As for the interview, Camille says, when asked "How did you learn to write?":
Like a medieval monk, I laboriously copied out passages that I admired from books and articles — I filled notebooks like that in college. And I made word lists to study later. Old-style bound dictionaries contained intricate etymologies that proved crucial to my mastery of English, one of the world’s richest languages.
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9 comments:
Paglia does have some great lines in reserve. I especially like when she let Tammany Hillary have it while getting in a shot at her "cornpone husband."
Now that's a great word. I wish I had one that good saved up in the ammunition depot.
Also, she said it with great contempt, as I recall. Nothing beats letting loose an insult that obscure and derogatory, in a tone that snide.
It compels the reader to go to some lengths educating himself, to better understand just how descriptively wretched the object of such a slur happened to be.
"...my ambition was to establish the legitimacy of the genre now widely accepted as creative nonfiction."
Same with the Supreme Court. It's an art form that plays well.
Well, I have to admit that if Post Structuralism means "It's turtles all the way down" I don't know how anybody can argue with its essential truth, even Paglia.
I'll say one thing about Paglia. A bisexual radical feminist who says men should get it up and women should get over it can't be all bad.
PS: I'm not Laslo
Clinton is cornpone like Paul McCartney or Andy Griffith though. It's an 'aw shucks' act used as a decoy for those irritated by such things.
(She may still resent that the Lewinsky situation didn't live up to her Butterfield 8 fantasies of stylish, discrete mistresses in zippy sports cars. That might be because it happened in real life and so hurt real people, not on the archetypal level of the brain.)
Really interesting about the monk method of learning. Iirc correctly Hunter Thompson did something very similar, transcribing The Great Gatsby by typewriter to get the feel of writing a great novel.
Derp nailed it.
Your blogging style has become more detached in the past ten years.
Thanks TMP, but to take Paglia's position for a minute, somebody in the other thread said that welders put things together and philosophers take things apart. So I can see her point that post structuralism is paralyzing to an artist who wishes to reach people on a deep level. Really, what's the point? Better to ignore the vast emptiness of the universe and pretend it's all about us and our emotions on this speck on a speck.
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