Since I've been asked - Schadenfreude. The adjective is schadenfroh. I
found Camille very amusing & stimulating in SP, not so much in what
followed, which I have merely sampled. It/she seems repetitive &
obsessional. This review is apparently on the ball. CP obviously has no
idea about contemporary poetry & is just scattershooting from the hip.
It's like the broadsides aimed with dull regularity at so-called
difficult modern music (brrr - Schoenberg & Co.) Theory interests me
very little (since I seldom understand it - when I do it appears either
platitudinous or mad); I want the pleasures of the text & I want them
now. In this case (CP) the law of diminishing returns obtains - whereas
Guy Davenport, for example, just went on being as good as it gets, not
being ideologically driven. Are there any critics now active (Kermode is
a survivor but one sees relatively little of him nowadays) whom one
reads as one did Empson, Kenner or Davenport - or, indeed, Duncan or
Thom Gunn - for the sheer enjoyment of the thing, while being
intellectually regaled? Heaney bores me, poetry or prose - which may be
my blankness. Und sonst?
mj
Alison Croggon wrote:
>I can't resist pointing you to this swipe at Paglia over her new book. It's
>tremendous for schadenfreud. (Or is that schadenfreude, Martin?)
>
>I never got through Sexual Personae because I hurled it across the room in
>the middle of the introduction. But that's just me.
>
>Here's the beginning:
>
>Look at Me
>
>by LEE SIEGEL
>
>"When Camille Paglia first strutted onto the scene in 1991 with her
>polemical tome Sexual Personae , her smart, audacious duels with orthodoxy
>and militancy on both the left and the right were a tonic. Against highly
>theoretical academic feminists comfortable in their privileged aeries, she
>cited the experience of working-class women, and also just plain, ordinary
>struggling women who were unprotected by tenure and by the sealed borders of
>a campus. In response to the conservatives who sought to woo her, she
>flaunted her bisexuality and her love of gay style and camp. In response to
>the multiculturalists who dreamed of bringing into the "canon" comic books
>and television sitcoms--thus making it possible for comic books and
>television to also bear the stigma of "homework"--she defended the virtues
>of classic literature. But when the conservatives came calling again with
>their Great Books boosterism, she blasted them with her ardor for rock and
>roll.
>
>Feminist martinets? Paglia zapped them with paeans to pornography,
>prostitution and the thrill of raw, heterosexual sex. Conservative prigs?
>She zinged them with hymns to Robert Mapplethorpe and to gay male porn, and
>to the superiority of gay male sex. Lesbians? Well, she didn't really like
>them, but she loved having sex with women, just in case you underestimated
>her antagonism toward the idea of "normalcy." And so it went.
>
>Like all styles of radical will, it eventually got tiresome. "Attacking the
>stale orthodoxies of both left and right" has itself become a stale
>intellectual franchise, a contrarian orthodoxy. You can be left, and you can
>be (I guess) right without being stalely orthodox. The "issues" Paglia was
>railing against were a lot less well defined beyond the parochial realm in
>which she debated them. Campus campaigns against free speech, a university's
>attempts to police the nebulous zone of sex and dating--such trends seemed
>sensationally oppressive inside the claustrophobic space of the university,
>and in the hungry eyes of op-ed page editors, book publishers and television
>producers.
>
>But standing outside the university and looking in yielded a different
>perspective. People, especially young people, really were feeling more
>vulnerable. Self-esteem really was a vital psychic quality worth talking
>about. Society was changing. Commercially fabricated permissiveness was not
>the same thing as genuine human freedom, and people hadn't yet developed--we
>still haven't--new defenses against new types of injury created by the
>marketplace. So younger people were looking for new ideas and new sentiments
>that would help them become persons, or simply to help them survive.
>Naturally there were going to be outrageous excesses, careerist hangers-on,
>charismatic charlatans along the way. That's the price of progress.
>
>Considered in this broader social context, Paglia's Emersonian
>pronouncements on the inestimable value of the individual began to sound as
>adolescent as Emerson at his most solipsistic. And celebrity started
>exacting its usual toll on Paglia in the form of self-exaggeration and
>self-parody. The thoughtful gadfly became a performing gabfly; her
>provocations declined into insults; her once-gratifying affirmations of
>individuality, imagination and incalculable experience began to sound like
>playground shouts of Look at Me. Paglia's vituperative ranting against
>hate-speech laws now seemed like arguments for why they should exist. She
>seemed to be precisely the kind of old-fashioned bully who had given rise to
>the new fragility and its search for protection, and for its own sources of
>power.
>
>Worst of all was Paglia's self-consciousness as a media personality. After a
>while, she was no longer taking positions in response to principles or
>ideas, but in response to her own positions. Her extreme rhetoric concealed
>a cautious tailoring of her image. For every step leftward, she had to take
>a step rightward; for every transgressive gesture she had to make a
>concession to middle-class mores, for every step down to pop culture, she
>had to step up to some exaltation of artistic greatness. It was like doing
>the last tango in Paris all by yourself, on The Charlie Rose Show . Shaped
>by the issues, Paglia reached the point where she could only express herself
>in the categorical language of the issues. As the issues that launched her
>career as a public intellectual gave way to different ones that were outside
>her arena of expertise, she receded from public view.
>
>Until now. With her new book, Paglia has found a new emergency in American
>life. As if an unnecessary war, a sinking economy, a widening gulf between
>classes, a rampant commercialism like acid on the brain weren't bad enough,
>America is now experiencing a crisis in...poetry. Resurrecting the patented
>alarmist language of Allan Bloom and all those culture warriors who marched
>across our television screens in the late 1980s and '90s--and in doing so
>created a cultural distraction while the right wing stole American
>politics--Paglia has exhumed a dead herring. She declares that "poetry was
>at the height of prestige in the 1960s. American college students were
>listening to rock music but also writing poetry." She attended lots of
>poetry readings back then. However, "over the following decades, poetry and
>poetry study were steadily marginalized by pretentious 'theory.'"
>
>The rest at
>
>http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050613&s=siegel
>
>Best
>
>A
>
>Alison Croggon
>
>Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
>
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