled with nonsense at universities, but within a few years, they
seem to regain their moral and intellectual bearings. It's an awful
waste of what should be the best years of your life, but not
irreparable.
I was up in your old neck of the woods recently - my boyfriend
grew up in Troy, New York - and was reassured by the common
sense and strong values all around me. But it also makes me
wonder whether our elite debates matter very much at all. Maybe
you and I are wasting our time.
CP: Regarding the state of the nation since 9-11, yes, I too am
delighted by the resurgence in patriotism. The snobbish anti-
Americanism of the Manhattan and campus intelligentsia was one
of my prime targets when I arrived on the scene with my first
book in 1990. Since I'm the product of an immigrant family (my
mother and all four grandparents were born in Italy), I have a very
clear sense of America's freedoms and opportunities.
And because my father and five uncles had fought in World War
Two for the Allies against the Italian motherland, I've always had
high regard for the military. Our national security is threatened by
the failure of prestige universities to encourage or respect military
careers. When our best and brightest expect a servant class to shed
their blood in the nation's defense, we're starting to look like late
imperial Rome.
As for the bitterness and hysteria I spoke of, I was mainly
referring to the degeneration of discourse on TV and radio talk
shows. Political positions have rabidly repolarized, and gradations
of opinion have vanished. I loathe this trend of anointing partisan
campaign consultants to host news shows. Hence two programs I
used to watch - ABC's This Week and CNN's Crossfire - have
dropped off the map for me. I wouldn't waste two seconds
listening to that unctuous socialite, George Stephanopolous, or
Paul Begala, a yapping mongoose with the ethical sense of a
stone.
I love your description of young Americans you know "whose
heads are filled with nonsense at universities". But as a teacher, I
don't agree that the damage is only temporary. There is too little
available time for the humanities as it is. Students forced to waste
their energies on postmodernism and poststructuralism, with its
pointless contortions, are graduating from expensive schools with
limited or superficial knowledge of the arts as well as history.
Compulsory exposure to bad writing and specious theorizing
cripples talented students when they try to develop their
individual voices. We've been waiting for a decade for a new
generation of credible young culture critics with staying power. It
hasn't happened yet. Imagination and taste need to be cultivated.
A writer is the product of everything he or she has absorbed.
By my "neck of the woods" (a phrase with resonance from its use
in "Auntie Mame") I assume you mean upstate New York. Yes, I
was born in Endicott and lived there and in the farm town of
Oxford until I was 10. Then we moved to Syracuse. I went to
college at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where
I got a superb education at bargain-basement rates. (I recently
addressed the scandalous costs of American higher education in
an appeal in Front Page Magazine.)
Until I left for graduate school at Yale, my entire world was
upstate New York, with its frigid winters and magnificent
landscapes. I've written about this in an article on Syracuse for
Britannica.com for a series they're doing on American cities. The
open skies and brisk Canadian air produce strong, independent
personalities. My upbringing as an outlander was somewhat
parallel to Germaine Greer's in Australia. We share this
impatience with hothouse coteries and tend to charge ahead,
mowing down everything in our paths.
AS: I agree with you about the tone and nature of contemporary
debate. Certainly in the gay world. Wouldn't it be great to have a
civilized, non-personal, insult-free discussion among gay
intellectuals? Ain't gonna happen. The smart left speaks an
academic jargon designed to shut itself off from mainstream
debate and enforce its views in its enclaves by naked power. The
rest is the curdled ressentiment of gossip columnists and smear
artists. So depressing. And having failed to enter into a serious
debate in the 1990s, they've now woken up, realized that they've
lost the argument and started desperately throwing mud. The good
news is that there's a rebirth of moderate, liberal and conservative
gay writers out there who also disagree about many things. But the
center of debate has shifted so far away from the old paradigm
that it's barely recognizable as a culture war debate. More of a
cultural nuance debate. Which suits me fine, by the way.
CP: Of course I completely agree with your lament about the
debasement of thought among hardcore gay activists -
professional gays whose religion is their sexual orientation. Their
belief system was flash frozen in the distant past, and they seem
incapable of intellectual inquiry or spiritual growth. Their petulant
refusal to engage your ideas or mine a decade ago has been one of
many factors in their steady cultural marginalization. Their usual
tactics of slander and ostracism didn't work with us, since we
were already fully formed thinkers and writers, but many dissident
gays were effectively silenced.
May I express again my admiration of the courage and fortitude
shown by you and Norah Vincent in the gay debate at the New
School in June. The C-SPAN tape of that evening (which I
reviewed in "The Gay Inquisition" in Front Page Magazine) is a
true historical document. The vipers were flushed from the
shrubbery for the whole world to see. And thanks to their lifetime
addiction to lazy groupthink, they were definitely not ready for
prime time.
The peak moment was when you read from your book to prove the
atrocious misquotation that's been ruthlessly used against you. It
was as if time stopped. One could feel through the TV screen how
the hostile crowd fell under a spell as you demonstrated your
power of mind and wonderful quality of language.
AS: Tell me something. You were a Nader supporter in 2000.
Have you changed or adjusted your view of president Bush since
then?
CP: I'm still a Nader fan. His critiques of capitalism can save it. I
think Bush is a decent, well-meaning man with simple tastes. He's
restored a sense of order and dignity to the White House, which
the Clintons treated like a tacky amusement park. It's a relief not
to see the president of the United States popping up like a jack-in-
the-box at every two-bit, fleabag mini-event.
Military leadership by the Bush administration in the months
following 9-11 was strong and confident. But this year there's
been an unsettling series of miscues, hesitations, and reversals.
The top people look tired, and political skirmishes haven't been
skillfully managed. Not that the Democrats are any great shakes!
Daschle and Gebhardt are such jackasses.
Bush's speechwriters finally found the right vocabulary and
cadence for him, but I still quail when I listen to him, as some
malapropism is bound to occur. Bush's lack of ease with
spontaneous, non-scripted communication has serious
consequences when he tries to calm investors' nerves or explain to
the world why we should wage war on Iraq.
Bill Clinton was a glib, seductive, serial abuser of language. Bush
has good, plain instincts, but in my view, a president needs greater
mastery of language to sustain his authority in a media age.
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