by Alex Linder
(Break, Blow, Burn by Camille Paglia; Random House: New York, 2005, 247 pp.)
This is an unobjectionable but also unremarkable treatment of 43 poems by Camille Paglia, or a language-arts teacher renting her name. It is nowhere near as interesting as her essays or breakthrough work, Sexual Personae.
At her best, Paglia jumps between disciplines and centuries with erudite ease; she’s that rarest of rara avises, a labia licker who likes men and eschews fashionable ideology for facts. She’s humble enough to admit that although she felt her graduate training in New Criticism juiceless at the time, experience has revealed the explicatory approach the proper grounding for larval scholars. Giving students the marxism, post-structuralism or feminism today passing for literary criticism equals giving theory hangers to students without fact clothes, as she has famously said. Menticide is another name for it. You kill people’s minds when you teach them they’ve mastered an idea or argument by discarding/classifying it. ‘Sexism,’ ‘racism,’ or ‘homophobia’ may function as arguments now that their detonators control the parapets of academe, but they aren’t. Someone has to keep the flame alive, and that’s me and you reading this, and in her own ways La Paglia.
Read the rest of this entry »