Anne Pierce writes for Pleine Peau in conjunction with Rewired about seeing Camille Paglia lecturing at the National Press Club with Frederic Madre who wrote for Rewired about his trip to Washington D.C. where all this happened. He did photographs too, for Pleine Peau. Anne and Frederic met on the net and subsequently wrote together for Wired and got carried away. Payment is shortly due, they say. and, hey, there is Tom Kelly!
My email is at least as popular as anything that I've ever written in html.
I wrote this email to my friend, Harvard intellectual and insane parachutist Tom Kelly, who wanted to go and see her (he said "Women and Leadership. Oooh, Ill bet she comes up with some zingers.") but he got stuck getting ready to leave for a meeting in Cambridge instead. So, later I wrote:
Me: "Hey ... there is a small chance that some of our
correspondence might go up with Frederic's narrative of the Camille Paglia's
show-on-ice. do you mind having your name there, as my pieds-du-couchons pen
pal? (f. fix the french spelling -- it's a bar in dc (it's pieds de cochon, anne.))
T: "Nope...sounds cool. How was she? I ended up packing and crashing...I AM
JEALOUS!"
Me: Let's see...she did mention that homosexuality has a lot to do with the
nuclear family and all its poverty. I think I've heard that weirdness from
her before.
T: I knew I should have been born into a rich family....
Me: There is more than one definition of "poverty," funny man. She said that
women with extended families used to have a great time, and child care was
*never* a problem in rural European life, laundry was fun. In fact, life in
rural Italy was a blast for women.
T: I bought a book called Uppity Women of the Middle Ages for Mari and it
talked about all the feminist people of the people - writers, artists, poets
-- and they were all nuns.
Me: She bemoaned being a short person. when someone announced that her new book,
out soon, was devoted to Hitchcock's movie "The Birds" i started to laugh
inappropriately. This is something I can't explain easily."
T: Chuckles bites the dust...
Me: She thinks your privileged harvard education was lousy. She is afraid you,
even though you went to Harvard, don't know enough about enough important
things to lead the country -- and of course you get to lead us, because you
went to Harvard.
T: Harvard was fine while I was there. Now I get a few very odd responses like
"YOU went to Harvard?" which doesn't sound good. I should try and keep my
cool quotient and reply that Bonnie Raitt did too.
Me: The list must be longer than that. She says you, too, suffer...like most
ex-eastern establishment students this day and age, since you didn't spend
enough time in the reference section of the library, where everything you
need to know is housed. Though somehow if she knew how much entertainment
gossip you know and digest so well, she could revise this impression of you
and the broadness of your thinking. I believe this, if only because she
embraced entertainment in her discussion just as she always does, zealously,
as though it had more to do with my life than I think it has. She did have
some interesting bits to say about sexual harrassment and that we should
embrace the idea that the workplace is by its very nature always a hostile
environment -- that's just the way things are, she says.
T: My communist friend would agree. However, does that mean it is also always
sexual? Yuck. Nothing going on here.
Me: She feels the pain of the corporate boss who has a photo of his wife in
a bikini on his desk and gets called to task for it. It kind of lets the guy
in the corner cubicle near the boiler-room with 2,000 pin-ups in his
surrounding space off the (meat) hook, too. Hm, she teaches with a timeline.
She wants Ginger Spice to stay in the band. The trouble with girl groups is,
everybody wants to be a diva and um, women should really study military
history. Most present-day females who stand out in politics are too short,
too, which doesn't help. We need to learn to take 'em out, so we can be
President, too.
T: Wow...your summary is even SOUNDING like Camille.
Me: Time to roll your eyes, like the biographer in the movie Watermelon
Woman. She said a lot of guys want mothers and this is a shame. Harvard is
pushing out geeks who are sort of wimpy, i think of both sexes, she didn't
discriminate. Oh, she was flanked by 2 versions of some kind of camille
follower, i guess -- the sort of tough graying older OBOS (Our Bodies/Ourselves)
rad political female person who is, you guessed, graced with the hands she loves
to hate, and the lovely rosy linen jacketed youngish exec woman-creature who pays
vivid attention -- she obviously attracts all kinds of women to help her with her
work, that's interesting. The audience was made up of hungry budgeting grad students
with tatoos and nose studs who were understandably impressed with the incredible
desserts and free wine, some hill types, who were maybe hopeful journalists or new
interns -- you know, in suits but with the self-conscious, gentle but awkward sort
of gestures and head movements that would make you think they might be fifteen and
waiting for horsebackriding lessons if they weren't there in those suits and
blocky-heeled shoes--she made lots of them laugh, often, with her mixed-up logic.
Her own hands are more elegant than meaty.
T: I never tried for style younger...I was always BEHIND...am still catching
up. Not old exactly...just like WHO was that.
Me: She answered questions as though she actually likes people, & this impressed
me a bit, i wasn't expecting it. Frederic, who sat on the other side of me,
thought she was conservative, which is true. He took pictures of her and maybe
some women in the audience -- think National Velvet, and you get the idea.
T: I told you I saw her debate Arianna Hutchinson and Arianna wiped the floor
with Camille. It was wild. AND I read after that Camille loved the fact
that she was flattened and came to like Arianna as a result. Sorry I missed it.
Me: Good, healthy ego.I've been typing all day except for dance class and i
need to sleep now. see you.
Tom: I picture choreography like typing or using the typing of keys,,,maybe
progressing from an old typewriter to a keyboard.