Gee whiz, do I wish I had time today to give Camille Paglia, Philadelphia’s very own Village Idiot, the full Rittenhouse treatment her Salon.com interview truly deserves.

Pull quote:

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.

Those with a particular interest in musty books virtually defined by their endless streams of bad prose, lack of discipline, and horrific narcissism dressed up as scholarship might want to click here and here and here.

A final note: It came as no surprise that Paglia managed to fit in her most irritating, overused, and meaningless trademark phrase: “my 1960s generation.”

[Post-publication addendum (October 31): See also David Neiwert of Orcinus, “Nice Projection on Your Forehead, Lady,” where Neiwert astutely observes that Salon.com captured the very character of Paglia in the sub-headline tagged to the site’s interview with Philadelphia’s Village Idiot: “what a phony” . . . “the hair” . . . “a monster” . . . “delusional narcissist.” Do you think Salon did that on purpose? By the way, Neiwert’s “nice projection” line reminds me of one of the few things Howard Stern ever said that I found funny. It was in reference to either Celine Dion or Sarah Jessica Parker or perhaps both: “Why the long face?”]