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She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; . . . and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary .... The fancy of a perpetual life... is an old one .... Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.
WALTER PATER, The Renaissance
"Ever since I joined, I've had this silly grin on my face." Mona Lisa as graphic header of the online column "Ask Camille" BY now surely the furor over Camille Paglia might be put behind us. Seven years after the publication of Sexual Personae turned an obscure humanities professor into a maverick general in the culture wars, some of the cover stories have died down, but her skirmishes are only more widespread. A lot of muscle has gone into lopping off her Hydra heads, to no avail; she has only multiplied into an icon as ubiquitous and exhausted as the Mona Lisa. As she herself remarks, "I have become a sexual persona, apart from my ideas, at a moment when both feminism and academe are in flux. I seem to have passed into Pop Art" (Vamps and Tramps xxv). Browsing the Web, you sense that she has become a sort of homiletic software. "The Camille Paglia Checklist" (updated September 1997) offers a "Pagliameter," a checklist to prove a particular celebrity interviewee is the real Paglia:
Is she talking about herself? Does she contrast something Judeo-Christian with
something pagan?
Something Apollonian and something Dionysian?
Hardcore porn is great?
Mainstream feminism sucks?
Foucault's an overvalued fake?
Art is Do?
This is an apt tally of her hornblasts through the noise of the traffic-and what an odd and suggestive mix it is. More subtly, there is something of a global Pagliameter calibrating the rituals of human sacrifice in celebrity culture. Recently, while the most active discussion list of Pagliana, Paglia-L, was carrying threads on the death of Princess Diana, the online advice column "Ask Camille" was displaying Paglia's pronouncements on the murder of...