Conversations with Tyler - Camille Paglia on her Lifestyle of Observation (Live at Mason)

Episode Date: April 25, 2016

Camille Paglia joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation on the brilliance of Bowie, lamb vindaloo, her lifestyle of observation, why writers need real jobs, Star Wars, Harold Bloom, Amelia Earhart, Edmund Spenser, Brazil, why she is most definitely not a cultural conservative, and much more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.  Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Email us: [e-mail] Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

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 Mercadis.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, Alison Wonderland, and the Marquis de Saude. She understands Bob Dylan and Susan Sontag.

And she has pursued a career of great integrity. That's my introduction for Camille. I'd like to start with a question from a reader. I was 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. My last big tech guru was probably Marshall McLuhan. It was like a prophetic insight into what was about to happen. He's kind of the patron saint of my working on the web, you know, from the very first issue of Salon in 1995, when it's hard to believe that the 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, oh, no one takes the web seriously. And the enormous thing has happened,

which, of course, is also sucked in a whole generation of young people, alas, that's all they know. So I think we're kind of on the downside of that right now. Take your last book, littering images, and your other work, which emphasized the role of the iconic and 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, 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, 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 are gigantic screens, you know, like the Ten Commandments, there's like a giant thing of Pharaoh, giant sculpture, you know, starts at one end of the screen and you watch it, like going to the other end of the screens. 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. You 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. So you have periods that esteem the colossal, like the Bernini Renaissance, and Baroque periods. and then you get the small, the art of the small,

like the Roco Co is a kind of evanescence and the evaporation of the big Baroque swirls, and all of a sudden it's like little tiny things like a valentine's card. So I think we go back and forth. I just feel lucky I think that, you know, I have a kind of epic imagination because I was raised watching the Ten Commandments, you know,

and Ben Hur. Oh my God, Ben Hur. I could watch that 200 times. 20 or 10 favorite movies, right? Yeah. It's the one on the list that's surprising. But given what you're saying. And the music, and the music composed for those things.

It directly inspired my writing of sexual persona. 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 insert, you know, and trample and conquer. It animates me. These are my, you know, 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 all? 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 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. There's a momentum to that. 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, even if you belong. And 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 nine times. Yes, in nine or ten, yeah. What does Brazilian culture have, which in North American culture lacks? Well, it'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.

What they understood was artifice, art, okay, because of carnival for them, and, you know, and customing, masquerade, and that kind of baroque exuberance and the syncretism of, you know, of Christianity with the the Aruba cults of West Africa in Salvador to Bahia. So they understood my vision of art and beauty, okay, and the beauty is an incredibly important human principle rather than the way it was being trashed, you know, 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 of nature. You know, to imagine that we can make a change in it. It's 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, you know, superstructure. It doesn't have a messianic view of itself. politically. The politics are always chaos. So in drama, it's like a grand opera. It's like another planet, really, Brazil. Okay, to continue the whirlwind tour of Camille Pahlia, 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 who is not the greatest artist it has nothing to do with George Lucas and I haven't seen it I wouldn't dream of God when it's on TV I'll look at it please okay I know

do you think I want to sit in the 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 it all yes so what is it that people don't get about the prequels they say jar Jar Jar Bing's and they say scream.

Oh, I can't tell you. Oh, I know, I know exactly what they're talking about. Tell us what's good about the people. No, it was Revenge of the Sooth. After the great volcano planet, climax of Revenge of the Sooth, 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, you know, anyone who dismisses what I say about the sublime quality of the vision, execution and the emotion, the passions of that scene, really, they just, you know, they don't know what I'm talking about because they haven't exposed themselves to it.

Music, Rolling Stones. Yes. They're the two albums. Hot rocks, more hot rocks. Now, you wrote about the Rolling Stone some time again, 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 then here come these surly guys sneering and spitting and so on. Those were dark and subtle too, right? Well, not like the stones.

But here's the difference, is that the Rolling Stones are inspired by. animated by, to this day, by, you know, by the blues, okay, by the blues tradition. And the Beatles, really, were more almost Broadway and musical comedy. Yes, British musical, 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, you know, wonderful bass player, but you're not getting the big roaring sound, okay, of, you know, Bill Wyman's bass at the beginning of, you know, of the Boney of the Stone's career.

And I really have not been following the stones. Ever since Bill Wyman left the stones, I have not felt that that's the stones I knew. So I'm delighted that they go on and 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 like, people like, oh, my goodness, just the light shows and this and the that. And this is not, this is not a, you know, 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 Jimmy Hendricks, 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. It's still fresh and so on. You know, for me, you know, there's a whole period there. I teach him my art of song lyrics course.

I just was doing like Crosby stills in Nash in doing wooden ships and it still has this incredible power I love that the entire period of the 1960s the music I think it was a kind of magic moment

and then still in the 70s Led Zeppelin when the levy breaks this has enormous power a lot of that music that Jimmy Page was doing a lot of it working in the studio actually 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 like a nightmare. Who stands up to the giants of the past? Stands up to working today? Working today or close to today?

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. The new album is an at a trip. It's really terrible. It's sad because there are so many people with talents, okay, who are not being developed is because our, you know, our music industry is now very formulaic. People can't, you know, young people can't really move along, you know, studying their instruments and, you know, getting their chops over a period of time. And 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, I'm just saying there are certain moments, you know, certain magic moments of fertility or creativity that happened to, 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 you 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 or the right time in any one of the artist show. 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, a school called Minerva, where you take four years, you spend each of the four years in a foreign country, one year in Buenna. artist, 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 two 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 young people a lot to be exposed to the world. Because our, right now, 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, you know, people, but people from the inner city, you know, from good schools, from bad schools. So I really have a very clear sense after 40 years of teaching what's going on, okay, 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 a 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, okay, at all, okay? I think that you need the live person, okay? And you need a live person who can talk, okay, extemporaneously, okay, and respond to the moment, okay, and not just people who are reading the same old damn lecture, okay, over and over again.

You know, the kind of form, then 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 did flattering there's like these small seminar things okay and they and the A-minus seminar right and so and so there's all this practice and learning how to talk in this slightly pretentious way about things and impressing each other blah blah so what you know so they're all packaging them for the bourgeoisie said them to Brazil right oh god okay and they're so proud of themselves as they produce all these like clones okay these polished bourgeois clones A witless, knowing nothing.

Speaking of inspiring teachers, what's your favorite Harold Bloom's 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. Oh, all right, okay. 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 of him, so I didn't know him at all. And then he heard, the only time I encountered him. Oh, this is going, oh, I shouldn't say this. Okay, maybe. But at any way, let's say he would come according, okay, and so I do like that with a famous poet who was a friend of his, who also named, and so I would see him turning up at a door way, you know, so I go, hello, hello, hello, okay, that's all. So I just knew him, you know, to say hello to him. And so that 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. And so that was it. So then he He understood everything. He said, 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, you know, or, you know, gave me confidence throughout all those decades when I couldn't get published. You know, I couldn't, my sexual persona was rejected by seven publishers and five agents.

And by the time it was published, I was 43 years old. So I'm like a great, you know, role model, it seems to me, for people. to just soldier through adversity and rejection and just continue to develop the craft and eventually hopefully, you know, one will see one's work in print. And what did he think of you in sexual persona? Well, I mean, he like, of course, he was like,

he always said I gave him great nahas, okay? All right, which is, you know, which is sort of like to have a father to a daughter, etc. But he and I agree about Freud. You know, 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 mentioned something, and you tell me if you think it's underrated or overrated by our society. By our society or by me? Well, your opinion relative to the societal opinion. Now, don't hold back on these. Tell us what you think.

All right. First one, economics. Economics is a field? That's 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, you know, just a baseline figure?

And then, you know, thanks to Kate Millett and all these Philistine, you know, 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, you know, 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. So you're saying underrated? Well, I think he should be on the reading list. I mean, I don't know. Perhaps he was overrated in our time, but he certainly.

is like it was a major author and a major, you know, influence in American literature, for heaven's sakes. But that's a young, young people aren't, you know, aren't reading him, and they aren't reading many of the great authors. Yoko Ono, overrated or not. Oh, Yoko Ono. You can eat, oh, don't start me on Yoko. So one of my least favorite people in the universe, okay?

Oh, yes, I blame her for the break of the babiness. And so on. And all that, all that, you know, that screechy yodling that went on. Oh, my God. Well, she's a horror. But, but I gave her, ado 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 Monroe. Oh, I don't read fiction. I don't read contemporary fiction. I have absolutely zero interest in temporary fiction.

The last contemporary fiction I have any interest in is anti-Mame, and I'm not kidding. I like plays like Tennessee Williams. No, the fiction writers 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 any, believe me, I haven't. These are the kind of books I like, I'll open like this. I like that. You're going to pass on Harry Potter, too. Harry Potter, no, I don't. I mean, yeah. 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. So Harold Bloom became known for... He got that because of me. Just like Norman Mailer got to interview Madonna for the cover of Esquire, okay, because Madonna said no to me, okay? That's another...

People kind of trying to bring us together. HBO wanted to do my dinner at Andre type thing with Madonna and me. She's just like a fray. I mean, I don't know what... I think she thought it was going to mean like some big intellectual, but it's not true. Parenthood, overrated or underrated.

Who? Parenthood. Oh, no. No. I don't have anything to do with that. No. Okay. The most underage?

I don't watch, I don't want, yeah. No, not the show, parenthood. Oh, parenthood. Being a parent. Oh, oh. That was a big switch. That's what he's over. That's what he's over.

I mean, we need a warning sign. You know, you turn. Okay, all right, go ahead. Parenthood, overrated or underrated. By who? Parenthood. Well, okay, I mean, obviously we're in a time now where, you know, parenting is in crisis, I would think. I mean, I think that it is a, I mean, the reason we have all these whiny, you know, super sensitive girls on campus, it'll run shrieking, okay, you know, that slightest thing that offends their ears or drag mattresses, you know,

onto the stage at commencement exercises. The reason we have that is because the parents have not prepared them, okay, for real life, okay? So, you know, in other words, they've been raised in this bourgeois, you know, pampered cocoon. So I think there's been a tremendous failure of parenting, certainly, okay, 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 mean, 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 know. Perhaps Antonin Cluopatra is like, is sliding to recede. I don't know why. I think Anthony and Cleopatra was a great favorite of my generation of the 60th generation. But for some reason it's becoming, I think, marginal. I'm not sure, maybe it's because it's about imperialism. May I ask a few questions about sex? Of course.

You've covered this topic before. The audience will demand it. Yeah. Which country comes closest to your vision of having healthy relations between the sexes or among the sexes? This 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 at the upper middle class, 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 plumber and plumber and duller and lose their hair. And nobody minds, okay? I think because they assume that the woman rules as like a woman is the, you know, the cock of the walk down there.

It's like, 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, open.

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. 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 not a doubt about it. I mean, I think that the, you know, that the AIDS was like a Holocaust, okay, and the number of interesting, fascinating, talented men of artists and people who were just, you know, in fashion and just every level. I mean, I think that in many ways, gig culture is sort of still recovering from that.

We're in a kind of like, I don't know, kind of holding pattern. I think after the... There was an enormous kind of flamboyance and assertiveness to do. 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 your whole course on Oscar Wild. And now what can you say? I mean, is there anything distinctly gay right now, except, you know, they're certainly gay activists are extremely successful, okay, in terms of pushing their agenda and, you know, and sorry. 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 is, like, kind of vanished, too.

For America, what should an ideal of masculinity look like now? What should it look like? Well, I don't know. The older generation, you would have like a Carrie Grant or 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 would seem to be masculine,

often the actual actors were gay, like Rock Hudson, and Carrie Grand's sexuality, remains one of the great mysteries. And there's something, a lot of things. I mean, I adore Carrie Grant. Oh, my God. But he's like a hallucination. All of the great images, you know,

on the screen are hallucinations. You know what I mean? Kim Novak and Vertigo is literally the hallucination. But what should be the... The problem right now is that is that the masculine has no honor whatever in our culture. We're in a period now where, you know,

young people are being processed with the universities and the, you know, the gender norms, okay, are said to be that, you know, gender is a construct. It's, it's a, it's a, it's simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There's nothing in the body. We have a big culture. Not everyone goes to university. So, thank goodness. You can go to a NASCAR race and a few of the people there have not been working class, to the Ivy leagues. Working class, working class, working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There's absolutely no doubt about that. Okay, there's, there's a, but, but with, with that comes static. Okay. So you

have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men. And so that is why masculinity is constantly being eroded and diminished and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. And that's what we have. Our university system is anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsically to rape 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, you know, we're moving toward that, the Eloy. And so that's how I see the upper middle class graduates of the Ivy League. They're the Eloy, okay? They're completely bland. They have no ideas. They'll get along very well with each other because they're nothing.

Okay, and so on. And they're eating their fruits, okay, which are given to them by the Morlocks, okay, who come, or the industrial class, so on. So that's how I see the future is that, I mean, unfortunately, I mean, I began my career talking about and talking about the imaginative complexity of and how the oratories and the shaman and the prophet to have this androgynous component. But today's androgyny is just boring. I mean, David Bowie at his height, okay, it was absolutely brilliant, electrifying, kabuki,

you've got to go on and on and so on. And now 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. Yes, yes. So think outside the box. Where do you see vitality, both culturally, sexually, in terms of aesthetics? No, I mean, I don't.

I think it's been a tremendous flattening. I mean, I think there's very little culturally that, you know, that there's right now. There's very, 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, you know, they have this ideal of the consensus. And that's why when I go up there, people have said to me actually, you know, like quietly,

oh, I love having you here. Everyone's always forcing us to have consensus in Canada. Okay. All right. 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 always have a consensus.

Right. But I mean, Canada is, everyone is very civilized in Canada, okay? But it's impossible to rise above the herd also, okay? You can't make any, you know, big gestures. You're thought to be antisocial. So I wouldn't glorify Canada. Let me ask you a few questions about yourself. There's a wonderful four-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? Where are you in it now? My early period was total failure, flop, and, you know, in the middle of it to 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, like ever since. Like that. I mean, I really don't see phases.

I just see, like, you know, nothingness and then everything. Okay, and so on it's like. I mean, sort of like a carnival, you know. What will the late period look like? The late period? Okay. Which we haven't gotten to it, yeah. 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 eight years on this, my Native American explorations. Okay. I'm very interested in Native American culture at the end of the ice age as the glacier withdrew. And I go around and I like find a little tiny artifacts and I read and so on. And absolutely no one, especially anyone in Manhattan. has a slightest interest in what I'm doing, all right? 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, you know, of ethnic studies and racial studies and so on has actually been very limiting. I mean, I find very objectionable,

this projection, eternal projection, of, like, of genocide and disaster and, you know, and so on. onto Native American studies. And so I'd like to show, you know, the actual vision of Native American culture, which is religious vision, metaphysical vision, okay. Cyclical approach? Sycical? Relevance of nature?

Yes. Oh, totally. It's almost like an early animism. That's why I'm interested in Salvador de Bahia also, because the Yoruba cults of West Africa that were absorbed into Salvador de Bahia in Brazil is the same, okay, 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, there was general destruction of Native American culture

for many reasons during that period. But it's out, 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 are remnants. I suddenly, 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 onodagas, 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 to find me some dirt,

and I'll find you a tool, okay, a broken tool. It's absolutely incredible. So I feel that's what I should be doing something like this, which no one is interested in. But I feel that, you know, is substantive and can, you know, hope can help to show what was here before. More about you. And Vams and Tramps, you once wrote that as early as 1981, the second volume of sexual persona, was more finished as a tricky word we know as writers. But some version is finished.

And do you think we will all ever have? have the privilege of reading it. Well, the Yale Press didn't want to publish those last chapters. No, but, you know, it didn't, it didn't, so the, the, the, you know, the, the, of the 19th century with, you know, Emily Dickinson, it was already a 700-pageian 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, you know, since the last 25 years, I've been essentially, you know, writing in articles, okay, everything that I would have written in that thing.

So everyone, all my writing in popular culture, I, you know, I've continued. Like on football, I had a chapter of baseball versus football, and football is the ultimate pagan, you know, sport, et cetera. Well, I've, you know, so I wrote Wall Street Journal, you know, 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, 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 in, like ballerinas. Please, that's not football. Football is wham like that.

Bring back to fullback. And the TV won't show the great defensive plays, you know, and so on. I mean, the whole art of defense and the great offensive, you know, defense in lines and that kind of tussle. It's like that's kind of gone. So I'm lucky. I feel lucky that I saw, you know, football on TV at its high point. You also wrote that when you were in high school, you either wrote or just 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. There was like an article in the Syracuse Herald Journal about, there's always some article about Amelia Earhart. You know, someone finds a fragment or 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, 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 three years in 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. In 1920s and 30s, where you had all these career women, like Amelia Earhart and Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Thompson, you know, Claire Booth Luce. There's just so many women, Margaret Burke 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 suddenly they revived and began complaining about men and all that stuff and so on so forth.

You know, I hated it, okay? And I was all, and it was early clashes that I had with those feminists. from the start. I try to join second-way feminism. They wouldn't have me. They kept them very, because I would not bad-mouthed men. These women, like Amelia Earhart and so on, they did not, they did not bad-mouthed 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, as who did all these great things. That was not the tone, okay, of second-way feminism from the start. It was always like, man-man, patriarchy,

people like this and so on. A bunch of, 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 May 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. She's like very rich and so now.

Okay, at any rate, so, Rita May Brown said to me, okay, she said, the difference between you and me, Camille, okay, is that you want to save these universities and I want to burn them down. Okay, now this is, what can you say? What, when there's a conversation stopper, okay? So I had, I had, I had the knockdown argument of 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? I would, my back was through the wall. They were splitting in my face. Okay, and, and I said, yes, the Rolling Stones are a saxist, but they make great music. And they're, oh, no, no, right, let's take a, let's like, let's like, under my under my thumb, yes, it's sexistly, but it's a great song. It's a work of art, and so on. And these women, okay, said to me, and they said to me, art, art, nothing that demeans women

can be art. Now that is the Stalinist view of art, okay, is right? More about you, more about you, less about that. Okay, all right. Then there was, wait a minute, then there was the argument that I had. Okay, this is, Emilier Hart. You asked him Amelia Hart. Yes, yes. Then I had my first job at Bennington College, 1972, okay? And people said, oh, they're this is new Women's Studies Department, one of the first ever said, the State University of New York and Albany, okay, you know, oh, they'll be wondering.

Okay, so, okay, so they're feminists, I'm feminist, okay, all right. So we had like a dinner, okay, we're going to 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 deny that 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 believe, and I, and these are women who are in the English department. I had a wonderful education they had in biology. I mean, at any rate, Amelia Earhart, okay?

Yes, of course. And 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, wrote in a letter to the editor. It was like their number one letter. I'm 16 years old, okay, at that point. And what was it? Oh, I know it. Then they put a picture of Amelia Earhart there. And it was Valentina Tureshkova, 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 Treshkova has become the cosmonaut, has become the first woman. On the anniversary, that Amelia Earhart flew the ocean, whatever it was, it was some big anniversary of her. And I said, I say, obviously, you know, Amelia Earhart's lifelong, you know, fight for equal opportunity for American women remains to be won. That's 1963. Gloria Steinem, okay, can lick dirt, okay, 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, okay?

Shit, that's fraud, that woman. 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 into a very prosaic question. 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? Well, it's a lifestyle. I mean, of observation. I feel that the basis of my work is not only the care I take with writing, with my quality control of my prose, but also my 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, you know, insular ideology, you know, on top of it. I am always, like, listening to conversations at the shopping mall, okay? The radio. I adore radio. The radio is fantastic. Any show on radio, the talk shows, political talk shows, but also the sports shows, okay? The sports shows are the only place that you can hear on radio,

actual working class voices calling in, okay, for, you know, when I'm talking about what happened in the game on Monday and what they would do if they had $2 million dollars and who they would hire and et cetera, et cetera.

It's fantastic. And so my, my writer's voice is actually very, you know, rather than these novelists, okay, with their rich as she, you know, the lingo and so on, my actual writing voice is very influenced by the way

English is spoken today, okay, you know, by people, And often men, okay, on radio. Okay, so you get this like 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 run. It's a horrible run. It's not a horrible rut. It may be a rut. It's a 40-year run. No, every time I go to an Indian restaurant,

I said, now I'm going to 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, So like to Quincy, tell us what are the effects of lamb vigil? I don't, I can't, I don't, what can I say? I attain, you know, Nirvana on, uh, just, 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 also, you mentioned LSD, can I say something else about that? Sure, LSD, okay. Now LSD, okay, you know, it's, I never took, I think 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 little wine, beer, you know, all these things have, you know, have hundreds of thousands of things. of years behind them, right. I said, you know, this Al-S-D, so I'm so glad I never took it. Everyone around me was taking LSD, okay, and people who did take LSD and survived,

it will still say things like, well, I'm really glad I did, okay, because I, you know, and everyone who says that, I feel actually never attain the level of accomplishments they should have in terms of whatever their vision had been. I think LSD gave vision, okay, it gave vision, but then it deprived people of the ability to translate that vision, okay, into material form, you know, for the present and for posterity. But I still remain, you know, very oriented toward the LSD vision. I mean, I feel like I took LSD because of the music. The music, you know, like, you know, with bathing at Baxter's, Jefferson Airplane, you know,

the first people to be using, like this, like this. And the distortions of the birds, you know, eight miles high. I adore that song. And so on. I just feel I'm in that psychedelic words. So I sometimes said that what I do is psychedelic criticism, because it is, metaphysical and his visionary. I have a vision, I have a vision, okay, that's bigger than the society. That's the problem with the Marxist approach. I believe the

Marxist's approach is useful, okay? You know, Arnold Hauser, it's like one of the great, you know, the social history of art is one of the most influential things I mean. 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, it doesn't even see it. It doesn't see nature, okay? What kind of a vision, okay, 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, you know, my generation was all into, you know, cosmic consciousness and, like, opening, and we were influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism and all kinds of Eastern. So that's, 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, you have to present world. cultures, including religion.

Religion is extremely important. 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 of the world cultures or anything else?

Is there anyone left writing serious books? I don't know. I mean, I'm trying to think who has written a serious book. interested in right now. I, listen, there's no one I would say, oh, so-and-so's book is coming. What? They're dead, you know? The people, the people who I admire are long dead.

Unfortunately, you know, it's a terrible destruction. I mean, my work looks very strange, idiosyncratic, because I'm alone. 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, okay? And 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, Bennington College,

really brilliant minds. And I had great hopes for them and for what they would do. And then 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, okay? And rejection simply infuriates me, okay, and so on.

I say, well, I'll have my revenge on you, okay, in the afterlife, okay, and so on. I'll be around and you'll be dead. I mean, it's an Italian thing. What can I say? This is sexual persona, your best-known book, which I recommend to everyone if you haven't already read it. Took 20 years. All of it. My favorite chapter is the Edmund Spencer.

Really? Why? How strange. Spencer to life for me. Oh, my goodness. I realized it was a wonderful book. Oh, my God. I had no idea.

I thought of it as old and fusty and stuffy. Yes. And 100% because of you. Well, we should tell them that the fairy queen is quite forgotten now, but it had enormous impact, Spencer's Fairy Queen, on Shakespeare and on the romantic poets and so on and so forth. And the fairy 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 Sad. Okay, so that's what, and how interesting that you would be drawn to that.

Very interesting. So the cover image is Queen Nefertiti in the Noyes Museum in Berlin. And recently in the news, we've seen that someone has scanned the bus. And it will soon be possible using 3D printers to print out your own copy of Nefertiti. And how do you feel about this? Oh, well. Well, you know, to me, you know, archaeology is one of the, you know, my master tropes. So what can I say?

And the bust of Nefertiti discovered in 1912. And it's amazing. It's barely, we've known it for like a century. It's extraordinary, isn't it, how it's become such a symbol of arch. And then, oh, and what should say, that all the push of countries like Greece and Egypt to recover their masterpieces from where they were taken, you know, 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. Don't send it back to Cairo. Of all the aesthetic judgments in your writings, you 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. 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 and a hundred of thoughts. 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 Huisman's

esthete and deizant 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 I'm a mind traveler okay what is your unrealized dream in life

my unrealized dream to meet Catherine de Nouve but I met her once I ran into smack ran into her once on on Fifth Avenue in front of Sacks. I know this is kind of bizarre. So it's a realized dream? Yes, but it was odd, yes.

But it was odd, yes. I pursued her into the glove department and forced her to sing my ticket envelope for the Fillmore East where I was seeing the Jefferson Airplane. To have a conversation with Catherine Nouve, should we say it? Civilized conversation. Now, on that topic, one of your books,

The Birds, about the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Great book. One of my favorite movies. Going back to that time, if you had the opportunity to date, either Suzanne Plachette or Tippi Hedrin. Date, to date? I don't date. I'm just a mad nun, is all that I am. Of course. Date. I don't think. Dating is so benal.

Okay, so, yeah. T. With Suzanne Plachette or Tippy Hedron. Well, Tippy Hedron invited me to lunch in Roder Drive after that. I was, I don't know, giving some speech on Shakespeare at the Los Angeles, a public library. And so she invited you to thank me for writing this. And I imagine she had a stack of 12 of these books and I signed the fact. She was 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, she collected and so on. But in 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, you know, Lena Dunham is Lena, oh, God. Lena Dunham is a product of exactly the same world, okay, that hold affluent art entertainment world in Manhattan. I said, look what's happened to, you know, to culture. You want to see the difference between Suzanne Plachette, I'm a sophisticated Suzanne Plachette, all right,

and Lena Dunham, okay, you want to see the decline, okay? 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 on a film and I said, how about the birds? I did, okay? So I wrote this book, okay? And it was universally, like, you know, panned, okay, by the film journals, okay, which said about it, okay, this book does nothing. This book does nothing, by which they meant that I didn't, it wasn't post-structuralist, it wasn't a post-modernist, There wasn't a lot of theory. I wasn't citing, you know, the male gaze and et cetera, et cetera, right?

All this book does is go through the film, the burns, 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, now here it is, it was 1998 when that came out, and I'm starting to get, it started to happen now, like the Rutledge, you know, Rutledge is like the publisher, that's like nothing about this theory stuff. And so they're starting to go, hmm, okay, maybe there was. something in with her, so I'm hoping, I'm just trying to inspire, you know, graduate students,

okay, to rebel against this horrible, you know, the fascism that forces theory onto them before they expose themselves into everything that's wonderful, you know, and imaginative in the history of literature and art. And so I believe they're paying minute attention to the actual work itself is the mission of criticism. And I am hopelessly old-fashioned, because that's not You're supposed to like, you're supposed to like, you mentioned Foucault, you know, 59 times in one paragraph, et cetera. What a know. Windbag that guy's, 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, you know, 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 Irving Goughman, okay, of Philadelphia, okay, who was like the great sociologist, originally Canadian, okay, who wrote the presentation. of self and everyday life. And so all the 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, you know, or intellect. And he wasn't. So it is a disease in these people. Everywhere, every single university in the United States,

every single gender studies department, they're impregnated with Foucault. And that's why we have graduates who know nothing. Impringated is an interesting word to you. Yes, it is. Yes, yeah, it is. You like Marnie, the Hitchcock movie?

I like Marnie, certainly. There are parts of, you know, I mean, I like most of Marnie, yeah, yeah. But it goes askew in a way the birds doesn't. Yes, it's like, yeah. I mean, it's not, yeah. I mean, there are problems with, I mean, there's so much was toxic going on on the set between Hitchcock and Tippihedron at that point, you know, and so on.

But, I mean, there are wonderful things in Marnie. 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, watch 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? My life is completely mundane. I'm a school marm, okay? That's all I am, okay? And I had the wisdom, although, 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, okay, I didn't move to New York, I didn't go chasing around, I didn't get a like, you know, a speaker's bureau, all that stuff. I try to keep, like, you know, I guess it's all the, my have a cousin who's a nun, okay, and I have all these, you know, bishops and, you know, priests and sextons and so on their family and so on.

And I just try to keep reality, okay, because I know that the basis of my work is my, the closeness, the world which I live to ordinary life, okay? That's, you know, and so on. I mean, and, you know, I hate the elites. I hate parties, okay? I don't have book parties or anything like that, and so on and so on. You know, and people, I think that people, you know,

they want success and they want material, you know, advantages and so on. And they don't, it's really, being a writer is just gutwork, okay, and being a teacher. And say, that's what's what's in Sontex. 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, you know, luminary, a big giant derigible luminary the whole life, like floating above the continents. Here's Susan Sontag, the dirigible, whoo, where she is, and so, all right? So nothing that she said had made any sense, actually, over time, okay, eventually, okay? And she loved to hold court at parties.

That's notorious, again, so people who remember her so, She was so brilliant why I saw her at this dinner party. Everyone was in awe. Well, people who tried to go to dinner parties to impress other people, it is such BS. And so Susan Sontag, over time, her work got less and less meaningful. Even though people worship at the shrine, you know, Sontag, you know, you try to quote her on anything. What can you quote her on? Okay, you know, there's nothing even quote her on is the thing that should regret.

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 king. cancer of history. That's the one she retracted finally. When she got cancer, maybe that she realized how horrible that was. She thought that was so hard. Now she realized and now I realized I shouldn't have said that. Okay. And so on. That's the only thing that you can quote her on. She's not quotable, okay, because there's all this sleight of hand that she's doing. She's taking material

that she borrows from others, you know, or places that she's been personally at a time when downtown New York was very exciting. So it basically was a kind of transcription of her everyday life. I think the best thing she did probably was, for me, like 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,

she only didn't stay in like that, it was 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, you know, as I've been enough, you know, for 40 years, I mean, there's not, you know, the kids don't care. I mean, the kids have no idea that I write books. I mean, so, and 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, you know, my father is like a fan of yours and so on. And so on. And so I said, oh, really? Oh, that's so nice.

Okay. And so on. All right. I'll say. But, you know, I don't want to do it. So the point is, all these professors at Harvard and Princeton and Yale, they're like, you know, they're like, you know, they're, they're. They have the graduate students are paying court to them because they need letters or recommendation. Hello.

They don't want something from you and so on. All right. So they're so used. They're so grand and so on. I go in and it's like, you know, we need, there more chairs. Okay. What's the wrong? You know, the curtain is right.

And so on. And so I'm always in touch with the janitors and so on and so on. Infrastructure, condition of the buildings. I deal with everyday life. Okay. 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, 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, it 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. Or Wallace Stevens, you know,

kept going to the office, you know, the insurance company, and so on, you know, 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, 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 like withdrawing from the world to be a writer, I think is a terrible mistake. Also, just big, I mean, I, number one thing is constantly observing. I mean, my whole life, I'm constantly jot, jot things down.

Constantly. Just jot, jot, jot, I'll have an idea, you know. I'm cooking, okay, and I'll have an idea. Okay, well, what? And so I have like a lot of pieces of paper with, like, tomato sauce, you know, on them or whatever. And I transfer these to cards or I transfer 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.

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 a Yale graduate school that I lost a great huge credibility with the professors because of my endorsement of not only film, okay, but Hollywood. Okay, when Hollywood, Hollywood was considered crass entertainment and so on. And now, you know, the media studies came in, you know, very strongly, you know, after that, although highly theoretical, not the way I teach media studies. But I also believe in following your own instinct and intuition, okay? Like there's something meaningful here. You don't know what it is, okay, but you just keep it kind of on the back burner. Okay, so that's basically how I work is like, is this the constant observation? There's nothing.

And also, like, I try to tell my students, I mean, they never get the message. it's really, okay? But I always, what I try to say to them is that nothing is boring. That's not like, nothing is boring, okay? All right, if you're bored, you're boring, okay? All right, so I'm like, okay. And then wherever you are, it's like, you know, it's exhausting, it's like frustrating. I don't know why. It's like, I don't know, the plane has been canceled and whatever. So, you know, no, all right, after you get over your fury, okay, you realize, okay, what opportunity is there here to, 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 a part of your developing system. So it's someone who, oh, another thing I have to say, anyone interested in ideas, do not read any of the, you know, the current books that are considered being like Pierre Burd-Dude, all that stuff. Oh my God, it's like, so, I completely, it's something boring. Okay, I believe in the library, the library is my shrine. It was my shrine when I was researching Emily 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 learned more from old commentators. So James George Fraser, the Golden Bough, which was considered completely gone but had a huge impact on the wasteland and other big works of modernism. But I've learned a great deal from the commentaries of the past, the historians of the past. Now, when I did, when I did glittering images, okay, the actual, you know, nullity of current scholarship became very exposed to me.

Of course, I already knew about it. But I really saw, I really got, you know, objective proof of it. Each artwork that I chose, like there's a 29 chapter in it, each artwork that I chose, I did a full research of what had been said about that particular artwork, okay? And so I began chronologically. I would work if it was like an older work from the late 19th century moving through the, the decades, you know, to the present, okay? And so for each of those, so there, you real, oh my God, could you see it? Could you see the fall in the quality of, you know, of scholarship, okay, in our time, in that from the 1980s on, okay, I would move from these incredibly

erudite and wonderful sentences and just, you know, beautiful stylists about our, late 19th century, moving into the 20th century, it's still, still solid, into about the 60s, okay? And then the 70s is kind of the holding area. And then all of a sudden comes the 80s, 90s, 20s. Oh, these people are pygmies. Pygmies, the people at the elite schools. And, you know, oh, 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 two-semester course. It would begin with Kvar and then move in two semesters down to modernism. Okay. Magnificent structure. now abandoned, you know, wholesale, except when students have protests

like at Smith. My sister is a graduate of Smith and was part of the protest that got the survey restored. But people no longer, graduate students in our heart history and art historians no longer have the ability 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 discussion. We have two mics. I will alternate mics. We start here. Feel free to identify yourself, if you would like. Hi, my name is Shana Davidson. Oh, hello. You mentioned Smith. I saw you speak at Smith or Mount Holyoke in 1993. Okay.

And it was fascinating to compare that to this because there was a great deal of booing and hissing at Smith. But it was eye-opening to me, you know, being kind of steeped in this. I am going to wrap up. Being steeped in this, you know, 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 don't, I don't remember teaching 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, like, all these, you know, 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 made my 40s, who had spent 20 years writing a book that had been rejected and finally was published while Yale Press, a book on the whole history of the Western civilization. And this is the treatment that I got, okay, at Smith College. This is one of the bastions of the Ivy League,

or not of the Ivy League, but of the Seven Sisters, one of the most noble names in the history of modern women's education. I mean, isn't it, that shows you, okay, how ideology really is very distorting. But, well, feminism, you know, it's like, is going through phases. I mean, I call myself a feminist, absolutely. I simply belong to a dissonant 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 silence 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, you know,

foregrounding of sexual themes and so on, okay, it allowed us to break through the over-control by the Steinem and Polibur, okay? I'll take another question, but you'll still get to say more. Okay, but the problem is, okay, the problem is right now, okay, that a whole younger generation, has risen up and it's now Steinem has returned.

Okay, she's like a bad penny. She's back again. So we have to, I mean, I feel like I'm back to square one. Next question, here. I'm sorry we can't get on, but I got. All right, thanks for coming. So you mentioned your incident with Catherine De Nouve, and you also talked about that in 1995 in Playboy,

you know, 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, that towering stature. Yeah. So, you know, you also mentioned in that interview that obsession and genius are pretty much the same thing. So where would you draw the line between, you know, 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 thing. the Roy Hinkley kind, and just that respectful distance. I mean, do you stifle creativity with respect for, you know, who this person is in 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, you know, I've, working in art schools also my entire career. So I know I have dancers in my class, I've actors in my class, and I commit to understand the difference between the fallible, you know, real self, the mundane real self, okay, and the artistic self suddenly emerges within what I call the, you know, the Teminoss, okay, which is the, you know, the sacred precinct that I regard as arch, okay, and therefore when I encountered Catherine Duned by accident that day, I was at the peak of my obsession with her. It really almost ruined my interest in her, okay?

Because it's like, oh my God, it's like, you know, it's not the real Catherine Nouve that I was so intent on. It was this magical creation that is a result of her talent, but also of, you know, of the director's own magical skills and so on. Oh, yes, Elizabeth Taylor, I have 50099 pictures, yes. People often say what's odd about that is not the number, but I had counted them, okay? So, all right.

But, yes, she, oh, she represented to me 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? Here's Elizabeth Taylor as a high-class call girl. Oh, my God. And I had Jean-Marot, you know, in Monica Vidi, and, you know, Inouca Me,

and there were so many, Melita Mercurie, 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 and 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, undope most of the time, that's why she looks so sultry. Okay, but, you know, Rihanna's Instagrams are to me,

like a work of art. That's all, the only thing I'm following right now, I have to say, that's equal in importance, is Rihanna, you know, floating from one, from one nightclub to another, okay, and yet, yet some other fashionable thing. All right, but back to your question. Wait, wait, wait, did I answer? I don't know if I answered. I'm not sure. It's good. I'm not sure. Oh, David Bowie. David Bowie. Okay. All right. Now, Bowie, you know, I wrote this, you know, this, I wrote this essay, you know, called Theater Agender. David Bowie at the climax of the sexual revolution. I wrote it for the Victorian Albert exhibition catalog for the costume show that they did, and it's 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 into my next essay collection. But with Bowie, I mean, see, Bowie is like different than DeNova. I mean, Bowie is truly like a creative artist. I mean, whereas DeNuve 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, I knocked out all over again, okay, at the enormity of what he achieved. And also, 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, you know, about that. And it appears to be that he did tell the VNA to invite. Yeah, so that's, that time, people don't know,

what you're talking about is where it was like earlier in the 1990s, and a message came to my publisher to the public 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, ha, ha, ha. I said, that's ridiculous. I said, oh, boy, it's just some fan trying to get it.

So on. And they said, no, David Bowie, the claim really wants your phone number. It's that the way David Bowie gets in touch with me when he wants your phone number. So I laughed and all that. And I didn't believe it. And it was also shadowy. I mean, it's like, and it only, only now, only when I, actually, after I did the research for this attorney 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 company, you know, 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 it, I made a mistake. 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, you know, but that's okay. I mean, I really don't, I think there should be a distance, okay, with greater, a sense of respect and reserve with greater artists. Next question. Hi. Hi.

So, I'm Kelly Ferguson. Oh, hi. Hi. I'm a master's economic student here at George Mason. Okay. And I'm told today is equal payday. So that makes the question I want to ask you about pay disparity, even more relevant, I guess. I'm 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 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, the way my own party, the Democratic Party is using this rubric of, you know, of equal pay for women as if this has not been a matter of law ever since the, you know, the, you know, presidency of JFK, for heaven's sakes. I mean, there may be cases, you know,

about rages, 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 at 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. about this issue, when in fact, if women are earning 72 cents or 75 cents on the dollar, okay, it's not that, it's not, but for the same job, okay, that's, this is the lie that's being

told. Women are not being, 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. as opposed to the around the clock, seven days a week, night thing, okay, that maybe high. For example, women tend to shy away from commission sales, 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, are making choices. They would prefer to be closer to their children. So, yes, these disparities are ultimately based in biological differences. So now, you know, Susan Faludi and these other, you know, the feminists of the Steinem kind of, you know, the credo, they have one answer, okay? Men must do more, okay? That's their answer. Men must do more. And, you know, Susan Faludi has never had a child, okay?

So it has absolutely no idea, all right? And, you know, and I, you know, what I feel is that is that there is a tie. There is an, you know, what can I was say? ineffable, indefinable, biological tie, okay, 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, I think 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, here to my husband. You know, you are equally, equally fit, okay, to be able to nurture this month, a month old, three 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 going on. The child, an infant doesn't want the father, hello, okay?

The infant wants the mother. You want the nice, kushy, the smell is the mother, okay? Who is this person coming closer? That is, I mean, go away. It was like, I mean, Freud talked about that. It's like this distraction comes in, the father. Get out, okay, remember, that's why, this is why Freud said every child wants,

you know, wants to kill the father and marry the mother, okay, et cetera, et cetera, right? They 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 observation is that women, and this is because my, I have a, you know, I have a child who I'm 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, is that the minute there are children, the children are born, The woman, it's a 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 one 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 sheep and stuff. But to ask men to do more, okay? Seems to me to ask them to do something, they are not biologically prepared to do. Our next question is, Romaine.

Sorry, that was interesting. I wanted to go on, but it's right. Yes. All right. I'd just like to preface my question by saying that as a whirlwind, Job's God has nothing on you. Oh.

Oh, nice, thank you. My question is, do you ever any concern that modern literature and eventually all the classics will have to be rewritten so that in order to be understood, every fifth 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 write down,

I mean, always write down any word I don't know. And what 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. And the email format now in text, okay, is very truncated. And so, and that's, it's why the writing on the web has also degenerated horribly. You know, the writing for blogs is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

No one has, it used to be with newspapers and magazines. There was a space limit, okay? And that imposed a real, you know, kind of, you know, a 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, and I'm curious to know if you think we're close to basically achieving the goals that were set out, or if the feminist 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 that sort of the job has been done. You have one minute, 30 seconds to answer this question? Well, I'm an equal opportunity feminist, by which I believe that, you know, all obstacles, the women's advance

and the political and professional realms should be removed. But what I'm also saying is that there are huge areas of human life, okay, that are not political. They have to do with our private, spiritual natures, okay? And that is a place where legislation will always be, you know, helpless and hopeless. and indeed intrusive.

So I think that, you know, I think that feminism has made enormous gains. I mean, you know, in terms of, you know, there was a time that women were totally dependent on father, on husbands, on brother, for their survival. Now women can be self-supporting, can live totally on their own. And it's part of this, you know, this whole Western world, powered by capitalism, that, you know, that our university curricula are now habitually always demeaning. 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 to 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 speech, you know, for like tens of thousands of years, okay, where, where mating occurred early, was early, okay, where you left your parents' house and, you know, and had your own household and your own, your own children, and, I mean, Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet, is 13 going on 14. You really already, she's ready for marriage. So in this, like, we have a very long, an naturally long period here, you know, before women can attain some sense of who they are as women, okay? So I think,

I think that that's, 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 the, um, this very mechanical system of the modern technological professional world that has emerged to replace the agrarian period, okay, when there were multi-generations living with each other and there were, and, and, and women had a natural sense of solidarity, okay, doing, being all together. There was the world of women and the world of men, okay, once, okay? They didn't have much much to do with each other once, okay?

All the problems have happened since we started to have to do with each other. Just to close. Stephen Pinker will be coming in October 24th. This summer we'll have Cass Sunstein, not yet scheduled. Camille, we thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.