Black and Blue and Smart
All Over
Camille Paglia Blows
in to Heat up the Frost
She’s the wise-cracking grand dame of academe, as likely to give
you the femme-eyed root of all evil as the elegant heel of her
Jimmy Choo.
By John Hood
There are smart
chicks; there are whip-smart chicks; then there’s Camille Paglia,
who out-quicks both. We’re talkin’ sharp, dig? Sword sharp,
hyperswift and, yes, sometimes even terrible. Not enfant terrible,
mind you; savant terrible. And note: no idiot.
Though there are
idiots aplenty suffering the wrath of Ms. Paglia’s swordplay. First
infamous for the bed-rocking Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence
From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, Paglia, the University
Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the
Arts in Philadelphia, has staked her claim to the higher ground by
getting down in the gutter and brawling, with sheer savage
brilliance. Call it intellectual thuggery, as thick as a learned
fist, and twice as lethal.
But while Paglia
may be a thug, she is no bully, unless you consider bullying to be
kickin’ the shit outta those who think they’re bigger than you.
Modern Critics and their French falutin ways? Defrogged and
dethroned. Victim-focused feminists with their bullish means?
Creamed to the puff that they huff behind. Knee-jerk reactioneers
of swillful repute? Battened with the Slugger they deserve.
She’s the
wise-cracking grand dame of academe, as likely to give you the
femme-eyed root of all evil as the elegant heel of her Jimmy Choo.
Infamous, and well-regarded. The New York Times’ Clive
James calls Paglia “madly glamorous”; he also says “[s]he is humble
enough to be enthralled by [poetry]; enthralled enough to be
inspired; and inspired enough to write the sinuous and finely shaded
prose that proves how a single poem can get the whole of her
attention.”
And what attentive
attention it is. Paglia’s benchmarking Break, Blow, Burn, of
which dear Clive so glowingly speaks, was a keen close read at a
view that’s become almost passé, or at least mostly inconsequential.
We mean, poetry, that idiom of flowers and trees which speaks to
fewer and fewer worth talking to. Copped from a kickass line in John
Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV,” Burn’s a high-end era New Crit
come-off waged as war on contemporary lit-critting, which, come to
think of it, isn’t very literary anymore, nor, for that matter,
really very critical, not in any learned sense of the term.
Paglia though will
learn you. Or else. Championed by both Bill Maher and Matt Drudge,
not to mention the dominatrix Elise Sutton; influenced by the likes
of Kenneth Clark and Mary McCarthy, Walter Pater and Dorothy Parker,
and despised by invertebrates everywhere, she does for art what it
long ago should’ve done for itself — severed those binding blinds.
To Paglia, art’s not about gender, it’s not about race, it’s not
even about time — it’s about talent. Pure, and not so simple-minded.
Kicking off this
season’s 26th run of the estimable Steven and Dorothea Green Critics
Lecture Series at FIU’s Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum,
Paglia will preface A Room of One’s Own, an elaboration of
space by Ciantas Fellows Teresita Fernández, María Elena González,
Quisqueya Henríquez and María Martínez-Cañas. Last year, Carlos
Fuentes inaugurated the proceedings; this inaugural will undoubtedly
be no less auspicious, or packed.
Come one, come all,
and come keen. Or you might get hurt.
Paglia is on at 8
p.m. Friday in the Green Library in the museum, in PC 110 of Florida
International University’s University Park Campus, SW 107th
Avenue and Eighth Street, Miami. Admission is free. Call
305-348-2890
Comments? E-mail
letters@miamisunpost.com.
