Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton: Oh, Please

Salon.com staff writer Tracy Clark-Flory interviewed provocative lesbian thinker Camille Paglia by email, upon the paperback release of her book, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars.

Some choice excerpts include:

On the avant-garde: "As I argue in Glittering Images, there has been nothing genuinely avant-garde since Andy Warhol except for Robert Mapplethorpe's luminous homoerotic images of the sadomasochistic underground. Everything that calls itself avant-garde today is just a tedious imitation of earlier and far superior modernist art."

On pornography: "I continue to support and defend pornography, which I believe exposes the deepest, darkest truths about sexuality....Having said that, I must confess that I find very little of interest in too-formulaic contemporary pornography -- except for the always hot gay-male scenarios that one stumbles on in surfing the Web.

On Anthony Weiner: "The compulsion to exhibit and boast about one's penis is embarrassingly infantile -- the obvious residue of some squalid family psychodrama in childhood that is now being replayed in public."

On Hillary Clinton: "As a registered Democrat, I am praying for a credible presidential candidate to emerge from the younger tier of politicians in their late 40s.... It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton (born the same year as me) is our party's best chance. She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train... Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood."

On skinny white girls: "When have I ever criticized anyone's fetish? I am a libertarian. Go right ahead -- set up plastic figurines of 1950s-era moppets to bow down to in the privacy of your boudoir.... Meg Ryan -- the spitting image of all those perky counselors at my Girl Scout camp in the Adirondacks. Gwyneth Paltrow -- a simpering sorority queen with field-hockey-stick legs. I will leave you to your retro pursuits while I dash off to moon over multiracial Brazilian divas."

Read the complete interview here.