Camille Paglia’s grandstanding narcissism

Camille Paglia’s latest interview in Salon must be consumed in its entirety to appreciate the title of this post. At one point, she characterizes Maureen Dowd as “that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen.” I can’t read that without a chuckle, because Camille Paglia is Maureen Dowd gone to grad school. I mean that with all its positive and negative implications. Paglia’s rants are riveting when she talks about celebrity. When she talks about politics the first two adjectives that come to mind are “inane” and “dyspeptic.” Oh, and here’s her take on blogs:

The Web has also dealt a fatal blow to the culture of stardom because isolated types can now instantly express and exhibit their conflicts and find fellow sufferers around the world through the Web. But e-mail is evanescent. And the blog form is, in my view, the decadence of the Web. I don’t see blogs as a new frontier but as a falling backwards into word-centric print journalism — words, words, words!…. Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you’re condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There’s a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one’s mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there’s no editing — it’s free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn’t masturbation — you’ve got to self-edit. Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first blog. I beg to differ: I happen to feel that my Salon column was the first true blog. My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity. They weren’t this dreary meta-commentary, where there’s a blizzard of fussy, detached sections nattering on obscurely about other bloggers or media moguls and Washington bureaucrats. I took hits at media excesses, but I directly commented on major issues and personalities in politics and pop culture. If bloggers want to break out of their ghetto, they’ve got to acquire a sense of drama and theater as well as a flair for language. Why else should anyone read them? And the Web in my view is a visual medium — I don’t log on to be trapped on a muddy page crammed with indigestible prose…. No major figure has emerged yet from the blogs — Andrew Sullivan was already an established writer before he started his. A blog should sound conversational and be an antidote to the inept writing in most of today’s glossy magazines. (emphasis added)

It is truly breathtaking to see someone take down the genre she claims to have invented. Paglia joins Darrell Hammond as the only people to successfully mimic Al Gore. Or, to use the pungent prose Paglia prefers:

[W]ho needs to be desirable to others when you’ve got a big fat love affair with yourself to tend to…. Maybe that wasn’t writing as masturbation, but I think it at least qualifies as a dry hump.

Heh. UPDATE: Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan offer their takes on the Paglia interview.