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.

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[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?

[daodon11]

@6musky She has said that her views on pop culture have changed so now she would have to reshape it into a kind of elegy, and besides everyone is writing about pop culture nowadays, is there any need for her to write another tome to it. But I don't understand why if it was all complete in 1981, then why didn't she just release part 2 in 1991 after part 1 was published? I don't quite get why it goes still unpublished.. I guess now we'll have to wait for part 2 to be published posthumously.

[6musky]

Monica Lewinski will go down in history.

[6musky]

I read Sexual Personae years and years ago, and she was talking about a Volume Two - what happened to it?

[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!

[beeroosterm]

@windowdresser I did your homework for you and looked at the end of the last part of the interview for the credits. It has a copyright of 2006.

[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?