There's a new piece in Salon, an interview with Camille Paglia. Paglia, you'll remember, is the quasi-liberal, quasi-academic answer to Rush Limbaugh, kind of loud, kind of obnoxious, more often correct than her critics are comfortable admitting, etc.
Anyhow, she makes for entertaining copy, and this interview is no exception. At one point, she takes on weblogs:
Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There's a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one's mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there's no editing -- it's free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn't masturbation -- you've got to self-edit.
I'm going to leave this alone, except to note the overwhelming sense of irony that reading it gave me. And then,
No major figure has emerged yet from the blogs
There's more, but I'll leave it to someone else. People on the Media Ecology Association listserv were chirping about Paglia a couple of months ago, when she mentioned the MEA on CNN. Fact of the matter is, however, that she's got no business whatsoever talking about this stuff. Her thoughts are overwhelmingly preoccupied with celebrity, with larger-than-life media figures (it's no accident that the bulk of her interview deals with presidential candidates, Limbaugh, Madonna, Cher, etc.). The kind of archetypal media celebs that Paglia admires (and indeed, wants to become) are the products of the mass mediapoly. They aren't going to come out of weblogs, and so, she has no interest in that phenomenon. She's got no sense whatsoever of the possibility that there are media models beyond the ones she has spent (and built) her career gushing over. Here's a little more from the interview:
Why else should anyone read them? And the Web in my view is a visual medium -- I don't log on to be trapped on a muddy page crammed with indigestible prose.
"In my view?" How about in the view of everyone who's written about the Web in the past ten years? And what has Paglia been doing to avoid trapping others on muddy pages crammed with indigestible prose? Oh yeah, she's "completing a book about poetry and a new collection of her essays."
Good luck with that.
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