Camille Paglia writes for a living. This is, complete, unedited, her opening paragraph:
Shuddering, lurching and stumbling, the 2008 general election has finally, mercifully begun.
Mercifully shuddering?
For a year and a half, U.S. voters have been flogged like a prison gang through the nine circles of media hell.
Flogging … a prison gang? … through hell?
The two dazed survivors of the primary process, John McCain and Barack Obama, are now warily circling each other, looking for an opening even as they try to shed the already hardened public perception of their character and motivation.
Survivors (NOT of hell’s whipped prison gang) circling … while shedding? … a hard … perception?
And … I’m tripping. If you make it to the “tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms” part, please close the doors of perception behind you. I don’t want the cat to get out.
June 11, 2008 at 5:23 pm
My favorite is this, about talk radio:
It’s gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.
Huh-wha? Since when was talk radio informative and entertaining? Since when did they become hackneyed and repetitious? Overt character assassination is now a problem? And now suddenly its nakedly partisan nature is a hazard? I can’t stand Paglia sometimes.
June 11, 2008 at 5:52 pm
By that standard, my weekly shopping lists should be leather bound.
“In order to survive we steal cheat lie forge fred hide and deal
We are obscene lawless hideous dangerous dirty violent and young
But we should be together.”
J. Airplane
June 11, 2008 at 5:52 pm
Does the Editors read for a livin’? “Mercifully” is an adverb, modifying “begun.” Its only relationship to “shuddering” is the sharing of a sentence.
Not a great sentence, I agree. But if you’re going to chide someone for her grammar-and-usage crimes, for God’s sake, get it right yourself.
June 11, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Ugh. The relationship of “mercifully begun” and “shuddering” is not that they passed in the night, but that they are both telling us about the “2008 general election”. “Shuddering, it mercifully begins.” That is why they are in the same sentence, Jim. I realize it is hopeless to try to explain this to fans of Camille Paglia, but a sentence is not just a bunch of unconnected half-thoughts followed by a dot.
Also, if you are going to chide people for chiding people for grammar-and-usage crimes, get a new hobby.
June 11, 2008 at 6:45 pm
That doesn’t look like a Paglia excerpt at all; there’s no reference to Madonna or Sexual Personae.
June 11, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Good grief. Paglia has never had a coherent thought and obviously cannot write a coherent sentence. Can we please just move on and leave her to ferment in her psychedelic stew in private.
June 11, 2008 at 8:18 pm
That was terrible.
If you had a million Paglias chained to typewriters, you still wouldn’t be able to produce the abridged works of Wesley Willis, no matter how much time you have.
June 11, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Also, can I get a new avatar? Preferably something lemon-like?
June 11, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Fear not Norbizness, Madonna is referenced by name in the teaser.
June 11, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Shorter:
“Dear You,
I like to describe things in fun and often psychedelic ways!
Bye!
Camille
PS If you guys find my hooka put it in my lemony, gas passing, begins.”
June 11, 2008 at 8:53 pm
That was adverbially adjectivous.
June 11, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Flogging … a prison gang? … through hell?
Paglia has access to the suppressed cantos of the Divine Comedy. They are kept in the Vatican Library, and are not for the eyes of the likes of you.
June 12, 2008 at 3:46 am
Well, she needs a comma after mercifully (which isn’t really right, but in the same way that “hopefully” is usually used wrong, and nobody’s really going to say “It is to be hoped” just because it’s grammatically correct), but mostly it’s just seriously unfelicitous.
Do the Editors read for a living?
Oh, snap.
June 12, 2008 at 10:56 am
Jim, here’s how it might read if Camille wanted to write in English, instead of High Dreck:
After shuddering, lurching and stumbling, the 2008 general election has finally — and the for electorate, mercifully — begun.
Just trying to help! And to mock ol’ Pags!
June 12, 2008 at 1:11 pm
She’s channeling Yoda and Golum
June 12, 2008 at 2:40 pm
After shuddering, lurching and stumbling, Herr Doktor Bimler is finally — and for the Frau Doktorin, mercifully — out of bed.
June 12, 2008 at 11:56 pm
The other great oversight of Paglia’s is that she failed to mention that she is, in fact, the author of _Sexual Personae_.
June 13, 2008 at 7:23 am
Jay B: I know you were trying to help, but putting it into actual English doesn’t mean it makes any more sense.
June 13, 2008 at 11:48 am
“I realize it is hopeless to try to explain this to fans of Camille Paglia, but a sentence is not just a bunch of unconnected half-thoughts followed by a dot.”
Oh yeah?!? That’s what YOU say, wrote, typed, hacked, ground out on a linoleum fax ribbon, tattooed in the buttocks of that trolloped cunt in adverbial dishabille, sort of, kind of, this way, that… period.
June 14, 2008 at 7:50 am
“If the sulky bearded lady wasn’t biting the new president’s leg, the oafish carnival barker would be sending in the clowns to lure all the young ladies into back-of-the-tent sword-swallowing. It would be a seamy orgy of scheming and screwing.”
That’s Ms. Paglia. I made it past the tornado alley, but couldn’t bring myself to click “next page”…
June 14, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Sometimes?
This is exactly why I never read Paglia. It’s too painful for words (so to speak).
June 20, 2008 at 8:36 am
As a ’90s lesbian author who enjoys acting out minor grievances against overenthusiastic/humorless women’s studies types from the ’70s and still can’t accept that my one moment in the sun, when gullible reporters decided that some crazy lady talking about how Madonna was a radical artist was a fun quote factory, I deplore this attack on myself.
June 20, 2008 at 8:37 am
Goddamn, I mangled some grammar there. Fuck me blue.