episode 35 - Camille Paglia - part 01

Part 1: Literary and cultural critic, Camille Paglia is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson and, most recently, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. She is University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In this segment, Paglia speaks about what it means to be a public intellectual, offers her takes on Angelina Jolie, Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton, and Condoleezza Rice, and discusses her love of popular culture. She also criticizes traditional feminism for its devalorization of the stay-at-home mom.
Part 2: In this segment, Camille Paglia, University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, discusses her best-selling 2005 book, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. Paglia explains how she wrote her lucid and passionate explications of these short and accessible English-language poems for a general audience. She discusses the book's title poem, John Donne's "Holy Sonnet XIV," and she explains her strategy for including religious, bohemian, pastoral, urban, gay, and other types of poems from Shakespeare to current times. She also talks about who is not in anthology and why.

[@marcelmagi4600]

I love Camille Paglia. I think audiences are so hungry for serious, individualised analysis. Not this constant moralising we see from the left and right, which is tantamount to emotional blackmail: agree with me or you're going to hell; agree with me or you're a woman hater.

[@HeySergioMata]

This is terrific. She needs to be interviewed again. As soon as possible.

[@lilianmaystudio1314]

What a wonderful interviewer! Really rare now! Fantastic!

[@zzendawgie]

This duo is incredible. Can they go again?

[@TheJamesroy3]

Part 1 of 4 to just a stellar interview with writer and intellect Camille Paglia that addresses Poetry, popular culture and many other subjects- LOVE it!

[@swordoff7]

Camile Paglia, a great American Popular Philosopher.

[@tarico4436]

Not that the rest of it wasn't equally mezmerizing, but I couldn't even find a chair, didn't look for one, in the bookstore, reading the 1st 30 pages of SP just standing there in awe. Came back a week later and bought it. It's in my top 20, and all it is is literary criticism; in addition to that, her reviews of books I knew I should have already read, but hadn't by then, urged me to go get and read them too, like Juliette, Against the Grain, Madame Bovary (?), Picture of Dorian Gray, and more.

[@cloclcl]

Very good questions. Paglia, as usual amazing!

[@AB-bt9eb]

Love Camille! Great interview.

[@alexzahradnik]

I believe it was May 16, 2006. Sorry, on most of the interviews the date is displayed on the opening title card. I'm not sure why it's missing here.

[@lylecosmopolite]

She is right about Hitchcock's great Hollywood films. As the decades roll by, Hitchcock's North by Northwest, Marnie, The Birds, and (my favourite) Vertigo loom ever larger. The toad of a man from the east end of London, so boringly dressed, who looked like Krushchev, who came to the USA only well into middle age, saw very deep into the American heart. There is something dark and uneasy in the American soul. Faulkner, Lovecraft, Philip Dick and Hitchcock all saw it.

[@christinas.4342]

alnot01 What's wrong with looking like Khrushchev?

[@johnmolina3284]

@@christinas.4342 lol

[@windowdresser]

Why don't these Drexel interviews include the dates of the interviews? We can guess at some of them, but this would be basic, academic information, no?

[@Paglia444]

I don't think Camille ever really "finished" Volume 2. I think she has high standards for the quality of her own writing, hence the 5 years it took to write a slender book like Break.
If Volume 2 were really "finished," she should publish it, regardless of the changes to popular culture. Her argument in Volume 1 was that paganism erupts at different moments of peak creativity; if pop culture circa 1920-1970 is one of those moments, who cares if pop culture has changed since then?

[@febweb17]

What does Camille feel about Transwomen? Is the Transwomen movement something that threatens the Feminist movement.

[@m_a_l_f_o_y]

When 99% of men don't want access to women and girls' spaces, you have to ask yourself what men want to do there. 75% of "transwomen" are straight guys btw

[@fexurbis123]

Interrupting interviewer.

[@mycroftholmes7379]

because she is a big fan of paglia...duhhh