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Camille's back!
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]After a six-year absence, our cultural high priestess and pioneering Web proto-blogger has returned! And nobody -- not Hillary, Obama, McCain nor Anna Nicole -- can escape her level gaze. [/FONT]
By Camille Paglia
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Feb. 14, 2007 | Greetings, Salon readers! [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]My column returns today for the first time since 2001, when I resigned from Salon to focus on writing "Break, Blow, Burn."http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 On my book tours of the past two years (for the Pantheon hardcover and the Vintage paperback), I was very touched by how many people in the signing lines enthused about my Salon columns and appealed for their return. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix.[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]The Web, in my view, has its own crisp idiom -- a fusion of the verbal with the visual. The computer screen, as a development of the TV monitor, doesn't favor the elaborate, self-interrupting, endlessly qualifying syntax devised for books and still aped by pretentiously big-think glossy magazines. (I chronicled the stylistic evolution of my Salon column, in response to new technology, in "Dispatches From the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet," an essay in "Communication and Cyberspace,"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 co-edited by Lance Strate.) [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]The Web so favors the roving, intrusive eye that the blogosphere itself is currently threatened by a gorgeous riot of viral videos-on-demand. As a Warholian pop fan, I'm thrilled with this impudent development -- even though as a career college teacher, I'm also concerned about the fate of analytic reasoning and literary expression. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]My place in the Salon family, which dates from my contribution to Salon's inaugural issue in 1995, has its roots in the San Francisco Examiner, where David Talbot was the progressive arts and culture editor and an early supporter of my work after I burst on the national scene in 1990 with the publication of "Sexual Personae."http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 He invited me to write for the Examiner, and the result was articles such as "The Female Lenny Bruce," my celebration of Sandra Bernhard (more about her later). David left the Examiner to found Salon with other veterans of San Francisco media.[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif] [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Initially, my Salon column, "Ask Camille," perpetuated the format of my satiric Agony Aunt feature in Spy magazine. (My Spy debut had been piquantly flagged on the infamous February 1993 cover of a cheerful Hillary Clinton clad in dominatrix gear and wielding a riding crop in the Oval Office.) Though I gradually phased out the Q&A structure, I always tried to incorporate reader response by posting letters on hot-button topics, such as gun control. Today, thanks to technological advances, Salon offers instant responses to all of its articles. To foreground reader interests and concerns, I will be devoting every third column to my replies to questions, which will be solicited by Salon through this special mailbox.[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Because the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign is already revving up, my monthly columns will start with politics and, as usual, move on to cultural issues from the fine arts to pop. And by the Italian principle of abbondanza, my columns will always be served in a mighty big dish. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]I am a pro-choice libertarian Democrat whose platform remains the same, above all regarding educational reform. I denounce the outrageous expense, ideological indoctrination and spiritual hollowness of American higher education, with its crazed admissions rat race and juvenile brand-name snobbery. And I call for a valorization of the trades and for national investment in vocational schools to help salvage the disaster zone of urban public education. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Though I am a professed atheist, I have been arguing for 20 years that the study of world religions should be basic to the university core curriculum. I addressed this matter last week in "Religion and the Arts in America," the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College (it was filmed by C-SPAN). I approached the subject from a different angle in "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s" (Arion, winter 2003). [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Let's cut to the chase. I am as adamantly opposed to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq as I was before it happened, when the mainstream press abandoned its watchdog role and servilely capitulated to administration propaganda. The thinness of the American case for war was on blatant display in Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council, which I saw on live TV and scorned as a series of slick rhetorical gimmicks and preposterously unpersuasive photos. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]After a six-year absence, our cultural high priestess and pioneering Web proto-blogger has returned! And nobody -- not Hillary, Obama, McCain nor Anna Nicole -- can escape her level gaze. [/FONT]
By Camille Paglia
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Feb. 14, 2007 | Greetings, Salon readers! [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]My column returns today for the first time since 2001, when I resigned from Salon to focus on writing "Break, Blow, Burn."http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 On my book tours of the past two years (for the Pantheon hardcover and the Vintage paperback), I was very touched by how many people in the signing lines enthused about my Salon columns and appealed for their return. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]I had certainly assumed the Web was surfeited with more than enough material, but evidently many others beside myself find the partisan polarization of the blogosphere numbingly predictable and its prose too often slapdash, fragmentary or drearily prolix.[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]The Web, in my view, has its own crisp idiom -- a fusion of the verbal with the visual. The computer screen, as a development of the TV monitor, doesn't favor the elaborate, self-interrupting, endlessly qualifying syntax devised for books and still aped by pretentiously big-think glossy magazines. (I chronicled the stylistic evolution of my Salon column, in response to new technology, in "Dispatches From the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet," an essay in "Communication and Cyberspace,"http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 co-edited by Lance Strate.) [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]The Web so favors the roving, intrusive eye that the blogosphere itself is currently threatened by a gorgeous riot of viral videos-on-demand. As a Warholian pop fan, I'm thrilled with this impudent development -- even though as a career college teacher, I'm also concerned about the fate of analytic reasoning and literary expression. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]My place in the Salon family, which dates from my contribution to Salon's inaugural issue in 1995, has its roots in the San Francisco Examiner, where David Talbot was the progressive arts and culture editor and an early supporter of my work after I burst on the national scene in 1990 with the publication of "Sexual Personae."http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=saloncom08-20&l=ur2&o=1 He invited me to write for the Examiner, and the result was articles such as "The Female Lenny Bruce," my celebration of Sandra Bernhard (more about her later). David left the Examiner to found Salon with other veterans of San Francisco media.[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif] [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Initially, my Salon column, "Ask Camille," perpetuated the format of my satiric Agony Aunt feature in Spy magazine. (My Spy debut had been piquantly flagged on the infamous February 1993 cover of a cheerful Hillary Clinton clad in dominatrix gear and wielding a riding crop in the Oval Office.) Though I gradually phased out the Q&A structure, I always tried to incorporate reader response by posting letters on hot-button topics, such as gun control. Today, thanks to technological advances, Salon offers instant responses to all of its articles. To foreground reader interests and concerns, I will be devoting every third column to my replies to questions, which will be solicited by Salon through this special mailbox.[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Because the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign is already revving up, my monthly columns will start with politics and, as usual, move on to cultural issues from the fine arts to pop. And by the Italian principle of abbondanza, my columns will always be served in a mighty big dish. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]I am a pro-choice libertarian Democrat whose platform remains the same, above all regarding educational reform. I denounce the outrageous expense, ideological indoctrination and spiritual hollowness of American higher education, with its crazed admissions rat race and juvenile brand-name snobbery. And I call for a valorization of the trades and for national investment in vocational schools to help salvage the disaster zone of urban public education. [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Though I am a professed atheist, I have been arguing for 20 years that the study of world religions should be basic to the university core curriculum. I addressed this matter last week in "Religion and the Arts in America," the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College (it was filmed by C-SPAN). I approached the subject from a different angle in "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s" (Arion, winter 2003). [/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman, times, serif]Let's cut to the chase. I am as adamantly opposed to the American invasion and occupation of Iraq as I was before it happened, when the mainstream press abandoned its watchdog role and servilely capitulated to administration propaganda. The thinness of the American case for war was on blatant display in Colin Powell's February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council, which I saw on live TV and scorned as a series of slick rhetorical gimmicks and preposterously unpersuasive photos. [/FONT]