The Richard Nixon of the intellectual set, Camille Paglia thrives on negative attention. What her books and essays lack in rigor, they make up for in their blindered consistency, depicting a two-valued world: Camille's, and everybody else's.

One redeeming quality, which almost makes up for everything else: she not infrequently writes about or refers to music with a tone-deafness of almost breath-taking purity. But even such unintended comic relief does not excuse her manifold profound and unexamined bigotries.

Back to Millennial Culture-at-a-glance

Magellan's Log VI

Magellan's Log front page