Camille Paglia on her Lifestyle of Observation (Live at Mason)

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Camille has written the very best essays ever on Edmund Spencer. Alice in Wonderland and the Marquis de Sade. She understands Bob Dylan and Susan Sontag.

Psst!

And she has pursued a career of great integrity. That's my introduction for Camille.

Oh!

I'd like to start with a question from a reader.

Alright.

I ask readers for questions.

Sure.

How do you feel about the fact that Silicon Valley dominates our economy and culture? Is there any tech guru you're interested in?

Well, no, I mean, my last big tech guru was probably Marshall McLuhan. He was like, had a prophetic insight into what was about to happen. He's kind of my patron saint of my working on the web from the very first issue of Salon in 1995 when it's hard to believe that web still wasn't taken seriously by already established journalists. There was a major political reporter at the Boston Globe, for example, who tried to pressure me not to write for the web. He said, "No one takes the web seriously." And this enormous thing has happened, which of course has also sucked in a whole generation of young people, alas, that's all they know. I mean, so I think we're kind of on the downside of that right now.

Take your last book, "Glittering Images," and your other work, which emphasized the role of the iconic in Western and Eastern culture, the role of the spectacular, vivid, visual, life-giving spectacular events. And now here we have people, they look, they listen on very small smartphones. Is this culture dead? But if the culture was so splendid, why did people give it up so quickly?

Well, the reason I wrote Glittering Images is because I felt that there's an avalanche of fragmented visual impressions that disconnected, glaring, tacky, you know, badly designed, that young people are growing up in. I think it really is true that children's brains are being reshaped and that standard forms for logic and for sequential information and for reasoning are really— everything's kind of disappearing. So I tried to write a book where people would just like sort of stare at an image for a certain length of time. I think it's getting worse and worse. Like web design, which my school, the University of the Arts, teaches and so on, I think web design is in the pits. I thought web design was moving into, you know, becoming a major genre of the arts. I think we're in a kind of swirling vortex. And yes, what you mentioned about the miniaturization of image, it's terrible. I was raised in a time, 1950s, when Hollywood was competing with television by doing something which television couldn't do. Those gigantic screens, you know, like the Ten Commandments, there'll be like, there's like a giant thing of Pharaoh, giant sculpture, you know, starts at one end of the screen and you watch it like go to the other end of the screen. It's phenomenal. Lawrence of Arabia, oh my God, the dunes of Lawrence of Arabia with that music And so there's no sense of the large. Young people have no sense whatever of the expansive, of the big gesture.

But did we maybe overrate the large? If the large gave through so quickly, so readily to what you're describing as this kind of mediocrity, what was wrong with that culture of the '50s, '60s, and '70s to begin with?

I would say that a culture always moves in cycles, okay? So you have periods that esteem the colossal, okay? You know, like the Bernini Renaissance, and then, you know, and Baroque periods. You get the small, the art of the small. Like the Rococo is a kind of evanescence and evaporation of the big Baroque swirls. And all of a sudden, it's like little tiny things like on a Valentine's card. So I think we go back and forth. I just feel lucky, I think, that I have a kind of epic imagination because I was raised watching "The Ten Commandments" and "Ben-Hur." Oh my God, "Ben-Hur." I could watch that 300 times.

One of your 10 favorite movies, right?

Yeah.

It's the one on the list that surprised me.

And the music composed for those things directly inspired my writing of "Sexual Personae." Absolutely, I'm directly inspired by music. But I think for women, it's good to have something that's going to make you, like, assert, you know, and trample, you know, and conquer. That's why it animates me. These are my maxims.

Given what you're saying, do you today consider yourself a cultural conservative?

No, not at all. Why not? No, because—

Everything used to be better. Isn't that awesome?

No, we're in a period of decadence, of falling off, you see. No, conservative would mean that I would be cleaving to something past, which was great and no longer is, and that I would be saying we need to return to that. And usually I'm not saying we need to return to anything. I do believe we're moving inexorably into the future. I'm a libertarian, okay? And I don't, so I don't, you know, that's why I'm, you know, I'm always freely offending both sides, you know, liberal, conservative, and I'm a Democrat even though I'm constantly criticizing. I mean, I think a true intellectual should be always beyond partisanship, okay? That even if you belong—

Always criticizing.

Yes, and always critiquing, you know, the premises of your own friends and allies.

So in the back, we were talking about Brazil. You mentioned you'd been there 9 times.

Yes, 9 or 10, yeah.

What does Brazilian culture have which North American culture lacks?

Well—

What's the draw?

It's such a polyglot of cultures and ethnicities. But beyond that, Brazilians understood my work from the first moment I began to publish. Because what they understood was artifice, art, okay? Because of Carnival for them and costuming and masquerade and that kind of baroque exuberance and the syncretism of of Christianity with the Yoruba cult of West Africa in Salvador de Bahia. So they understood my vision of art and beauty, okay? And beauty as an incredibly important human principle, rather than the way it was being trashed by my fellow feminists at that time. And they also understand nature, the grandeur of nature, the power of nature. It's much larger. Yes, instead of these silly little arguments that, "Oh, climate change is causing the end of the world." Oh my God, okay? Anyone who talks like that does not understand the grandeur and the power power of nature. To imagine that we can make a change in it is like so absolutely absurd.

But what's your theory of modernity that puts them on one part of the curve and we're on another more decadent part of the curve? What's the difference? What's sort of what we would call the structural equilibrium as economists, if I dare invoke such a thing?

Well, Brazil is, it's in its own world. I mean, it's not been part of the world wars, you know? It doesn't have this huge militaristic superstructure. It doesn't have a messianic view of itself, okay, politically. Brazilian politics are always chaos and drama. It's like a grand opera. It's like another planet, really, Brazil.

Okay, to continue the whirlwind tour of Camille Paglia, you wrote in Glittering Images that George Lucas was perhaps, or maybe definitely, the greatest artist of our time. I do not disagree with that, but now that you've written that, The Force Awakens has come out, which is not George Lucas' creation. Who is not the greatest artist in the world.

It has nothing to do with George Lucas. I haven't seen it. I wouldn't dream of going. When it's on TV, I'll look at it. Please. Okay, I'm not— oh, do you think I wanna sit in a theater and be tortured, okay, by the contamination of my ideals? I'm not going to do that. No, I just— okay.

And you've spoken very highly of the prequels, which many people don't like at all.

Yes, they do.

So what is it that people don't get about the prequels? They say Jar Jar Binks and they scream.

Oh, I can't tell you. Oh, oh, oh, I know exactly what they're talking about.

Tell us what's good about the prequels.

No, it was Revenge of the Sith. Revenge of the Sith, after the great volcano planet climax of Revenge of the Sith, I think it's one of the greatest sequences in all of modern art. The thing is, once I had written about it, I realized as I went out into the world how few people had actually seen the movie because people had given up on the prequels long before. Therefore, I think anyone who dismisses what I say about the sublime quality of the vision, the execution, and the emotion, the passions of that scene, really, they just don't know what I'm talking about because they haven't exposed themselves to it.

Music. Rolling Stones.

Yes.

Here are the two albums. Hot Rocks, More Hot Rocks. Now you wrote about the Rolling Stones some time ago.

Yeah.

But if I look at the career of the Stones, they have a new album coming out this year. I find it striking that they've kept on going, and I actually count that as a mark against them. I still think they're good, but when I go back and listen, I never hear new things in their music. So now that some time has passed, what would you say about the Rolling Stones? And do you agree that you're a little disappointed with them?

Well, I haven't been following them for many, many years. To me, the Rolling Stones were a revolution when they happened in that period when the Beatles were all upbeat and happy, and then here come these surly guys sneering, spitting, and so on.

The Beatles were dark and subtle too, right?

Well, not like the Stones. Here's the difference, is that the Rolling Stones are inspired by, animated by to this day, by the blues, by the blues tradition. And the Beatles really were more almost Broadway and musical comedy. British musical hall. Yes, British musical hall and Tin Pan Alley and so on. They were tremendous songsmiths, but there's nothing dark about them. In other words, you're not getting— Paul McCartney is a wonderful bass player, but you're not getting the big roaring sound of Bill Wyman's bass at the beginning of the Stones' career. And I really have not been following the Stones ever since Bill Wyman left the Stones. I have not felt that this was Those were the Stones I knew. So I'm delighted that they go on and that they perform and so on, but I have absolutely no interest in exposing myself to those horrible arena conditions for music. It's like, it's— people like, "Oh my goodness, just the light shows and the this and the that." This is not— they're not musical experiences. They're social experiences now.

So what's the music from classic rock that when you listen to it today, every single time you hear more in it? Like I would say Brian Wilson and Jimi Hendrix.

Jimmy Hendrix.

Every time I hear them, it sounds different and fresher for me. But what are your picks?

Well, you know, Jimmy Hendrix is one of the great geniuses of any instrument in the last 100 years. Obviously, his music has lasted, still fresh, and so on. For me, there's a whole period there. I teach in my Art of Song Lyrics course. I just was doing Crosby, Stills, and Nash in doing Wooden Ships, and it still has this incredible power. I love that entire period of the of the 1960s, the music, I think. It was like a kind of magic moment. And then still in the '70s, Led Zeppelin, you know, "When the Levee Breaks," this has enormous power. A lot of that music that Jimmy Page was doing, a lot of it working in the studio actually, it wasn't just live music.

So fast forward back to the present. Who would be a musical artist today? I know you've written "Taylor Swift is a Pestilence," so it's probably not her.

Taylor Swift is not my man.

But who would be a musical artist today who stands up Stands up to the giants of the past?

Stands up to working today? Working today or close to today, the last 10 years. I was enjoying, I was really very hopeful about Rihanna for a while there, but unfortunately I think that she's not really working with the top producers any longer, and the new album is an atrocity. It's really terrible, it's sad because there are so many people with talents who are not being developed just because our music industry is now very formulaic. Young people can't can't really move along studying their instruments and getting their chops over a period of time. So there's nothing to draw on in the way that the musicians of my generation could draw on the folk tradition, the folk music.

You're sounding like a cultural conservative.

Well, no, I'm just saying there are certain moments, you know, certain magic moments of fertility or creativity that happened in many of the arts. You can find certain key moments where there's a confluence of influences and a certain richness and at that very moment, it's a great time to be alive, to be young. For example, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare if he were alive today. As it happens, he left Stratford for whatever reason, okay, went to London at a magic moment, okay, when theater was flourishing, which was only for a few decades, and then it was out again, okay? And so on. So there's a certain kind of luck if you're the right person at the right time in any one of the artistic forms.

Well, look at Jay West.

Every album is different. He draws upon a lot of sources from the past.

Oh, my God.

The bloat.

The bloat. Okay.

Rhythm and blues? No?

What can I say?

Okay, I understand. Education. Some questions about education.

Yes, okay.

There's a new model school called Minerva where you take 4 years, you spend each of the 4 years in a foreign country, one year in Buenos Aires, one in Istanbul, one in Bangalore, I think. You work in small classes, but the classes are all online. There's no library. There's no formal campus per se. It's been around for about 2 years. What do you think? What's your prediction?

Well, I think the idea of sending young people abroad is great. I mean, I think that is a proper use of the money that's going down the tubes at the major universities right now. For parents to think, you know, it would profit the young people a lot to be exposed to the world because, obviously, our— right now, our primary school education is absolutely appalling, okay, in its lack of world history and world geography. I mean, I know because I get everyone in my classroom. I'm lucky I teach at a kind of school where I'm getting students from a wide range of preparations. So there might be a couple of private school people. But people from the inner city, from good schools, from bad schools. So I really have a very clear sense after 40 years of teaching what's going on at the primary school level. And it is unbelievable how little they know. It's absolutely shocking how little they know. This is a recipe for disaster. So I say, yes, send them abroad. Fantastic idea. Now this other thing of the online thing, I don't believe this online thing at all. I think that you need the live person. And you need a live person who can talk, okay, extemporaneously, okay, and respond to the moment, okay, and not just people who are like reading the same old damn lecture, okay, over and over again. Also the kind of formulaic teaching that goes on in the Ivy League, and also the kind of teaching that goes on in the Ivy League where there's all flattering, they're flattering, there's like these small seminar things, okay.

The A-minus seminar, right?

And so there's all this practice in learning how to talk in this slightly pretentious way about things and impressing each other, blah, blah, blah. And so what? So they're all packaging them for the, bourgeoisie. God, okay, and so, and they're so proud of themselves as they produce all these clones, okay, these polished bourgeois clones, witless, knowing nothing.

Speaking of inspiring teachers, what's your favorite Harold Bloom story?

My favorite? You mean personal story?

Personal story.

Well, I don't know about favorite, but if you want to know the story.

The story, please.

Oh, all right, here's the story. Okay, all right, so I never took a course with Harold Bloom, okay, I was in graduate school at Yale and I just never took a course personalities. I didn't know him at all. And then he heard— I, I, the only time I encountered him— oh, this is going— oh, I shouldn't say this. Okay, maybe. But, um, but at any rate, let's say he would come according, okay? And so I do it like that with, uh, with a famous poet who was a friend of his, who also named, um, and I, because I, I, and so I, I would see him turning up at the doorway, you know. And so I go, hello, hello, hello. Okay, that's all. So, um, I, I just knew him, you know, to say hello to him. And so then he heard what I was going to be working on, that I was having trouble, okay, finding a dissertation director for a study of androgyny in literature and art, okay? And it's a time when nobody was doing— it's hard to believe now because everything is sex and gender everywhere. But at the time, no one was doing a dissertation on sex at the Yale Graduate School. I mean, it's hard to believe, okay? And so he summoned me to his office. And that's really how we met. And he said, my dear, I am the only one who can direct that dissertation. And I said, okay. All right, and so that was it. So then he understood everything. He said he understood everything I wanted to do with the book, and he understood my ideas. And so he was a fantastic resource for me insofar as he also supported me, or gave me confidence throughout all those decades when I couldn't get it published. My sexual persona was, rejected by 7 publishers and 5 agents. And by the time it was published, I was 43 years old. So I'm like a great role model, it seems to me, for people to soldier through adversity and rejection and just continue to develop the craft. And eventually, hopefully, one will see one's work in print.

And what did he think of you and Sexual Persona?

Well, I mean, he liked it. Of course, he was like, you know, he always said I gave him great naches, OK? All right, which is sort of like of a father to a daughter, et cetera. But he and I agree about Freud. We have a kind of Freudian psychohistory and so on.

Now there's a segment of all of these conversations in the middle. It's called Underrated or Overrated. I mention something and you tell me if you think it's underrated or overrated by our society. And now the first thing—

Oh, by our society or by me?

Well, your opinion relative to the society's opinion. Oh, okay. Now don't hold back on these. Tell us what you think.

All right.

First one, economics.

Economics as a field?

As a field, overrated or underrated?

Probably underrated.

Why?

I don't know, I just think that economists sort of are kind of figures of fun sometimes in cartoons. I don't know, I'm just judging by what I sense.

William Faulkner.

Oh, he's totally gone, poor man. Okay, I mean, I actually have been commenting on this recently to my friends. Do you remember that period when Faulkner was everywhere and everyone read him and he was just like a baseline? Figure. And then, you know, thanks to Kate Millett and all these Philistine feminist types, in the early '70s, there was like a great sweeping away of many, many major male figures in the history of literature, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, who had a huge influence on me. So, I mean, if you are a resident of Mississippi, Faulkner still lives and is vivid. But I think outside of that, it's been years since I've heard Faulkner mentioned.

Okay? Is he overrated?

Well, I think he should be in a sense on the reading list. I mean, I don't know, perhaps he was overrated in our time, but he certainly was a major author and major influence on American literature, for heaven's sakes. But that's a— young people aren't reading him, and they aren't reading many of the great authors.

Yoko Ono, overrated or underrated?

Oh, Yoko Ono. Oh, don't start me on Yoko Ono. She's one of my least favorite people in the universe, okay? Ugh! Yes, I blame her for the breakup of the Beatles and so on. All that screechy yodeling that went on. Oh my God, she's a horror. But I gave her her due in Glittering Images because she was a very important figure in the development of conceptual art. She really was very innovative in the 1960s. But oh, what a dreary, humorless person.

Now, when I think of a lot of your books, and especially if I contrast you to Marxist criticism, I think of your emphasis as being a lot of metaphysics. In a very exciting big picture way. So let's say we take a writer, very high quality, but she moves very far from metaphysics. She writes stories about small numbers of people in rural Ontario, Alice Munro.

Oh, I don't read fiction. I don't read contemporary fiction. I have absolutely zero interest in contemporary fiction. There is— the last contemporary fiction I have any interest in is Auntie Mame, and I'm not kidding, okay? I like plays like Tennessee Williams. No, the fiction writers The characters are off in another world, okay? They are not— they don't see the world as it exists now. They don't use the language of the contemporary world. Their English is utterly stale, okay, and cloistered. I cannot read a page, okay, of contemporary fiction. I'm sorry. But anything that is pre-contemporary fiction, I'm a great admirer of. I haven't read— and believe me, I have not— these are the kind of books I like. I'll open like this. I don't like that.

You're gonna pass on Harry Potter too?

Harry Potter, no, I don't. I mean, yeah. I mean, in fact, I refused to write on Harry Potter for the Wall Street Journal once. And they said, oh, who should we ask next? And they asked Harold Bloom. And so Harold Bloom became known for it. He got that because of me. Just like Norman Mailer got to interview Madonna for the COVID of Esquire, okay, because Madonna said no to me, okay? That's another, sorry. People kept trying to bring us together. HBO wanted to do it. To do a "My Dinner at Andre" type thing with Madonna and me. You know, she just was like afraid. I mean, I don't know why. I think she thought I was gonna be like some big intellectual, but it's not true.

Parenthood, overrated or underrated?

Who?

Parenthood.

Parenthood? Oh no, oh no. I don't have anything to do with that, no. Okay.

The most underrated?

I don't watch, I don't want, you know, yeah.

No, not the show "Parenthood," the thing "parenthood." Oh, parenthood, are you— Being a parent.

Oh, oh, that was a big switch.

That's what these are.

Oh, Lord.

I mean, we need a warning sign, a U-turn. Okay, all right, go ahead.

Parenthood, overrated or underrated?

Parenthood. Well, okay, I mean, obviously we're in a time now where parenting is in crisis, I would think. I mean, I think that it is a— I mean, the reason we have all these whiny, super sensitive girls on campus that run shrieking, okay, the slightest thing that offends their ears, drag mattresses onto the stage at commencement exercises. The reason we have that is because the parents have not prepared them for real life. So, in other words, they've been raised in this bourgeois pampered cocoon. So I think there's been a tremendous failure of parenting, certainly, in terms of young people being ready to take on the real world in their late teens.

What's the most underrated play by William Shakespeare?

The most underrated play? Yes. I don't know. I really can't answer that. I'm teaching my Shakespeare course this semester. I simply focus on the really major plays, so I don't— there's no— so I don't know. Perhaps Antony and Cleopatra is starting to recede. I don't know why. I think Antony and Cleopatra was a great favorite of my generation, of the '60s generation. But for some reason, it's becoming, I think, marginal. I'm not sure.

Maybe it's because it's about imperial May I ask a few questions about sex? Of course. You've covered this topic before.

The audience will demand it.

Which country comes closest to your vision of having healthy relations between the sexes or among the sexes, which may be a better way to put it?

Well, I would say that Brazil has the healthiest view of sexuality, but I wouldn't say that the sexes are particularly getting along in the upper middle class in Brazil. As I meet professional women journalists and so on there. I mean, I think that the women are magnificent. They're incredible the way they look and dress and they have such style and assertiveness and so on. But I'm not sure the communications with men are particularly successful right now. There's a lot of static there. And the men look kind of— the men are like gnomes. It's strange. They don't have this thing like in the United States, usually the upper middle class successful successful careers and so on, you'll have the women doing their Pilates and the men will be going to the gym also. But not in Brazil, okay? The men just seem to sag and get plumper and plumper and duller and duller and lose their hair and nobody minds, okay? I think because they assume that the woman rules. It's like a woman is the cock of the walk down there. I'm still trying to figure it out. But anyway, I love it. I adore it. I mean, I love Brazilian women, okay? They're so bossy, okay?

We've now had gay men in the military. For some time, out openly, legally permissible. How that has run, has it surprised you? Because earlier you wrote you expected it could be quite disruptive, and it hasn't been. Um, in a sense, has male gay culture turned out to be tamer than what you expected in the early '90s?

Tamer?

Tamer. More domestic, more people adopting children, more people settling down.

Well, it's changed. There's no doubt about it. I mean, I think that, you know, that the, um, you know, AIDS was like a holocaust, okay? And the number of, of, um, interesting, fascinating, talented men of artists and, and, and people who were just, you know, in fashion and just every, every level. I mean, I think that in many ways gig culture is sort of still recovering from that. We're kind of kind of holding pattern. I think after the— there was an enormous kind of flamboyance and assertiveness to gay male culture once. And it had a distinct style and voice of its own. And so what you're saying, oh, things are turning out better. Well, yes, there's an assimilation going on, okay? But also to me, a kind of disappearance of that gay aesthetic that was— so I mean, Oscar Wilde is one of the major influences on my thinking, remains that. I teach a whole course on Oscar Wilde. And now what can you say? Is there anything distinctly gay right now except certainly gay activists are extremely successful in terms of pushing their agenda and, you know, and so on. I mean, that's probably these little cadres of gay activists are the only thing that's left. I don't know. I mean, I think assimilation is always a loss. I mean, certainly my culture experienced it. Italian-American culture has like kind of vanished too.

For America, what should an ideal of masculinity look like now?

What it should— what should it look like? Well, I don't know.

I mean, I think— In an older generation, you would have like a Cary Grant or a Rock Hudson, right? You would see the movie Philadelphia Story, one of your favorites. There was some ideal of masculinity on the screen, maybe not your ideal. But today, what is it that's out there which comes closest to your ideal?

Well, you know, many of those images on the screen, which seem to be masculine, often the actual actors actors were gay, like Rock Hudson. And Cary Grant's sexuality remains one of the great mysteries. A lot of things. I mean, I adore Cary Grant. Oh my God. But he's like a hallucination. All of the great images on the screen are hallucinations. I mean, Kim Novak in Vertigo is literally a hallucination. But what should be the— the problem right now is that the masculine has no honor whatever in our culture. We're in a period now where young people are being processed through the universities. And the gender norms are said to be that gender is a construct. It is simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There's nothing in the back.

We live in a big culture. Not everyone goes to university, thank goodness. You can go to a NASCAR race and a few of the people there have not been to the Ivy Leagues.

Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But with that, comes static, okay? So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men, okay? And so that is why masculinity is constantly being eroded and diminished and dissolved, okay, on university campuses, 'cause it allows women to be weak, okay? If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. And that's what we have, okay? Our university system is— anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture, culture, a utopian future is imagined when there are no men, we're all genderless mannequins. And to me, the movie of The Time Machine is like one of— we're moving toward that, the Eloi. That's how I see the upper middle class graduates of the Ivy League. They're the Eloi. They're completely bland. They have no ideas. They all get along very well with each other because they're nothing. And so on. And they're eating their food. Fruits, which are given to them by the Morlocks who come, or the industrial class, and so on. So that's how I see the future is that, unfortunately, I began my career talking about androgyny and talking about the imaginative complexity of androgyny and how the artist and the shaman and the prophet have this androgynous component. But today's androgyny is just boring. I mean, David Bowie at his height, it was absolutely brilliant, electrifying, kabuki. You got to go on and on and so on. All these pallid androgynes of today, okay, there's nothing creative about them whatever.

But just to try to cheer you up a bit, what then is the healthiest segment of American society? Because again, you've lived most of your life in the Northeast, mostly in colleges and universities, correct? Yes, yes. So think outside the box. Where do you see vitality both culturally, sexually, in terms of aesthetics, critics?

No, I mean, I don't. I mean, I think it's been a tremendous flattening. I mean, I think there's very little culturally that, right now, there's very little of substance or interest being produced in art and culture. We're in a kind of retro period where we're kind of like chopping up everything, putting everything from the past through the grinder again.

How about Canada? Overrated or underrated? Or do they just have all the same problems?

Well, Canada, they have this ideal of the consensus. And that's why when I go up there, people have said to me actually, quietly, oh, I love having you here, because everyone's always forcing us to have consensus in Canada. And I've been told that also when I go to Norway. People say, oh, we can't stand it. We're not allowed to have an opinion in Norway. We all have to have a consensus. I mean, Canada is— everyone is very civilized in Canada. I think it's impossible to rise above the herd also, okay? You can't make any big gestures, okay? You're thought to be antisocial, okay? So I wouldn't glorify Canada.

Let me ask you a few questions about yourself.

Yeah.

There's a wonderful 4-page essay you wrote called "The Artistic Dynamics of Revival" where you talked about how creators have early, middle, and late periods. Beethoven is maybe the most obvious example, but there are many, many others. When you think of your own career, how do you see it as fitting together in terms of like a time arc and what you've done, what you want to do? What are your early, middle, and late periods?

Well, where are you in it now? My early period was total failure, flop, and, you know, in the middle of the get published, okay? There was that. And then all of a sudden I sort of burst out like a jack-in-the-box, and it's been like blabber, blabber, blabber, like ever since, like that. I mean, I don't— so I really don't see phases. Phases. I just see like nothingness and then everything, okay, and so on. It's like, I mean, sort of like a carnival, you know.

So what will the late period look like?

The late period?

Okay, which you've— we haven't gotten to it yet. So the everything is the middle period.

Well, right now I'm working on something that no one has any interest in, you know, whatever. I've been working for 8 years on this, my Native American explorations, okay. I'm very interested in Native American culture at the, at the end of the Ice Age as the glacier withdrew. And I go around and I find little tiny artifacts and I read and so on. And absolutely no one, especially anyone in Manhattan, has the slightest interest in what I'm doing. But that's, you know, I think that that's, everything has been prepared for in my life. I've been always interested in archaeology and I feel I can make a contribution even though no one is interested at all. What I'm trying to do is show how the politicization ethnic studies and racial studies and so on has actually been very limiting. I mean, I find very objectionable this projection, eternal projection of genocide and disaster and so on onto Native American studies. And so I'd like to show the actual vision of Native American culture, which is religious vision, metaphysical vision.

Cyclical approach?

Cyclical.

Relevance of nature?

Yes, absolutely. Metaphysics at the center? It's almost like an early animism. That's why I'm interested Which is in Salvador de Bahia also because the Yoruba cults of West Africa that were absorbed into Salvador de Bahia in Brazil is the same, where all of the forces of nature are perceived as spirit entities that bring you energy or vision.

So of the Native American cultures which have come down to us, which is different, of course, from what you had at the Ice Age, but which of those do you relate to the most and why?

Oh, well, all I'm doing is exploring the Native American cultures of the Northeast because when the settlers came from Europe, the Indians were pushed out, the hunting grounds were limited, and then there was, you know, I mean, general destruction of Native American culture for many reasons during that period. But we know more actually about the Plains Indians and obviously Northwestern Indians and the Navajo than we do about the Northeastern Indians. And I believe that there remnants, I mean, I stumbled on this and I just could, I'm very sorry I didn't notice this when I was living all those years in upstate New York where the Onondagas still have their reservation and so on and probably the remnants of these glacial era cultures were still there as well. But I find it's absolutely staggering, it is staggering. The actual signs and remnants that are everywhere in the Northeast. I mean, I could go out right now and find some dirt, okay, and I'll find you a tool, okay, a broken tool. It's absolutely incredible. So I feel that's what I'm— I should be doing something like this, which no one is interested in. But I feel that is substantive and can, I hope, can help to show what was here before.

More about you. In "Vamps and Tramps," you once wrote that as early as 1981, the second volume of "Sexual Persona" was more— finished is a tricky word, we know, as writers.

It was.

But some version of finished. And do you think that we will all ever have the privilege of reading it?

Well, the Yale Press didn't want to publish those last chapters.

Oh, publish it.

No, but, you know, it didn't— so Yale Press ended with the end of the 19th century with Emily Dickinson. It was already a 700-page book. And so yes, so I put in there the next book was coming, but then what happened, of course, is that throughout the '90s and since the last 25 years, I've been essentially writing in articles, okay, everything that I would have written in that sense. So everyone, all my writing on popular culture, I continue to do. Like on football, I had a chapter, Baseball Versus Football, and football as the ultimate pagan sport, et cetera. Well, I've been, you know, so I wrote Wall Street Journal, my football feminism, you know, I have a whole kinds of philosophy of that, et cetera, et cetera. And now football is getting more and more boring. It's gotten more and more technocratic, okay? So it's not in a period right now that I would celebrate. But I was celebrating that tremendous period, you know, when there were still hard hits and there was still defense, okay? And there wasn't all this like, you know, throwing, fleeing the ball down the field and like people catching it. Like ballerinas. Please, that's not football. Football is wham, like that. Bring back the fullback. And the TV won't show the great defensive plays and so on. I mean, they show the whole art of defense and the great offensive defensive lines and that kind of tussle. It's like that's kind of gone. So I feel lucky that I saw football on TV at its high point.

You also wrote that when you were in high school, you either wrote or just started you started a book on Amelia Earhart.

Oh, yes.

And what was the appeal of her to you?

Oh my God, okay. Well, Amelia Earhart, I stumbled on, it was like an article, 1961, okay, in the Syracuse Herald Journal about, there's always some article about Amelia Earhart, you know, someone finds a fragment of something and, you know, something. And I became very interested in her. And at that point I was like, I guess, 14. And so I began researching her and in the bowels of the Syracuse library, 'cause things were still not on microfilm yet. It was like all the newspapers were still there from the 1930s. So I did that for like 3 years on this research project, and that's how I became a feminist before feminism had revived, okay? Because I suddenly discovered this period just after women had won the right to vote, okay, the 1920s and '30s, where you had all these career women like Amelia Earhart and Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Thompson, you know, Clara Booth Luce. There's just so many women.

Margaret Bourke-White.

Work white. And so by the time second wave feminism revived, which was with Betty Friedan's co-founding of NOW in 1967, I was out of sync with them. So when suddenly they revived and began complaining about men and all that stuff and so on and so forth, I hated it. And I was all— and there was early clashes that I had with those feminists from the start. I tried to join second wave feminism and they wouldn't have me. I kept them going because I would not badmouth men. You see these women like Amelia Earhart and so on they did not— they did not badmouth men, okay? They admired men; they admired what men had done, okay? And what they said was we demand equal opportunity for women which give us the opportunity to show that we can achieve at the same level as men who did all of these great things. That was not the tone, okay, of second-wave feminism from the start it's always like "Men have this patriarchy blah-blah-blah." Meow-meow meow! Like that, right? This and so on. Bunch of them, I mean, these women were insane, okay? From the start, okay? I went to this feminist conference, okay, at the Yale Law School, okay, when I was in graduate school. It was 1971. Kate Millett was there, Rita Mae Brown, okay, who later became a lesbian novelist and lives on a horse farm in Virginia, okay, around, you know, so on.

Maybe she's here.

Maybe she's here. She's like very rich and so now, right? At any rate, so Rita Mae Brown said to me, okay, she said, "The difference between you and me, Camille, okay, is that you want to save the universities and I want to burn them down. Okay, now this is that— what can you say with a conversation stopper? I had the knockdown argument with the Rolling Stones, okay, with the New Haven women's liberation rock band, okay? All right, I adored the Stones, they hated the Stones, okay? So we had this huge screaming argument, okay? My back was to the wall, they were spitting in my face, okay? And I said, yes, the Rolling Stones are sexist, but they make great music. And they're, oh, no, no, no, no. I said, all right, let's take— undermine Under My Thumb, yes, it's sexist, but it's a great song. It's a work of art, okay, and so on. And these women, okay, said to me, art, art, nothing that demeans women can be art. Now that is the Stalinist view of art, okay?

More about you, more about you, less about them.

Then there was, wait a minute, then there was the argument that I had, okay, this is Emile Aherhart, you asked about Emile Aherhart.

Yes, yes.

Then I had my first job at Bennington College, 1972, okay? And people said, oh, there's this new women's studies department, one of the first efforts at State University of New York at Albany, okay? You know, you'll be wondering, okay, so they're feminists, I'm feminist, okay, okay, all right. So we had like a dinner, okay? We were gonna go to a lecture, okay, and so on. And we didn't get through to dessert, let me tell you, over that dinner, okay? Because we had this screaming argument about hormones, okay? They denied that hormones, hormones have the slightest impact on human life. They said hormones don't even exist, okay? They told me I had been brainwashed, okay, by male scientists to play. And I— so, and these are women who are in the English department. I had a wonderful education they had in biology. All right, I mean, I mean, at any rate, Amelia Earhart, okay, yes, of course, never, okay, never was like this with men, because this is the point, okay? So Amelia Earhart has a— in fact, in fact, my next book, my next essay collection, I'm going to reproduce the page from Newsweek magazine, okay, 1963. Okay, I wrote in a letter to the editor that was like their number one letter. I'm 16 years old, okay, at that point. Okay, and, and, and what was it? Oh, I know what it was. Then they put a picture of Amelia Earhart there, and it was Valentina Tereshkova, okay, had become the first woman in space. Okay, and I— the Soviet Union had sent her up, and I wrote a protest letter into Newsweek, and I said that Valentina Tereshkova has become the cosmonaut, has become the first woman to— on the anniversary that Amelia Earhart flew the ocean, whatever it was, it was some big anniversary of hers. And I said, obviously, Amelia Earhart's lifelong fight for equal opportunity for American women remains to be won. That's 1963. Gloria Steinem can lick dirt as far as I'm concerned. When I was doing that, Gloria Steinem was running around New York in a plastic skirt. I'm telling you. She's a fraud, that woman. Fraud.

You consume, absorb, experience a remarkable number and amount and diversity of cultural products. Music, art, architecture, interior design.

Yes.

Fashion, whatever, right? Now, just a very prosaic question.

Yes.

In terms of your own time management, how is it that you do what you do? What is your method, so to speak? What is your diet?

Yeah, well, it's a lifestyle. I mean, of observation. Totally. You know, and I feel that the basis of my work is not only the care I take with writing, okay, my quality control of my prose. But also by observation, it's like 24/7. I'm always observing. And I don't just like sit in a university. I never go to conferences. That is a terrible mistake, okay? A conference is just like overlaying the same kind of insular ideology on top of it. I am always like listening to conversations at the shopping mall, okay? I watch, I adore radio. The radio is fantastic. Show on radio, the talk shows, political talk shows, but also the sports shows, okay? Sports shows are the only place that you can hear on radio actual working-class voices calling in, okay, for, you know, talk about what happened in the game on Monday and what they would do if they had $2 million and who they would hire and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's fantastic. And so my writer's voice is actually very, you know, rather than these novelists, okay, with their recherché lingo and so on. My actual writing voice is very influenced by the way English is spoken today, okay, by people and often men, okay, on radio, okay? So you get this high-impact kind of a sound.

You once wrote, and I quote, "My substitute for LSD was Indian food." And by that you meant lamb vindaloo. Yes.

Yes, I've been in a rut on lamb vindaloo. It's a horrible rut. No, it's a horrible— it's a 40-year rut. No, it's a 40— every time I go to an Indian restaurant, I say, "Now I'm gonna try something new." But no, I must go back to the lamb vindaloo. All I know is I do— it's like an ecstasy for me, the lamb vindaloo.

So, like De Quincy, tell us, what are the effects of lamb vindaloo?

I don't— what can I say? I attain nirvana on a— Yeah, I know.

Yeah. How would you describe your views on astrology? A reader wrote to me, asked me to ask you.

Wait, wait, you mentioned LSD. Can I say something else?

Sure, LSD, please.

Okay, now LSD, okay, you know, it's— I never took it, thank God. I never took— I never took drugs. I didn't believe— I thought, what is this untested thing? I didn't believe— I thought, you know, like a little wine, beer, you know, all these things that like have, you know, thousands of years behind them, right? I said, you know, LSD— so I'm so glad I never took it. Uh, everyone around me was taking LSD, okay? And, um, it And people who did take LSD and survived will still say things like, well, I'm really glad I did. And everyone who says that, I feel, actually never attained the level of accomplishment that they should have in terms of whatever their vision had been. I think LSD gave vision. It gave vision, but then it deprived people of the ability to translate that vision into material form for the present and for posterity. But I still remain very oriented toward the LSD vision. I feel like I took LSD because of the music. Like, you know, with Bathing at Baxter's, Jefferson Airplane, you know, the first people to be using, like this. And the distortions of the birds, you know, 8 Miles High, I adore that song and so on. I just feel I'm in that psychedelic world. So I sometimes said that what I do is psychedelic criticism because it is metaphysical and it's visionary. I have a vision, I have a vision, okay, that's bigger than society. That's the problem with with a Marxist approach. I believe the Marxist approach is useful, okay? You know, Arnold Hauser is like one of the great, you know, the social history of art is one of the most influential things on me. It's a Marxist perspective, and indeed my work is always very attentive to the social context of anything, right? But what Marxism lacks is that larger vision of the universe. So there are all kinds of questions and issues about human life that Marxism has no answers for. The poor doesn't even see it. It doesn't see nature. What kind of a vision doesn't see nature, can only see society? So this is what's happening. We have all these graduates of the elite schools, okay, who have not— whereas my generation was all into cosmic consciousness and opening— we were influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and all kinds of Eastern— so I feel that is the true multiculturalism. I've been arguing for that for 25 years. I've been saying that if you want true multiculturalism, multiculturalism, you have to present world cultures, okay, and the whole— including religion, okay? Religion is extremely important as the most complex systems that human beings have ever devised were the great religions of the world.

Past Arnold Hauser, past Norman Brown, who are the contemporary writers and thinkers who influence you now who are writing serious books on either the world cultures or anything Is there anyone left writing serious books?

I mean, I'm trying to think who has written a serious book that I'm interested in right now. There's no one I would say, "Oh, so-and-so's book is coming." I'm like, "What? They're dead." You know, the people who I admire are long dead. Unfortunately, it's a terrible destruction. I mean, my work looks very strange, idiosyncratic, 'cause I'm alone, okay? I'm alone. All my— the people who should have been writing interesting, quirky books, like as I do, are dead, or their brains were destroyed in LSD. It's one or the other. Because I knew so many, to me, brilliant minds in graduate school and then early in my teaching career at Bennington College. Really brilliant minds. And I had great hopes for them and for what they would do. And then and they couldn't get anything done. They couldn't, for whatever reason, they couldn't, they didn't have the, I don't know what, they didn't have the resilience to continue against obstacles. When their work would get rejected, they would become discouraged and would stop, and rejection simply infuriates me, and so on. I say, well, I'll have my revenge on you in the afterlife, and so on. I'll be around and you'll be dead. It's an Italian thing. What can I say? Okay, you know, we—

this is Sexual Persona, your best-known book, which I recommend to everyone if you haven't already read it.

And 20 years, all of it.

My favorite chapter is the Edmund Spencer chapter.

Really?

Why?

That brought Spencer to life for me. Oh my goodness, I realized it was a wonderful book. I had no idea. I thought of it as old and fusty. Oh, and stuffy.

Yes.

And 100% because of you.

Well, we should tell them that The Faerie Queen is like quite forgotten now, but it had enormous impact. Okay, Spencer's which is "The Faerie Queen," on Shakespeare and on the Romantic poets and so on and so forth. And "The Faerie Queen" had been taught in this very moralistic way. But in my chapter, I showed that it was entirely a work of pornography, okay, equal to the Marquis de Sade, okay? So that's why— and how interesting that you would be drawn to that.

Very interesting. So the COVID image is Queen Nefertiti in the Neues Museum in Berlin. And recently in the news, we've seen that someone has scanned the bust.

Oh, that's awesome.

And it will soon be possible, printers to print out your own quote-unquote copy of Nefertiti. And how do you feel about this?

Oh, well, well, you know, to me, you know, archaeology is one of, one of the, you know, my master tropes. What can I, what can I say? And the, you know, the bust of Nefertiti discovered in 1912, and it's amazing, it's, you know, barely we've known it for like a century. It's extraordinary, isn't it, how it's become such a symbol of art? And then, oh, and what should say I would say that all the push of countries like Greece and Egypt to recover their masterpieces from where they were taken and scattered around the world, I mean, I think with what's been happening with ISIS and the demolition of Palmyra and all kinds of things that have happened, my attitude now is like, keep Nefertiti in Berlin, please, okay? And send it back to Cairo.

Of all the aesthetic judgments in your writings, and you've covered a lot of ground, but are there any where you really fundamentally regret an earlier judgment and have revised it, not in a marginal way, which happens all the time, but really just thought, well, I was wrong about that?

Hmm, interesting. I don't know. I'm trying to think. Well, I mean, my early work I worked on for so long that there was like, I had plenty of time for, you know, sort of second thoughts and third thoughts 100 of those. So no, I mean, I can't think of anything offhand. Can I get back to you about that?

Sure, sure. If you could travel to one place you haven't been, where would it be and why?

I'm like Huysmans' Esthète en désespoir. I am not a great fan of traveling. I just feel it's like, you know, it's become too onerous. No, I'm a traveler of the— I'm a mind traveler.

Traveler.

Okay.

What is your unrealized dream in life?

My unrealized dream? To meet Catherine Deneuve. But I met her once. I ran into her, smack ran into her once on Fifth Avenue in front of Saks. I know this is kind of bizarre.

So it's a realized dream.

Yes, but it was odd. Yes, I like pursued her into the glove department and forced her to sign my ticket envelope for the Fillmore East where I was seeing the Jefferson Airplane, um, um, to have a conversation with Catherine Deneuve, should we say, civilized conversation.

Now on that topic, one of your books, The Birds, about the Alfred Hitchcock movie, the great book, one of my favorite movies, uh, going back to that time, if you had the opportunity to date either Suzanne Pleshette or Tippi Tippi Hedren?

Date? To date?

Date.

I don't date. I'm just a mad nun is all that I am. Of course. Date. I don't date. Dating is so banal. Okay, so, yeah.

Tea with Suzanne Plachette or Tippi Hedren?

Well, Tippi Hedren invited me to lunch in Rodeo Drive after that. I was giving some speech on Shakespeare at the Los Angeles Public Library. And so she invited me to thank me for writing this, and I met her. Stack of 12 of these books and I signed them for her. She was the most elegant and wonderful warm woman and I didn't have time, much time. She invited me to go to the ranch and see all the animals and the lions, you know, that she collected and so on. But Suzanne Plachette I think was absolutely underutilized by Hollywood. What an intelligent, just knife-sharp character she was. In fact, I recently in one of my Salon columns compared her to Lena Dunham Lena Dunham is a product of exactly the same world, okay, that whole affluent art entertainment world in Manhattan. I said, look what's happened to culture. If you wanna see the difference between Suzanne Plachette, sophisticated Suzanne Plachette, all right, and Lena Dunham, okay, you wanna see the decline, okay, that we're in the middle of right now, there it is. Oh, can I say a word about this?

Sure.

Okay, all right, all right, so, okay, so I wrote this, so the British Film Institute asked me to write I said, how about the birds? And I did, okay? So I wrote this book, okay? And it was universally panned, okay, by the film journals, okay, which said about it, okay, this book does nothing. This book does nothing, okay? By which they meant that I didn't, it wasn't poststructuralist, it wasn't postmodernist, there wasn't a lot of theory, I wasn't citing, you know, the male gaze, et cetera, et cetera, right? All this book does is go through the film The Birds, okay, from beginning to end, scene by scene by scene, and pays attention to the film, okay, itself, okay? And slowly it's made its way, and so now here it is, it was 1998 when that came out, and I'm starting to get, it's starting to happen now, like the Rutledge, you know, Rutledge is like a publisher that's known nothing but this theory stuff, and so they're starting to go, hmm, okay, maybe there was something in what they heard. So I'm hoping, I'm just trying to inspire graduate students, okay, to rebel against this horrible fascism that forces theory onto them before they've exposed themselves to everything that's wonderful and imaginative in the history of literature and art. And so I believe that paying minute attention to the actual work itself is the mission of criticism. And I am hopelessly old-fashioned because that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to like— you're supposed to mention Foucault 59 times in one paragraph. What a windbag that guy is, I'm telling you. Foucault is nothing. He's nothing, okay? Nothing, okay? And the reason why I know he's nothing is because he was influenced by— he pretends to be such a mastermind, but in fact he's just a collection of influences. And one of the biggest influences on him was Erving Goffman, okay, of Philadelphia, okay, who was like the great sociologist, originally Canadian, okay, who wrote The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. And so all this The same things that were influenced on me, okay, influenced Foucault. And so you have all these people thinking Foucault was some sort of innovative figure in the history of modern sociology or intellect, and he wasn't. So it is a disease in these people that everywhere, every single university in the United States, every single gender studies department, okay, they're impregnated with Foucault. And that's why we have graduates who No nothing.

Impregnated is an interesting word to use.

Yes, it is. Yes.

Yeah, you like Marnie, the Hitchcock movie?

I mean, I like Marnie, certainly. There are parts of— yeah, I mean, I'd like most of Marnie. Yeah, yeah, it goes askew in a way The Birds doesn't. Yes, it's like, yeah, I mean, it's not, um, yeah, I mean, there are problems with— I mean, that's so much was toxic going on on the set between, um, Hitchcock and, and Tippi Hedren, that in at that point, you know, and so on. But I mean, there are wonderful things in Marni.

So if you were to take someone who had read all or almost all of your work and they had a sense of you and read a lot of your columns, you know, watched some of your talks online, whatever, and they had a picture of you, but you wanted to tell them one thing about you that maybe they wouldn't get from any of that about what motivates you, what drives you, what your life is actually like It's like, what is—

My life is completely mundane. I'm a schoolmarm, okay? That's all I am, okay? And I had the wisdom, hello, having been raised Catholic, okay, that once I became known, finally became known, age 43, I didn't change one thing about my life, not one thing. I didn't move to New York. I didn't go chasing around. I didn't get a speakers bureau, all that stuff. I tried to keep, I guess it's all the— I have a cousin who's a nun, okay, and I have all these Bishops and priests and sextons and so on in their family and so on. And I just try to keep to reality, okay? Because I know that the basis of my work is the closeness with which I live to ordinary life, okay? That's, and so on. I mean, and I hate the elites, I hate parties, okay? I don't have book parties or anything like that, ugh, and so on. And so on. And people, I think that people, they want success and they want material advantages and so on. And they don't— it's really being a writer is just scut work, okay? And being a teacher— and see, that's what Susan Sontag also did wrong, okay? Susan Sontag began in graduate school and then, "Oh, it's so boring," and so on. She did a little teaching and then she went off and became a luminary, okay? And so she was a big luminary, big giant dirigible luminary her whole life, like floating above the continents. Here's Susan Sontag, the dirigible, woo, there she is, and so on, all right? So, and nothing that she said made any sense actually over time, okay, eventually, okay? And she loved to hold court at parties, it's notorious. And so people who remember her so brilliantly, she was so brilliant, why, I saw her at this dinner party, everyone was in awe, okay? Well, people who tried to go to dinner parties to impress other people. It is such BS, okay? And so Susan Sontag, over time, her work got less and less meaningful. Even though people worship at the shrine of Sontag, you try to quote her on anything, what can you quote her on? There's nothing to quote her on. The one thing you can quote her on is the thing that she regretted. Quote a sentence from Susan Sontag, a great sentence. You can't. The only sentence was the one she regretted, "The white race is the cancer of history." That's the one she retracted finally when she got cancer. Maybe she realized how how horrible that was. She thought that was so horrible. Now she realized. And now I realize I shouldn't have said that. And so on. That's the only thing that you can quote her on. She's not quotable because there's all this sleight of hand that she's doing. She's taking material that she borrows from others or places that she's been personally at a time when downtown New York was very exciting. So basically it was a kind of transcription of her everyday life. I think the best thing she did probably was, for me, she wrote a very witty thing, "The Imagination of Disaster." I like that essay a lot, which is all about the horror films of the 1950s. And I thought, if she only had stayed like that, okay, kind of unpretentious and really engaging with actual materials, okay, and so on. But Susan Sontag, basically her life became going from lecture to lecture, being hailed as the great one and being so detached, okay, from ordinary life. Whereas when you're a teacher, like a classroom teacher, as I've been now for 40 years, I mean, there's things I mean, the kids have no idea that I write books. I mean, so they'll hear now and then someone, they'll hear someone's father will say, you know, she writes books, okay? And they'll come and say, my father is like a fan of yours and so on. And so I say, oh, really? Oh, that's so nice, okay, and so on. All right, I'll say, but I don't wanna do it. So the point is all these professors at Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they're like, they have the graduate students are paying court to them because they need letters of recommendation, hello, they want something from you and so on, right? So they're so used, they're so grand and so on. I am, you know, I go in and it's like, you know, we need more chairs, okay, what's wrong, you know, the curtain is right, and so on. I'm always in touch with the janitors and so on, so infrastructure, condition of the buildings, I deal with everyday life, okay, all right? And there's no, and I'm not treated like a queen, I'm just like an ordinary, you know, school mom working, you know, and, you know, like a like a horse and so on, pulling the plow, et cetera. So I think that's a really good idea for writers or for, you know, is to have a job where you're dealing with constant frustrations and problems and so on. I think that's really good for you.

Like Herman Melville, right?

Yes, yes.

Hunting whales is not easy.

Or Wallace Stevens, you know, he kept going to the office, the insurance company and so on, every day, okay?

So my last question before they get to ask you, but I know there are many people in this audience, or at least some, who are considering some kind of life or career in the world of ideas. And if you were to offer them a piece of advice based on your years struggling with the infrastructure and the number of chairs and whatever else, what would that be?

Get a job. Have a job, okay, that's the real job, okay, where you're— every time you have frustrations with the real job, you say, this is good, okay? This is good because this is reality. This is the reality as everybody lives it, okay? And this thing of withdrawing from the world to be a writer, I think, is a terrible mistake. Also, just be— I mean, number one thing is constantly observing. I mean, my whole life I'm constantly jotting things down, constantly. Just jot, jot, jot, jot. I'll have an idea. I'm cooking and I'll have an idea. Okay, whoa, whoa, whoa. So I have a lot of pieces of paper with tomato sauce on them or whatever. And I transfer these to cards or I transfer I these transfer to them to notes, et cetera. So I'm just constantly open, okay? And everything's on all the time, you know, like what on? And I never say this is important, this is not important, okay? And that's why I got into popular culture at a time when popular culture was very— in fact, there's absolutely no doubt that Yale Graduate School that I lost a great huge credibility with the professors because of my endorsement of not only film, okay, but popular culture. I mean, by Hollywood, okay? When Hollywood— Hollywood was considered crass entertainment and so on. And that— and now, you know, the media studies came in, you know, very strongly after that, although highly theoretical, not the way I teach media studies. But I also believe in following your own instincts and intuition, okay? All right? Like, there's something meaningful here. You don't know what it is, okay, but you just keep— you just keep it kind of on the back burner, okay? That's— so that's very important. Basically how I work is like, is this the constant observation. There's nothing, and also I try to tell my students, I mean they never get the message really, okay, but what I try to say to them is that nothing is boring. That's the only thing, nothing is boring, okay, all right. If you're bored, you're boring, okay, all right, so I'm like, okay. So, all right, and wherever you are it's like, you know, it's exhausting, it's like frustrating, I don't know what, it's like, I don't know, the plane has been canceled and whatever. So, no, after you get over your fury, okay, you realize, okay, what opportunity is there here to absorb something more, okay, from this experience, from observing other people or whatever it is, okay? And I think there's really no experience that you can have that there's not something in there, okay, that eventually you can't, you know, use as part of your developing system. So, if it's someone who— oh, another thing I I have to say. Anyone interested in ideas, do not read any of the current books that are considered being like Pierre Bourdieu and all that stuff. Oh my God, it's so incomplete, it's so boring. I believe in the library. The library is my shrine. It was my shrine when I was researching Amelia Earhart. When I got to Yale, Sterling Library was my shrine. And I ransacked that building. Oh my God. And that's the thing is that I've I've learned more from the old commentators. Sir James George Fraser, The Golden Bough, which was considered completely gone but had a huge impact on The Waste Land and other big works of modernism. But I've learned a great deal from the commentators of the past, the historians of the past. Now when I did Glittering Images, okay, the actual nullity of current scholarship became very exposed to me. Of course, I already knew about it, I really got objective proof of it. Each artwork that I chose, there are 29 chapters in it, each artwork that I chose I did a full research of what had been said about that particular artwork. And so I began chronologically. I would work if it was like an older work from the late 19th century moving through the decades to the present. And so for each of those artworks, so there you really, oh my God, could you see it? Fall in the quality of, you know, of scholarship, okay, in our time, from the 1980s on, okay. I would move from these incredibly erudite and wonderful sentences and just, you know, beautiful stylists about art. So late 19th century, moving into the 20th century, it's still solid into about the '60s, okay. And then the '70s is kind of holding here. And all of a sudden comes the '80s, '90s, '20s, and all these people are pygmies. Pygmies, the people at the elite schools. And you know, let me say, there's no, you know, the big art survey courses are being dismantled. Hello, okay, it used to be you'd have a 2-semester course. It would begin with KVAR and then move in 2 semesters down to modernism, okay? Magnificent structure, now abandoned wholesale except when students Students have protested, like at Smith. My sister is a graduate of Smith and was part of the protest that got the survey restored. All right, but people no longer— graduate students in art history and art historians no longer have the ability, okay, to teach the big picture because all narratives are regarded as fictional now, imperialistic fictions, okay? So the entire story of art is not possible, and therefore people know nothing.

I need to give them the chance to ask you questions, but thank you for a fascinating—

Thank you.

We have two mics. I will alternate mics. We start here. Feel free to identify yourself if you would like.

Hi, my name is Shayna Davidson. Oh, you mentioned Smith. I saw you speak at Smith or Mount Holyoke in 1993. Okay. And it was fascinating to compare I don't know how to compare that to this because there was a great deal of booing and hissing at Smith. But it was eye-opening to me, being kind of steeped in this, I am gonna wrap up, being steeped in this, the hegemony of the patriarchy and how we must even dress like men. And you saying something to the effect of, I teach in a skirt because I have more control over the classroom that way.

Well, I actually don't remember teaching in a skirt, but go ahead. Okay, but in any case, I remember something to that effect.

The question is, do you think that feminism has evolved beyond that or is it just sort of running that same record dry?

Well, it was at Smith. I mean, it's really shocking. Yeah, when I arrived at Smith, they had papered the walkway, in fact, okay, as people walked in with all these hostile and uncomprehending things. People had no idea what my real ideas were. It was just part of this, the whole PC thing was escalating out of control at that point. But it's really shocking. I mean, here's a person, a woman, a middle-aged woman at that point, I mean, in my 40s, who had spent 20 years writing a book that had been rejected and finally was published by Yale Press, a book on the whole history of Western civilization, and this is the treatment that I got at Smith College. From one of— this is one of the bastions of the Ivy League, or not of the Ivy League, but of the Seven Sisters, you know, one of the most noble names in the history of modern women's education. I mean, isn't that— it shows you, okay, how ideology really is very distorting. But, well, feminism, you know, it's like— it's going through phases. I mean, I call myself a feminist, absolutely. I simply belong to a dissident wing of feminism, and I think that the error made by all these people was not to understand that my wing of feminism had been suppressed and silenced at that point for 25 years. And eventually we won in the '90s, the pro-sex wing of feminism, thanks to Madonna, who wasn't a feminist, but because of Madonna's foregrounding of sexual themes and so on, okay, it allowed us to break through the overcontrol by the Steinem Politburo, okay? I'll take another question, but you'll still get the same OK, but the problem is, OK, the problem is right now, OK, that a whole younger generation has risen up and now Steinem has returned. OK, she's like a bad penny. OK, she's back again. So I mean, I feel like I'm back to square one.

OK. Next question here.

Sorry we can't go on, but—

All right, thanks for coming. You mentioned your incident with Catherine Deneuve, and you also talked about that in 1995 in Playboy, following her and also having 599 pictures of Elizabeth Taylor. But then at the same time earlier this year, when David Bowie passed away, and you mentioned how he had reached out to you and wanted to meet you, you talked about how you weren't sure you would have wanted to because you have to keep a respectful distance from an artist of that towering stature.

Yeah.

So you also mentioned in that interview view that obsession and genius are pretty much the same thing. So where would you draw the line between, say you have an opportunity to meet someone who is very important to you or contrive a meeting or just seek them out. Where do you draw the line between the obsession and I mean the Polly kind of obsession, not the Roy Hinkley kind and just that respectful distance. I mean, do you stifle creativity with respect for who this person is and their privacy?

Well, I think I personally have never had this great desire necessarily to meet, you know, the figures that I most admire in the arts because I understand that what they represent on screen is something that is, you know, it's an artificial construction. It's not the reality that— I've been working in art schools also my entire career, so I know I have dancers in my class, I have actors in my my class, and I completely understand the difference between the fallible real self, the mundane real self, and the artistic self suddenly emerges within what I call the temenos, which is the sacred precinct that I regard as art. And therefore, when I encountered Catherine Deneuve by accident that day, and I was at the peak of my obsession with her, it really almost ruined my interest in her. Because it's like, oh my God, it's like, it's not the it wasn't the real Catherine Deneuve that I was so intent on. It was this magical creation that is a result of her talent but also of the director's own magical skills and so on. Oh yes, Elizabeth Taylor, I guess 599 pictures, yes. People often say what's odd about that is not the number but that I had counted them, okay? So, all right. But yes, she represented to me every everything, the pure sexuality that had been repressed, okay, during the, you know, Doris Day 1950s and early '60s. Butterfield Day still remains for me like a great pagan, you know, exhibition, okay, where here's Elizabeth Taylor as a high-class call girl. Oh my God. And I had Jean Moreau, you know, and Monica Vitti and, you know, and Nuka May and there were just— and there's so many— and Melina Mercouri. There were so many phenomenal images that I was inundated with when I was in high school and college. And what do these kids have today? You know, Taylor Swift. Oh my God, okay, she is such a fake. I mean, she poses in things that she imagines are sexy and sultry and it's like so fake. Awful, awful, awful, okay? But at least Rihanna, who's like, you know, on dope most of the time and that's why she looks so sultry, okay? But, you know, Rihanna's Instagrams are to me like like a work of art. That's the only thing I'm following right now, I have to say, that's of equal importance is Rihanna floating from one nightclub to another, okay, and yet some other fashionable thing. All right, but back to your question. Now wait, wait, wait, wait, did I answer everything? I don't know if I answered the question. I'm not sure. Oh, David Bowie, David Bowie, okay. All right, now Bowie, you know I wrote this, you know, I wrote this essay called "Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution." I wrote it for the Victoria and Albert exhibition catalog for the costume show that they did that is now still touring the world. And I consider it one of my most important pieces. But it's in the catalog. I want to get it into my next essay collection. But with Bowie, I mean, see, Bowie is different than DeNova. Bowie is truly like a creative artist. I mean, whereas Deneuve and Taylor are performers in other people's fictions, but Bowie was truly a master creator of a level that just— it's staggering. When I did the research for that essay, I just was knocked out all over again at the enormity of what he achieved and also at how little has been acknowledged— his deep knowledge of the visual arts and how he had been influenced by that. I found all kinds of little details that showed his deep knowledge, his erudition about that. And it appears to be that he did tell the V&A to invite— Yeah, so that time, people don't know. What you're talking about is where it was early in the 1990s and a message came to my publisher saying— and it was conveyed to me by the publicist of my publisher— saying, David Bowie wants your phone number. And I burst out laughing. I said, oh, ho, ho, ho, ho.

I said, that's ridiculous.

And I said, "Oh, boy, it's just some fan trying to get in." So, and they said, "No, David Bowie, they claim, really wants your phone number." I said, "Is that the way David Bowie gets in touch with you when he wants your phone number?" No. So I laughed and all that. And I didn't believe it. And it was all so shadowy. I mean, it's like, and only now, only when I actually, after I did the research for this Return to Albert thing, did I realize that the reason it was so strange was that he had fired his entire staff. He had fired his management. He had fired his staff. Company, dealing with the record companies and so on after Berlin, okay? And that he only dealt with the world via friends, okay? And so that's what was so strange about it. It was strange, okay? And so I made a mistake, okay? And what he wanted was he wanted to use an excerpt from Sexual Persona on a record album in one of his lyrics. I thought, "Oh my God." All right, so it's very embarrassing that that happened, but that's okay. I mean, I really don't I think there should be a distance, okay, with great art, a sense of respect and reserve with great artists.

Next question.

Hi, so I'm Kelly Ferguson.

Oh, hi.

Hi, I'm a master's economics student here at George Mason.

Oh, okay.

And I'm told today is Equal Pay Day, so that makes the question I want to ask you about pay disparity even more relevant, I guess. I've been thinking about it a lot, and it seems to me that it boils down to a problem of culture, to the extent that, for example, Mark Zuckerberg publicizing taking paternity maternity leave does more to alleviate the pay disparity problem that we have than either companies or governments setting a policy, because to the extent that the demand for flexibility to have children and care for children is only used by women, it's going to hurt us on the margin when it comes to pay. And since you're such a great and incisive social critic, I just wanted to get your thoughts on that.

Well, I mean, first of all, you know, I think, you know, about, you know, the way that my own party, the Democratic Party, is using this rubric of, you know, equal pay for women as if this has not been a matter of law ever since the, you know, the presidency of JFK, for heaven's sakes. I mean, they— you know, there are— there may be cases, you know, of outrageous disparity in pay for doing the same work. I mean, now and then they'll find something like in a hospital, you know, a woman doctor, a veteran doctor, was not being paid the same level. But it's like rare, okay, when these actual cases do surface. Okay, what— there's all this propaganda being pumped out, okay, about this issue, when in fact women are not— if women are earning 72 cents or 75 cents on the dollar, okay, it's not that— it's not for the same job, okay? That's— this is That's a lie that's being told, all right? Women are not being paid— doing the same job as a man are not being paid 75 cents for something that the man is being paid a dollar. What it is is overall the averages of women of their own volition for whatever reasons are taking jobs, okay, that have more flexibility, okay, as opposed to the around-the-clock, 7 days a week, night thing, okay, that may be high. For example, women tend to shy shy away from sales, from commission sales jobs, okay, where they're on the road a lot, okay? And that's where a lot of men, you know, have very high earnings, okay? And women, you know, have further— are making choices. They would prefer to be closer to their children, okay? So, yes, there is— these disparities are ultimately based in biological differences. And so now, you know, Susan Faludi and these other, you know, the feminists of the Steinem Feminine kind of credo. They have one answer, okay? Men must do more, okay? That's their answer. Men must do more. And Susan Faludi has never had a child, okay? So, has absolutely no idea, all right? And what I feel is that there is a tie, there is an ineffable, indefinable biological tie between a child and the mother in whose body, okay, the child has developed into a full being, okay? And that there are all kinds of impulses and instincts that women may have, okay, of protectiveness toward their biologically born children, okay? That I think that it— to politicize the thing and to assume that a woman bearing a child is like an automaton, okay? And yes, here is the baby, okay? My husband, you are equally fit, okay, to be able to nurture this month-old, 3-month-old child. Now, as the child gets a little older and turns into a real human being, okay, with a personality and so on, it's not so dependent, then is when men, okay, can do more, okay? But I still, I believe, okay, personally, from my observation of human life, okay, that there is something something going on. The child, an infant doesn't want the father. Hello? Okay. The infant wants the mother. He wants the nice coochie, the smell is the mother. Okay. Who is this person coming closer? That is, I'm gonna go away. It was like, I mean, Freud talked about that. It's like this distraction comes in, the father, get out. Okay, remember this is why Freud said every child wants to kill the father and marry the mother. Okay, et cetera. And they don't know what men— and men don't know what to do. Men are clumsy and they have like the big hands and so on, okay? And what I have seen from my own observation is that women— and this is because I have a child who I adopted from my former partner and so on. What I have seen is the world of the moms, okay? I have seen the world of the moms from the inside, okay? And what I see is that the minute there are children in the debate, the children are born, the woman, it's the woman who biologically, I believe, has the master strategist mind, okay? She is the generalissimo of the household. The man, her husband, who was once her equal, shrinks down to merely one counter, okay? All right? Becomes one. It is she who issues the master plan for the week. He is hopeless, okay? All right? She has the multiple levels. She assigns, she knows what, and she's the who makes the schedule and so on. And the good father is the one who says, "Okay, yes, I will do. Okay, give me the plan. Give me the sheet," and so forth. But to ask men to do more, okay, seems to me to ask them to do something that they are not biologically prepared to do.

Our next question is from a man.

Oh, sorry. That was so interesting. I wanted to go on, but it's all right. Yes. All right. Wait.

I'd just like to preface my question by saying that as a whirlwind, Job's God has nothing on you.

Oh. How nice. Thank you.

My question is, do you ever Do you ever have any concern that modern literature and eventually all the classics will have to be rewritten so that in order to be understood, every 5th word will have to be the word "like"?

Well, unfortunately, the sense of language in general or just respect for language or interest in language is degenerating. I mean, I'm someone who used to— I used to write down— I mean, always write down any word Every word I don't know, you know, and when I'm reading I would make lists and I would like study the dictionary and etymologies, you know. And now young people, you know, have no concern for language per se. The way they communicate with each other in email format now and text, okay, is very truncated. And so, and that's why the writing on the web has also degenerated horribly. You know, the writing for blogs is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It used to be with newspapers and magazines there was a space limit, okay? And that imposed a real, you know, kind of format. It forced you to condense. And it gave a kind of crispness to language. So we're in a period now, I'm afraid, that the ear for language is degenerating.

One last question, very quickly.

Oh, the last one? Oh no. All right, I'll try to be quick.

In my view, feminists have made a lot of progress in the Western world in the last century. I'm curious to know if you think we're close to basically achieving the goals that were set out, or if the feminists will ever feel like the fact that more women go to college these days, for example, is a symbol of progress, or that they'll never feel like the job has been done.

You have 1 minute 30 seconds to answer this question.

Oh no, well, I'm an equal opportunity feminist, by which I believe that all obstacles to women's advance in the political and professional professional realms and should be removed. But what I'm also saying is that there are huge areas of human life, okay, that are not political, that have to do with our private spiritual natures, okay? And that is a place where legislation will always be helpless and hopeless and indeed intrusive. So I think that feminism has made enormous gains. I mean, in terms of, you know, there was a time that women were totally dependent on depended on father, on husband, on brother for their survival. Now women can be self-supporting, can live totally on their own. And it's part of this whole Western world powered by capitalism that our university curricula are now habitually always demeaning, right? I mean, capitalism made women's emancipation possible. So I think that the problem right now is that young women have been taught to somehow identify their own sense of personal unhappiness with men. Men are responsible for our unhappiness. When in fact, part of the issue is that we have lived as a species for tens of thousands of years, okay? Where mating occurred early, was early, okay? Where you left your parents' house and had your own household and your own children. And I mean, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet is 13 going on 14. Already she's ready for marriage. So, in this, like, we have a very long, a naturally long period here before women can attain some sense of who they are as women. So, I think that that is the— and it's not men, it's not the patriarchy, okay? And it's ultimately not a feminist issue. It has something to do with this very mechanical system of the modern technological professional world that has emerged replace the agrarian period, okay, when there were multi-generations living with each other and women had a natural sense of solidarity, okay, being all together. There was the world of women and the world of men, okay, once. They didn't have much to do with each other once, okay. All the problems have happened since we started having to do with each other.

Just to close, Steven Pinker will be coming in October 24th. This summer we'll have Cass Sunstein, not yet scheduled. Camille, we thank you heartily.

Oh, thank you.

So, so much.

Thank you. Thank you.

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