A few weeks ago while listening to the radio at night (my custom since childhood), I picked up Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi being interviewed by Tavis Smiley on his public television show. What a contrast to Hillary's brittle, calculated self-consciousness and incoherent shifts of persona. Speaking of her family and marriage, Pelosi was simple, centered and warm. There was no pretension or overkill, simply a relaxed, resonant realism. Pelosi, with her low purr, has mastered both TV and radio -- which cannot be said for Hillary, who smiles and smiles but whose tight-wound, self-righteous attack voice always erupts and betrays her.
Why don't we have a stronger Democratic female candidate? I have repeatedly said that Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California should have been the first woman president. With all due respect to Salon's perspicacious Glenn Greenwald, whose hard-hitting columns on Feinstein as a Beltway politician have been must-reads, Feinstein's statewide and national popularity are mainly due to her unflappable performances on television as a shrewd, steady, articulate public servant, deeply informed about military matters. She handles and deflects media queries with silky ease. Exuding both authority and compassion, she has true gravitas -- a rare quality in women. Dianne Feinstein, not Hillary Clinton, has already created the paradigm for a female commander in chief.
The recent horrific wildfires in California set off a gratuitous series of maunderings (from Jamie Lee Curtis to Thomas Friedman) about human culpability in global warming, the new liberal theology. Man is evil! Natural disasters are escalating! The world is coming to an end!
Good lord, were all these people in a coma through the gigantic storms like Hurricane Camille in 1969? The destruction wrought by that Category 5 storm is chronicled in Philip D. Hearn's book, "Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast,
Hurricanes in the early 20th century were numerous and hugely destructive: For example, the 1926 Miami hurricane may have killed 800 people; the 1935 Florida Keys hurricane, a Category 5, killed more than 400 and was dramatized in the Humphrey Bogart film "Key Largo"; the Great New England hurricane of 1938 killed 600. The latter storm hit Long Island and the New England coastline with a 12- to 16-foot storm surge and catastrophically flooded downtown Providence, R.I. Among the large beachfront homes completely swept away was Katharine Hepburn's family house in Old Saybrook, Conn. Hepburn barely escaped with her life. All that was left was the bathtub and some family silver buried in the sand.
This facile attribution of climate change to human agency is an act of hubris. Good stewardship of the environment is an ethical imperative for every nation. But breast-beating hysteria merely betrays impious tunnel vision. Thousands of factors, minute and grand, are at work in cyclic climate change, whose long-term outcomes we cannot possibly predict. Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity.
Meanwhile, here's someone with my mystic view of nature's stormy operations: It's the phenomenal guitar wizard Stevie Ray Vaughan (who tragically died in a helicopter crash in 1990), performing in Melbourne, Australia. Try to ignore the bumptious host and his pink pal, and listen to the dialogue between Vaughan's fractured, fibrous, undulating guitar line and his tormented lyrics, with their ominous imagery of rolling clouds: "It's flooding down in Texas/ All the telephone lines are down..."
Norman Mailer's extensive obituaries this past week could not disguise the fact that his enormous fame was decades in the past and that very few young people (outside the writing community) had ever heard his name. Mailer was certainly a major player when I was in college and grad school. I didn't care about his novels -- I don't care about any novels published after World War II (Tennessee Williams is my main man) -- but I was impressed by Mailer's visionary and sometimes hallucinatory first-person journalism. And I was directly inspired by his eclectic "Advertisements for Myself" (1959), which I took as a blueprint after my first books were attacked by the feminist establishment in the 1990s.
Mailer's "The Prisoner of Sex" (the original 1971 Harper's essay, not the book) was an important statement about men's sexual fears and desires. His jousting with Germaine Greer at the notorious Town Hall debate in New York that same year was a pivotal moment in the sex wars. I loved Greer and still do. And I also thought Jill Johnston (who disrupted the debate with lesbo stunts) was a cutting-edge thinker: I was devouring her Village Voice columns, which had evolved from dance reportage into provocative cultural commentary.
Feminism would have been far stronger had it been able to absorb Mailer's arguments about sex. If my own system seemed heterodox for so long, it's because I appear to have been one of the few feminists who could appreciate and integrate all three thinkers -- Mailer, Greer and Johnston. I'm sorry that Mailer, presumably cowed or pussy-whipped, abandoned the gender field. It would take Madonna, thanks to her influence on a generation of dissident young women, to bring authentically Dionysian '60s feminism back from the dead. That pro-sex wing of feminism (to which I belong) has of course resoundingly triumphed, to the hissy consternation of the Puritans and the iconoclasts --those maleducated wordsmiths who don't know how to respond to or "read" erotic imagery.
Speaking of Madonna, one of the lousiest things Mailer ever wrote was his flimsy cover-story screed on her for Esquire in 1994. It was obvious Mailer knew absolutely nothing about Madonna and was just blowing smoke. I wonder if it's this debacle that Woody Hochswender, who had worked at Esquire, is describing in a startling letter following Roger Kimball's scathing Mailer critique, which is posted on that indispensable site, Arts & Letters Daily. Guess what -- Esquire's original proposal was for me to interview Madonna. Mailer was the sub!
Penthouse magazine had similarly tried to bring Madonna and me together, as had HBO, which proposed filming a "My Dinner with André" scenario of the two of us chatting in a restaurant. But Madonna, no conversationalist, always refused. When Newsweek asked her in a 1992 cover story whether she would like to meet me, she said, "First, I'd like to see her across the room and then I'd like to decide whether I want to approach her." (I said when I read it, "What is this, a sorority party?")
I attributed Madonna's skittishness at the time to her uncertainties about her education (she had dropped out of college after one semester to seek fame in New York). But nothing could be further from my respectful and indeed reverential attitude toward artists, particularly performing artists who must capitalize on their youth. The idea that Madonna somehow had to read "Sexual Personae
Next page: Ellen's meltdown; a play for the birds
