Letters to the Editor
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Where is Molly Ivins when we really need her?
"Vast oceans of swill" just about sums it up. Four pages to spout gossip-column trivia about candidates and to tell us that she thinks Ann Coulter is a "smart woman?" Ann Coulter is smart in the same degree that Paglia is a scholar. Coulter is forty-very-something mutton dressed as lamb impersonating a grade-school bully. It takes no intelligence to spout mindless abuse, but Paglia has built her career doing much the same with a more pretentious vocabulary.
Of course, the world is just dying to know all about her fascinating trip to Camden and her epiphany that trucks going in and out of a warehouse epitomize the glorious achievements of patriarchal culture. Um, most people I know discovered a fascination with cars and trucks at the age of 18 months, and are not still congratulating themselves for their brilliant insight decades later.
Time for Bill Maher to award this woman his "get over yourself" prize.
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Is she really that stupid?
I mean that seriously.
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A Lesson in Objectivity
Camille is dead on when she dicusses capitalism and the benefits that most groups, including leftists, have derived from it. I also agree that it is Darwinian, and people on the left would better serve their cause by focusing on actually achieving real results rather than the typical mental masturbation about social revolution.
I wish more people on both sides of the political spectrum would read and ponder her point of view. Her biting witt aside, Camille's writings are a true lesson in objectivity.
Todd Houck
Midland, Texas
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Deconstruction
I'd always thought Frankenstein's monster was rather Byronic. Poor ol' Doc Polidori -- his musings from that fetid summer yet again absconded with.
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@virgo1981
Does anyone other than me notice that the volume of responses generated by Camille's article proves precisely why she is still relevant?
Number of responses is not a good yardstick of relevancy, especially when most of them are the verbal equivalent of stomping out a burning bag of ca-ca.
If you want to see lots and lots of responses that are engaged and intelligently argumentative, go to Glenn Greenwald's column.
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Self-recognition?
As she rips Newt Gingrich a new one, Camille observes: "While he poses as a futurist, he has an unfocused mind that mistakes erratic connections for insight."
There's no indication of irony, so one would suspect this was not an epiphany for the good professor. Well, like a broken watch, she is capable of being right at least twice a day.
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Scott Rosenberg
Just want to make sure I'm clear on this.
Letter writer posts that someone should be shot: letter is deleted.
Debra Dickerson writes, despite her having ignored the case, that OJ should kill himself: published as main article.
Please stop publishing Dickerson and Paglia. Neither is worth the electrons. I don't read either any more and am only reading this letters page to see how many readers feel as I do about Paglia. Evidently, most! I'm a premium subscriber and fortunately, you still publish Conason, Greenwald, Kaufman, Traister and a few others. If it were all like Paglia and Dickerson, I'd bail entirely. I don't want to read hateful, right wingers pretending to be liberals. The constant repetition of "No really, I'm a liberal" from Paglia is nausiating.
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Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein
My belief that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein does not stem from my fear of challenging the status quo or my investment in some sort of identity politics. Like Chris, I believe Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein because I've read her other novels, which have far more in common with the style and tone of Frankenstein than do Percy Shelley's writings. See, for instance, Mary Shelley's very poetic and melancholy novella Matilda.
Percy Shelley wrote the Preface to Frankenstein, and even though it is unsigned and my students initially have no idea it was written by another author, I am constantly asked why the style of the preface is so radically different from Mary Shelley's own later introduction and from the novel itself.
And, yes, she was a teenager when she wrote the novel, but she was far from badly educated or inexperienced. Her parents were both philosophers; her childhood home was constantly being visited by literary greats; and her father encouraged her to read widely from his diverse library. At sixteen, she ran off with a married poet, traipsed about Europe with him and with friends like Lord Byron, read extensively, attended scientific demonstrations and lectures, had a baby who died, learned of the suicides of her half sister and of Percy's wife, got married, and had countless other experiences generally not available to your average teenager. See this fantastic U. Penn. website for a chronological list of her reading, and then call her a "badly educated teenager." http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/MShelley/bydates.html
Still, I'll happily read this book Paglia's recommending, if only to see whether or not the author makes a more rational argument than she does.
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CP is a lot like Coulter ...
in one fundamental way: she craves the spotlight. Coulter by being nasty, CP by pissing readers off with her increasingly daft reasoning and rambling prose. I have no doubt that CP is now basking in the maelstrom she's created even as we type. Salon can dump her or keep her: I don’t care. But I won't read her again. Nor will I contribute again to the furious responses her pieces tend to generate.
I must say though, the absurd image of pesky CP stalking after a work crew and picking through their cocoa beans is priceless... Oh, if only a 200-lb bag fell from the flat bed at precisely the right moment! Now that would be worth reading about.
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oh really now
can we get rid of this column? the ENDLESS self-referentiality is mind-numbing. yes, camille, ms. spears cut her hair because of you.
and, by the way, the term "wuss" is no less offensive than coulter's "faggot" if you consider the origins. neither is it more legitimate or less hateful to speak to coulter's "gender wierdness" - what is the message here? that you must conform to the societally constructed gender binary or keep a low profile to avoid being mocked. this should not be up for grabs. i am NO fan of ms. coulter, but to speak to her gender expression by way of insult is childish and anti-feminist. maturation seems in order. and maybe a good editor.