|
Ever since she rocked the academic world with her 1990
battle cry, Sexual Personae, humanities
professor-turned-provocateur Camille Paglia has enjoyed wide
appeal. Her breathless, cross-disciplinary rants on art, pagan
ritual, queer culture and, memorably, Madonna, have endeared
her to polymorphous throngs while earning the ire of
mainstream feminists.
Now Paglia's sounding off again in her new book, Break,
Blow, Burn, in which she offers audacious readings of 43
of the "world's best poems," and finds implications about
everything from postmodernism and queer theory to psychedelic
drugs and the Doors. WW spoke with Paglia by phone from
her Philadelphia office, as she geared up for a 10-city book
tour.
WW: You say you like the look of "a shapely poem on
paper, surrounded by white," but you didn't include e.e.
cummings in your book.
Obviously, he's very important and influential for his
experiments, OK, but I didn't find a strong enough poem of his
to include.
You didn't include Allen Ginsberg, either.
That was one of my regrets. Howl had a huge impact on me in
college in the '60s. I treasured that little book like it was
a piece of holy scripture! I thought maybe I should excerpt
it, but it didn't quite work. I found another one by him from
early on-it was about Marlene Dietrich-but it was so
unrepresentative that I thought it would be silly to put it
in, and I knew if I put this in, people would say, "Oh, she's
putting things in because she's a fan of Hollywood movie
stars!"
I like the fact that you include Joni Mitchell as a
poet. What do you think of Jim Morrison?
I take him seriously as a poet because he had vision and
instinct, and I like his sense of myth. He had a great sense
of archetype. He was part of that whole Jungian, Joseph
Campbell kind of thing, the authentic multicultural
perspective, with serpent imagery and imagery from Mexican
mushroom cults. He was inspired. He saw something. Of course,
part of it was due to drugs.
Speaking of which, you give a brilliant reading of
"Kubla Kahn," which came out of one of Coleridge's
laudanum trips. Do you take it as a given that psychoactive
drugs can inspire creativity?
Well, the most creative and adventurous people of my
generation took drugs in the '60s, and they to this day say it
helped them. As for my own experience, during my first weekend
at college, I drank seven 7&7's in an hour, and I was
violently ill for the next, like, day and a half. I was so
burned by that that I've been very careful about drugs. I went
psychedelic through the music, though, rather than the drugs.
In fact, any drug music, OK, that is my music! I am so totally
insane with the psychedelic culture! You know what John Lennon
said? He said that while obviously he enjoyed psychedelics, he
felt that on some level he hadn't really needed them, because
his mind worked like that anyway. I feel that way about my
mind: I have a kind of psychedelic mind.
In your reading of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," you
write that Whitman's brand of "egalitarian" bisexuality was
superior to modern queer theory.
Queer theory today is disastrous, OK? After Stonewall, as
male homosexuality become more permissible, there was a
withdrawal by gay males from culture as the medium of creating
your own identity, which previously had been theirs since the
time of Oscar Wilde. So especially with the post-structuralist
and postmodernist influence, you've gotten this shrill,
strident voice, as if gay people could really segregate
themselves from the human race. Queer studies almost
immediately became a ghetto, because its leading interpreters,
their view of life and of nature is extremely constricted.
They don't have the expansiveness of Whitman's vision or
Tennessee Williams' emotional outpouring. And this has
blighted developing young gay writers and artists with the
cheap, cynical irony of postmodernism.
The biphobia or heterophobia in queer theory, you
mean?
Right! Everything in queer theory now is so politicized
that gay people are stopped from any self-reflection. Know
thyself, OK? People who identify themselves as exclusively
gay-I'm saying that's a trap. Stop thinking like that! If you
say, "I want to be this way for the rest of my life," all
right, fine, I endorse it. But you should also say, "I'm going
to keep the doors open and allow myself to respond to life as
it happens." I believe that every single human is born with a
potential for bisexual response. The real mystery is why
anyone would be exclusively heterosexual or exclusively
homosexual. My ideal universe is one in which people have a
primary sexual orientation but feel absolutely free to
experiment across gender lines, to respond to the moment, to
the person. That's sophisticated! That's truly creative!
Originally published on
WEDNESDAY, 4/20/2005
|
.gif){kind=small}
