By Camille Paglia (2018)
I completely failed the first time, so I tried again on holiday to get through Provocations by Camille Paglia.
My conclusion: that I am done with Camille Paglia. Her contrarian shtick may have been refreshing fifteen years ago but her act has been stolen by the intellectually vacuous and she’s keen to follow them
My conclusion: that I am done with Camille Paglia. Her contrarian shtick may have been refreshing fifteen years ago when she stayed closer to what she knows (broadly: classics and aesthetics), but her act has been stolen by the intellectually vacuous and it seems she’s keen to follow them.
It doesn’t help that this book is a patchwork of bits and pieces, nearly all of which have been published before, and quickly becomes a repetitive list of familiar tropes, to the extent you could almost plays a drinking game (mentions Robert Mapplethorpe’s cover of the Patti Smith album Horses – drink!).
It seems to have been diminishing returns with Paglia since 2000 – I’m afraid I stopped reading when she claims that global warming isn’t real because, um, Al Gore is in psychological bad faith (or something).
Sexual Personae (her PhD thesis, now many decades old) is great, as is her book of poetry criticism (the hilariously-titled Break, Blow, Burn) – more “recently” Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders, her criticism of academic careerism and specifically Foucault, it very funny. But the problems have clearly been there from the start โฆ it’s quite difficult to take even the earlier work entirely seriously now.