April 12, 2005
Break, Blow, Burn
Camille Paglia is back, and just as verbose as ever. She'll be in town tonight promoting her new book Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems. Paglia burst onto the literary scene with her book Sexual Personae, which takes Western culture, post-modernism and almost everything else to task. Known for her iconoclastic ideas on higher education, gay culture, art, feminism, and politics, over the years she's managed to piss off both conservatives and liberals, a feat which Bostonist finds commendable.
Although we found Sexual Personae a bit...unending, we really like her Salon articles and her refreshing ideas about feminism. For a taste, check out her recent interview in the Phoenix. Paglia is also renowned/despised for her live shows. We can't wait to check it out for ourselves.
Camille Paglia speaks at the Brattle, in Cambridge, tonight at 6 p.m. Free tickets are available at the Harvard Book Store.
Contributed by Alex Gantley
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i don't know if anyone heard paglia on npr last night, but she talks like she had a pot of coffee and a couple lines before she went on. i find her insanely fast talking both endearing and annoying, but when she talks about popular culture and politics (both of which she knows little about) it's like she's thinking so fast there are huge gaps in her reasoning. she does literary criticism like nobody's business, however. she makes gloria steinam look like andrea dworkin!
seriously, though, she takes post-modern or whatever criticism to task, which needed to be done like 10 or 15 years ago when Sexual Personae came out. now pomo stuff has fallen out of fashion yet paglia continues to act as if it is plaguing us still.
her new book is great, though. as a literary critic who can open up a poem to make a reader appreciate its depth and beauty, she's one of the best.
A dude (I assume) that likes Paglia? Most liberal guys that I know "aren't familiar with her work", i.e. they're scared shitless of her loudmouth and crazy antics. Too bad that I missed her NPR interview last night--did she insult NPR or the host? (she usually does something like that).