Or so I felt like singing.
"Let's get it crunk, we gon' have fun / Up on in this dancery..."
No, really. I did a little dance. Ooh. Ahh. Spin. Repeat.
There's still a hole in my soul from Spy magazine (check out the infamous nude Arnold Schwarzenegger) having taken a fall, where Camille Paglia (whom I wrote about not too long ago) sliced and diced history, literature, politics, and pop culture in her "Ask Camille" columns on a level that I've never seen paralleled.
I try to be her, although I am inevitably and perpetually doomed to failure. But we gotta have role models, right?
A "libertarian Democrat" who voted for Nader but likes to listen to Rush Limbaugh, who is a lesbian feminist from the academy yet called Susan Faludi a "whiny little mouse" (ouch!), who debuted as a columnist in the issue of my beloved Spy that infamously featured the more dour Clinton's head atop a dominatrix's body – oh, and that's just the beginning.
Why do I celebrate her return?
Because she's one of the most gifted writers I've ever encountered, mixing elitist academic prose with street slang and pop culture panache. It's what I default to, although she does a far better job than I could ever hope to do.
Because she's not predictable, nor is she a wannabe politico – she calls 'em as she sees 'em, and skewers everybody in need of being skewered, regardless of whether they wear red or blue on their sleeve.
Because she realizes that the liberal "left" tends to be as boorish, elitist, and dogmatic as the radical "right" tends to be morally bereft, pendantic, and narrow-mindedly "un-American" as either side would never admit.
Because she has a killer sense of humor that stops at just short of outrageous, in the original sense of the word.
And all the while, she's just so fucking obviously smarter than everybody else who would dare call her out for a match of dissing and dismissing.
She's back as a regular columnist for Salon.com, from her original stint on that news and culture site back in 1995.
For those in the expat blogosphere who want, like me, to keep in touch while actually using some of the brain cells and neural connections left on hold by a lot of the work many of us are forced to do in Korea, her writing is one refreshing way to help do that.
I wouldn't be surprised if you are excited, impressed, suspicious, and possibly even offended by what she writes; I like that. Sort of like a fine wine hitting all the taste buds, she covers a lot of interesting bases.
Time to dance again. Ooh. Yeah!
