Alcohol's enhancement of direct face-to-face dialogue is precisely what is needed by today's technologically agile generation, magically interconnected yet strangely isolated by social media. Clumsy hardcore sexting has sadly supplanted simple hanging out over a beer at a buzzing dive. By…
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Camille Paglia
Camille Anna Paglia (English: /ˈpɑːliə/; born April 2, 1947) is an American academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. Known for her critical views of many aspects of modern culture, Paglia is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990). Paglia has also written three collections of essays, an eponymously titled analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, Break, Blow, Burn (2005) on poetry, and Glittering Images (2012), a history of the visual arts. She is a critic of American feminism and of post-structuralism as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history. In 2005, Paglia was ranked No. 20 on a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. 2Personal life Paglia was born in Endicott, New York, the elder daughter of Pasquale and Lydia Anne (née Colapietro) Paglia. Both her parents immigrated to the United States from Italy. Additionally, Paglia has stated that her father's side of the family were from the Campanian towns of Avellino, Benevento, and Casert
I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity. I want to restore the terms art and culture to their general…
All sacred spaces, pagan or Christian, should be honored, not because there is or is not a God but because these are quiet points of contact between the individual and the macrocosm.
Teenage boys goaded by their surging hormones run in packs like the primal horde. They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.
How eerily history seems to be repeating itself! But this time it is the fate of the entire nation that hangs in the balance. Trump is a stormily dynamic change-maker who will surely win this election unless the Democrats get their house in order and nominate a figure of honor and integrity. Bernie…
I am still amazed at the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger to governor—a man who has never held political office and who participated in only one serious debate. It is a disturbing sign in any nation when politics have become so inefficient and corrupt that the people turn to an outsider as ‘strong…
The moment there is imagination, there is myth.
Poetry is the connecting link between body and mind. Every idea in poetry is grounded in emotion. Every word is a palpation of the body. The multiplicity of interpretation surrounding a poem mirrors the stormy uncontrollability of emotion, where nature works her will.
When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression.
Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know.
The body, for good or ill, has become a primary marker of identity in this transient society where the extended family and old community ties have broken down. Style is cyclic: all standards will eventually change. But that may not be soon enough for young people (increasingly male as well as…
The massive power of commercial media can only be countered by alternative images from world art and culture.
Forms of cultural expression have their own dynamic, whose evolution can never be fully foreseen.
A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.
Barbra Streisand has never received due credit for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism. Emerging from bohemian nightclubs where her campy patter and vintage costumes were shaped by gay male sensibility, Streisand embodied a scrappy…