Books like Vamps & Tramps: New Essays

Ah, ma bon Camille...I stumbled across this title when I was reading other reviews on this site and I was charmed to find that I could glimpse, grunt a bit, and quietly murmur in that way known to the freakishly bookish "I read that."It was in undergrad. Such an undergrad type of book. Her style is all meathooks and dynamite. Not to say it wasn't salient- I still shudder and remove myself from engaging with the more dense and sci-fi sterile tomes of Frenchified Filosophy- "gunk" was the fun and bracing and refreshingly colloqial term she used. I have always enjoyed her insouciance. She's a whip-smart cultural critic when she's not trying to be uber edgy, provacative, obsterperously outrageous. It was exciting to read back when I was 18 or so, on a very radical, if solicitous and self-righteous campus, just coming into some buildungsroman awareness of the political myself, after painfully shedding religious terpitude. Paglia was the jolting breath of life to me, at that tender age when sex is more in the head than anywhere else. And it was a lot of fun, energizing indeed, to read her one woman kulturkampf against the squares and the prudes and the persnickities. She gave me a jolt of sugary, near-lucidating brain energy, maybe a really cold fanta for the burgeoning belletrist. It made me want to at least dream of being a provocative intellectual myself one day (one day! one day!) and stun the moneyed, literate booboise by talking about orgasms, Balzac, Bergman, and Led Zeppelin on a daytime talk show. I used to have a crush on her. Now she's more like a kooky old aunt I remember hanging out with before I left for summer camp. When I found out she was in Yale in the 70's in Bloom's class I asked a teacher I knew could be placed in the same milieu if he knew of her at all and he said with a certain kind of poky nonchalance that he did- he sat next to her in class, in fact. Wow. What was she like?"Wimpy little kissass."