Letters to the Editor
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More Arts, Less Politics
I'm the guy who sent in the letter about the Met's collection. I love Paglia's published writings, for the most part (except, maybe, some of what she had to say about rape back in the day...she crosses the line there, in my opinion, out of ignorance masquerading as knowledge: her ideas about rape come from books and paintings.) I didn't read her first salon column previously, so I'm not sure whether it was predominantly political then. But it seems to me that Salon has now seriously miscast her, or allowed her to miscast herself, as a political talking-head. It just seems obvious that, in that role, she isn't going to be able to contribute much of lasting value or impact.
I would encourage her, and the editors that work with her, to explore ways of bringing more arts and culture coverage into the column. For example, I love the iconic, anthropological but very passionate way Camille writes about Elizabeth Taylor and several other film stars in some of her essays, and her monograph on Hitchcock's The Birds is divine. Camille, the world may need your skills as a film critic and historian of cultural iconography more than as a political commentator. And when you said in your last column that Bush and Cheney had a vampiric relationship, you might want to clue your less obsessed readers into the fact that vampirism is a special part of the critical vocabulary you elaborated in Sexual Personae (Bush as Christabel!?), not just a cheap trick. This kind of integrated balance of culture, art, politics, and media is closer to who you are as a thinker and writer, and since no one else is doing that and you do it so naturally, why swim against the current, to become something you're not?