Interview Roundup: The All Camille Paglia Edition

Why? Because there's enough interviews promoting Break, Blow, Burn to quote from, that's why...some bits stand out in a nice way, some in a glaring way, and I'm just going to throw them all together and let you sort them out. I'd recommend following through and reading the full interviews, too, if you're up to it.

• In the California Literary Review: "The terrible tsunami waves that swept through the Indian Ocean in December provided but another example of human impotence in the face of natural power.  I have repeatedly written about the illusions we must live under in civilization.  The slightest tremor of the earth's crust can turn everything to ruin--something I realized as an adolescent in my study of archaeology."

• From Bookslut: "Third-rate Yeats is what I found in [Seamus] Heaney. That guy is a coward. He has never written a poem that addresses, passionately, or engages with, his own country's terrible political state, the cataclysms for centuries. People praise him as if he is a bold speaker? He's not a bold speaker."

• From Salon: "Before me, only poli-sci or history professors would write Op-Ed pieces. You just didn't do that if you were in humanities. In the early '90s, some Harvard woman snob actually said to a reporter about me: 'Oh, we don't consider anyone serious who writes articles for the newspaper.' That's where things were back then. They all tried to write books directed toward a general audience, and none really succeeded until Stephen Greenblatt's book on Shakespeare--which as far as I'm concerned is ultimately a product of my pressure on the profession in the early '90s, when I called for literary critics to address the general audience."

  (She adds, "As someone who teaches Shakespeare, however, I don't think it's a very good book...Greenblatt's Shakespeare isn't one I recognize from my own study of the plays." This isn't especially surprising, given that earlier in the interview she displays a blatant inability to detect when Gawker's Intern Alexis is being ironic.)

• From Newsday, on Paul Blackburn's "The Once Over" (MP3): "This to me is a classic poem of my time. There's a mysterious girl in a beautiful dress, and everyone is staring at her. That's it. That's the entire thing. It's so wonderful, the way he captures that moment, and that's the purpose of reading poetry--which is that it teaches you to notice what other people don't notice. To find significance in the insignificant."