t h ecamille  paglia
c h e c k l i s t

So, you've missed the beginning of this interview and don't know whether it's Camille Paglia or not? Nothing simpler than that. Just fill out this handy checklist, and the revolutionary Pagliameter will do the work for you!

Is she talking about herself?
Does she contrast something Judeo­Christian with something Pagan?
Something Apollonian and something Dionysian?
Hardcore porn is great?
Mainstream feminism sucks?
Foucault's an overvalued fake?
Art is porn?


(Last change March 4th, 2006.)



/cpc/essays

The Mighty River of Classics: Tradition and Innovation in Modern Education, published in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics; this is a transcript of a lecture delivered on May 5th, 2001 at Santa Clara University, for the conference "Jesuit Humanism: Faith, Justice, and Empiricism in the Liberal Arts",

The Gay Inquisition, review of a debate about gay ideology at the New School in New York, June 27 2002, which she watched on C-SPAN 2.

Ask Camille 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 Paglia's weekly letter-answering column and some longer essays in Salon Magazine; pointers to archived articles can be found at the bottom of the page.

The Left has Lost its Way and Lost its Voice, reprinted from the London Times by Frontpage magazine. She voted for Nader in 2000. The left needs to embrace capitalism.

No fairy-tale ending for Madonna in the London Independent, August 27th, 2005. Madonna fell off a horse, what a poser. Her children's book sucked, too. Lucy Cousins is much better.

Hurricane Katrina has demolished this administration's mask of confidence London Independent, September 3rd, 2005. The American (television) media is toothless, but not Matt Drudge, who forecast the enormity of last December's tsunami. The "pagan chaos of brute nature". Pitt, Aniston, Jolie. "What do Jolie's strange vitality and mysticism owe to her Iroquois ancestry?" What is the greatest rock & roll song of all time?



/cpc/interviews

Break, Blow, Burn - Camille Paglia discusses poetry with Shane Barry at Three Monkeys Online. The interviewer is well-informed, although some of the questions have predictable, softball answers. New criticism's close reading makes a comeback; novels are outdated too quickly; watching Oprah; why no Ezra Pound (creatively self-crippled), T.S.Eliot (never liked him), Auden (of questionable quality), Frost (made my skin crawl). Also, should feminist author Germaine Greer have gone on the reality television show "Big Brother"?

An interview with Camille Paglia with Daniel Nester at bookslut.com. Paglia's roots in "New Criticism" (and a kick-ass definition of Close Reading from the interviewer). Judith Butler is clueless. Influence determines greatness. Comtemporary poetry: What happened?

The Camille Paglia IMterview with Andrew Sullivan, in 2001. An interview conducted in Email messages, with some of the questions contributed by Sullivan's readers. Resigning from salon; Interview magazine; why not Slate ("merciful Minerva! Can anyone imagine that shrinking violet, Michael Kinsley, dealing with an Italian-American Amazon?") US patriotism since 9-11; the gay debate; Bush.

Ingrid Sischy's interviews for Interview Magazine. Paglia had a regular interview-format column in Interview Magazine, whose website doesn't host an archive, but which allows access via "LookSmart".

Boy, She Sure Does Talk Fast By Dan Savage with Christine Wenc, set up by Malcolm Lawrence. Camille pays her own room service bill. Her early lesbianism. Male homosexuality as a late response to an inborn artistic impulse. ACT UP isn't moving people spiritually. Women with maternal love of men are in league with each other to protect men. Male heterosexuals have maybe three buttons.

doctor paglia probes pop, the net, and hitchcock An interview by Dmetri Kakmi. Pop is being adopted by newcomers who shouldn't spice up their writing with pop culture quotes without having Paglia's reverence for pop culture. The net became palatable to Paglia once it "went from the DOS format into these beautiful graphics". Hitchcock's "The Birds", also the title of Paglia's new book about it at the behest of the British Film Institute, influenced Paglia's theory of civilization, especially the Apollonian jungle gym.

From huntress to hunted Camille Paglia talks about Diana, Princess of Wales. (The title refers back to "Diana the huntress", the title of Paglia's "New Republic" essay as reprinted in "Vamps and Tramps".)

Untrue to You in Their Own Fashion Urban Desires magazine publishes twelve short conversations with different people on the topic of cheating. The one with Paglia touches on her own monogamous relationship, honesty, Prince Charles, Picasso, and Woody Allen.

Think Tank: Does Hollywood Hurt America? Transcript of a June 1995 PBS talk show. Paglia discusses with her 100% irony-free opponents Robert Bork (author of "Slouching Towards Gomorrah") and John Leo the age-old question: Do fictional sex and violence cause "bad behavior"?

Art Matters, October 1995: Camille Paglia Adrienne Redd's interview focuses on the relationship between arts and politics. Art and politics in competition (art survives where regimes are forgotten); what should be funded, what not; the architecture of Philadelphia.

AOL Transcript 9/19/95: Camille Paglia. ACLU media director Phil Gutis interviews Camille Paglia in AOL's ``Constitution Hall,'' touching on such staples of American Civil Liberties as swimsuit competitions, Calvin Klein ads, and the movie ``Showgirls.'' (Well, okay. There's also the usual bit about abortion, gay Republicans, porn, and rape laws.)

Interview with the Vamp: The August '95 issue of the libertarian reason magazine had this phone interview by Virginia I. Postrel from April '95. The `respect' that the interview's subtitle claims Paglia has for Ayn Rand is actually one she has for world religions; the feelings she expresses towards Ayn Rand are mild disagreement and a general sense of discomfort. (Why learn to read when you can publish?) Other topics: the 50ies, Sommers (courageous), Wolf (incoherent), Limbaugh (ignored), gay men (building civilization), masculine men (fixing the plumbing), and letting your rear end go dead.

Interview by Peter Downie for Progress and Prophesy, the 25th anniversary special of the Canadian series `Man Alive.' The interview was filmed for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Philadelphia, 1991; producer David Cherniack has now published the raw transcript. It is long, unstructured, and hard to read on screen, but full of biographical and historical statements about feminism, the sixties, and culture.

In the transcript of "Has Feminism Gone To Far", a ThinkTank interview, Paglia and Sommers present their, unsurprisingly, unanimously dim views of `gender-feminism' vs their own `equality-feminism'.

The Prostitute, the Comedian -- And Me, an interview by Tracy Quan, probably the best-known Paglia interview on the Web.



/cpc/quotes

A Brief Autobiography of Camille Paglia As Told Through Introductory Appositive Phrases In Her Online Column. by Lisa Whipple, for McSweeney's.

Camille Paglia says it best in these quotes from Vamps and Tramps on mainstream feminism and political correctness. The site behind it is eclectic in a manner typical for the web, with Focault, Derrida, and Chomsky only two links away.

Camille Paglia, Astrologer, a small collection of quotes from ``Vamps and Tramps'' and ``Sex, Art, and American Culture''.

The last word in stolentelling, part of the wonderful Joyce site ``The Brazen Head,'' seeks out references to Joyce in (among others) Paglia's Sexual Personae.

Selections from Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia, excerpt two chapters, on boys as "origin of the great art" of Ancient Greece and the Rennaissance.

Chapter 22: American Decadents: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, presents sixteen numbered quotes from that chapter, somehow - I'm not sure how - mixed up with Debora Wyrick's class materials in Contemporary World Literature.

Critiques of Feminism: Camille Paglia: excerpts and brief, sympathetic responses to Paglia's comments from host Brian Carnell.



/cpc/books


Vamps & Tramps

  Essay Tramp, a review by Hannah Glasston for her `Eighth Day' column in the Tuscon Weekly. After expressing disappointment about finding no material on Paglia's newer criticism of the university system, Glasston spends the rest of the review picking on gender-political quotes; something that is easy to do given Paglia's provocative style, but not really fruitful. Key quote: `Not getting enough. I thought so.'

Matt Haber's review for io Magazine is brief, but to the point.

De omgekeerde schoenendoos van Paglia (``The upside-down shoe-box of Paglia.''), a Dutch review by Xandra Schutte for the magazine ``De Groene Amsterdammer.''



Sexual Personae

  Randal E. Metz attempts an Overview of Sexual Personae. As he admits, summarizing the book is, of course, impossible; but if you're already vaguely familiar with Paglia's style of presentation, this page will give you a good idea of what to expect.

A Brilliant Reading Of Western Culture's Lurid Evolution, concludes Kevin Cassell, and gives brief summaries of both the whole Apollonian/Dionysian shebang and Paglia's position amidst attacking forces from liberals, conservatives, gays, and feminists.

The Section on Paglia of "Rodney Anonymous Tells You How To Live" entertainingly jams the book into a nutshell - and does a surprisingly good job. (It's the paragraph next to the little torn-off notebook page with "C P + R A" in a heart.) Sounds a little like PJ O'Rourke.

Wikipedia, the collaborative encyclopedia, has an entry on the subject. Since this is a Wiki, one could go and improve on what's there; but reading fragments like this one: "for her, human sexuality is dark, cruel, sadistic, powerful, daemonic, perverse, murky, decadent, pagan..." somehow just leaves me with an urge to add "cute" and "fluffy" to the list.

J. Edgar Bauer's Long German Review of "Die Masken der Sexualität" (with English abstract), originally published in the Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, now reprinted (rehosted?) by the International Gay & Lesbian review.

David Christopher Naylor Swanson's review tries to give Paglia her due while disagreeing with her on just about everything.



Sex, Art, and American Culture

  Tom Davis reviews Sex, Art, and American Culture, and Bernard Kelly comments in a letter to the Teletimes (down a page).

Michael Arner's Opinions after the Cancelled Preface to Sexual Personae call for a reception of Paglia as a scholar, not just as a purveyor of provocative sound bytes.

Jane Szita's review for Mediamatic chronicles Paglia's self-promotion binge of the early nineties.



The Birds

  Paglia's small book on Hitchcock's masterpiece was commissioned by the British Film Institute. (Which also reveals to us her Top Ten movies of all time.)

In issue #49 of Australian culture magazine Sevenmag's weekly pop culture column "savvy", Dmetri Kakmi (who interviewed Paglia for Sevenmag not long before) reviews the book very favorably.

Bill Krohn lucidly reviews the work for "Screening the Past", contrasting it with Me and Hitch, a memoir that came out a year prior to Paglia's.



Break, Blow, Burn

  Paglia's next book, subtitled "Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems", was published March 29th, 2005.

The title is taken from a John Donne poem:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Dmetri Kakmi spends half of his "Critical Eye" column in the spring 2006 edition of the istanbul literature review being gently, informedly, disappointed.



/cpc/thoughts

Kamilla Pal'ja: chernaja ovca v stade amerikanskogo feminizma, by Sergej Kuznecov. Seks, drugz, rok-n-roll, and the conflict of the dionisijskogo with the apollonicheskogo.

Camille as never before, by Chase Madar Over-the-top fictitious self-interview.

PAGLIA: Pop Culture Pseudo-Intellectual, by Michael Phillip Wright. Michael initially got pulled in by Paglia's stance on feminism, but is appalled by her endorsement of astrology and accuses her of reinforcing the Mafia stereotype in her essay "The Italian Way of Death".

Marit Synnevåg: Camille Paglia, reprinted from Samtiden, nr 5, 1995 intersperses discussion of Paglia's theory (in Norwegian) with quotes from David Bowie songs (in English) and quotes from Paglia (some in English, some translated to Norwegian.) Key vocabulary: Apollon og Dionysos. The article is only a small part of Marit's larger collection of Paglia material; see below.

Impolitic, by Molly Ivins Was printed in Mother Jones magazine in 1991. ``What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit.''



fans and experts

Random House webpage for Camille Paglia is -- well. It's mostly purple, done in some sort of astrology/astronomy theme, and you can vote on what you think the world's greatest disco hit is. Oh, the interactivity.

a Camille Paglia archive, curated by J. Poletti, is an impressive, up-to-date, eclectic collection, fed in part by by the Paglia-L mailing list, with a rich layer of archival sub pages discussing details like Paglia's relationship to Gore Vidal's "Myra Breckinridge" character or the question of Sexual Personae volume II.

Camille Paglia - Feminist Fatale from Marit Synnevåg seems like a mixture of the Unofficial and the Spectaculum homepage; there are quotes (who are shorter, but better attributed, than those in the Unofficial page), and short links that do without ``click here''s and were written by someone who knows what a bibliographical reference looks like.

The USENET newsgroup alt.fan.camille-paglia exists, but has very low volume these days.

Paglia-L, the Camille Paglia mailing and discussion list, has resurfaced hosted as camillepaglia by topica.com.

Bookrags: Biography: Camille Paglia succeeds in presenting a comprehensive biographical sketch of the author.

Wikipedia: Camille Paglia is sprawling, detailed, and probably more up to date than this page.

Jahsonic.com: Camille Paglia Another dictionary entry in a network of illustrated cultural references, with quotes illustrating various points Paglia is known to occasionally make.




Thanks to the denizens of irc channel #dutch for the translation of Schutte's title,
and to the many people who've told me about bugs in this page,
or suggested additions and improvements.
Comments? Send email to jutta@quut.com.