The Revolt of the Pendulum

The Revolt of the Pendulum by Clive James Page B

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Authors: Clive James
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until
everybody is sexually functional would be a long time to hold your breath.
    Nor does Paglia’s useful conviction that feminism, as an ideology, is as debilitating for individual responsibility as any other ideology make it true that women are now out of the woods.
Only the misapprehension that she can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in Inside Deep Throat , to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was ‘an
epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality’. On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can’t be
convincing even when they masturbate.
    But all these posturings by the madly glamorous Paglia happen only because, in the electrified frenzy of the epochal moment, she forgets that the light-storm of publicity makes her part of the
world of images. In her mind, if not yet in her more excitable membranes, she knows better than to mistake that world for the real one. This book on poetry is aimed at a generation of young people
who, knowing nothing except images, are cut off from ‘the mother ship’ of culture. The mother ship was first mentioned in her 2002 lecture called ‘The Magic of Images’. In
the same lecture, she put down the marker that led to this book. ‘The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.’ She can say that again, and let’s hope she does,
in a longer edition of a book that shows her at her true worth. When you have proved that you can cut the mustard, it’s time to cut the malarkey.
    New York Times , March 27, 2005
    Postscript
    One way of summing up Camille Paglia would be to say that she looks like the classiest number in the bar until the fight breaks out. It isn’t that she doesn’t
watch her words: she watches them to make sure they are going the wrong way. One is forced to conclude that publicity is the sea in which she swims, beating it to a phosphorescent froth. But we
should not let her effulgence blind us to her importance. Break, Blow, Burn is an important book in a movement we should all favour: the movement to restore the ideal of the self-contained
poem to a superior position over the more marketable notion of poetry as a generalized and infinitely teachable commodity. I thought my review had unmistakably praised her for this initiative, so I
was quite stunned to find some of the American cultural bloggers accusing me of having done a knife-job. The noisiest bloggers are often the most stupid, and probably the worst you can say of
Camille Paglia is that she sometimes sounds as if she might like to hang out with them, always granted that hanging out is something they ever do. You would expect someone with so formidable a mind
to fight shy of petty quarrels. I can think of no contemporary cultural figure who would so benefit from being less available. She should stay in more.
     
    THE GUIDEBOOK DETECTIVES
    If you’ve spent a couple of years being unable to get past the opening chapter of one of the later novels of Henry James, it’s hard to resist the idea that there
might be a more easily enjoyable version of literature: a crime novel, for example. After all, quite a few literary masterpieces spend much of their turgid wordage being almost as contrived as any
crime novel you’ve ever raced through. On page thirteen of my edition of The Wings of the Dove , Kate Croy is waiting for her father to appear. ‘He had not at present come down
from his room, which she knew to be above the one they were in . . .’ But of course she knew that; knew it so well that she wouldn’t have to think about it; she is only thinking about
it so she can tell us. If a narrative is going to be as clumsy as that, can’t it have some guns?
    It’s been a long time since Sherlock Holmes cracked his first case, and by now every country in the world must have at least one fictional detective with half a dozen novels to his name.
Some countries

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