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to you both, Camille and Joan, for your guts and grace as writers for Salon.
Speaking for myself, and I suspect for others, I would not be able to take the yapping adolescent-like reactions you get from a handful of readers in this letters section. (I really don’t understand the response “I’m going to cancel my subscription if you keep publishing a certain author”—how narcissistic, and it seems especially inappropriate when the author under personal attack is someone whom I’m guessing gets the most clicks and letters per article on your site, connects to a lot of OTHER readers, and whom many of us respect as one of Salon’s earliest contributors, whether she riles us up or not.)
I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Edwards (as well as her husband, Obama and Hillary), and I loved Elizabeth’s willingness to take on Ann Coulter directly. To me, her actions modeled the approach I wish more schools adopted in response to bullies; instead of catering to them, or passive-aggressively whining about them, just calling them out. But I also see how it takes a lot of maturity not to join the fray when the bullies are being publicly sadistic, whether those bullies are on air or in the Salon letters section. I applaud Camille and Joan both for the way you stay above the fray even as you stay engaged with us all.
It makes sense to me that in this current postmodernist/ post-structuralist time, when nothing is sacred and everything begs to be deconstructed (perhaps one of the most democratic, broadly creative and playful of critical eras?), Paglia’s structuralism will feel out of place to many readers. My reading of Paglia over the last 20 years is that in her worship of nature and art, she finds much larger connections than most of the rest of us do, especially those of us who have rejected religion. But why should we be threatened by her voice? My sense is that she's true to her generation; she’s true to her long-held passions; she’s true to her independent view of the world, without being locked to it. I suspect she’ll be open to exploring modern film makers and musicians in response to some of the suggestions in these letters. In the meantime, I continue to be sincerely grateful for the ways she continues to express her ways of seeing the world and to challenge my own perceptions.
From a reader who remembers what it was like to be captivated by Northrop Frye before having a clue who Derrida was...
