Our favorite shark attack survivor, Paul De Gelder, a Sydney-based Navy diver (just now back to work, a year-and-a-half after his attack!), and nine other shark attack survivors are lobbying the UN for shark protection. Sharks! Why do we keep savagely and randomly attacking them on our beaches?

Lest we ever think we understand anything, we don’t. In this current era of environmental devastation, when the word “salmon” brings to mind tainted eggs and the disease-infested fish farms, rather than anything anybody would want to put in their mouth, the delicious, nutritious and very-much wild Sockeye variety of the species returned to Vancouver’s Fraser River in astounding numbers this year.

As Heather Pringle of the Last Word On Nothing reports:

“The sockeye salmon returned to the Fraser River in such vast numbers that fishery scientists could scarcely believe what was happening. In July, they predicted a run of 11.4 million salmon. Four weeks later, when the sockeye began massing at the mouth of the Fraser, they bumped up the estimate to 25 million.

Then, on September 1st, as the fish began their arduous journey upriver, researchers came up with a new figure. As many as 34 million fish, they calculated, had entered the river-the largest Fraser River run since 1913.”

That’s awesome! Specially considering how badly the numbers had been dwindling lately. Just last year, the run was a measly two million, “prompting the Canadian government to launch an official public inquiry into what had gone so terribly wrong.” So, phew. And the grizzly bears have got to be psyched, too. (Definitely watch that BBC clip.) But Pringle warns against celebrating too soon. For starters because no one knows why the salmon came back.

Here’s a theory: Some spiritual lines got crossed between the time in March when the Winneman Wintu tribe travelled to New Zealand to perform their “nur chonas winyupus,” or “middle water salmon dance,” to call salmon back to the McCloud River in Northern California, and the fish returned to the Fraser instead, some 2,000 miles up the Pacific Coast.

So, what we need is more middle-water salmon dancing, and better GPS microchips inserted into salmon brains. And soon there’ll be enough wild salmon jumping out of our rivers to shut down those nasty fish farms forever. Or at least until demon carp invade the territory and wipe all the native species off the map forever. For now though, it sure looks nice in Vancouver.

Camille Paglia’s attack on Lady Gaga in the Sunday Times begins with an attempted burnishing of her own rusted credentials: “Camille Paglia, America’s foremost cultural critic, demolishes an icon.” Who on earth-or at least who in America-would describe Paglia that way? Nobody! The introduction only underscores the irrelevance it was meant to forestall.

The full article, behind the paywall, only underwrites the reader’s initial doubts. There is a tired potted history of Hollywood vamps-Theda Bara (daughter of a Cincinnati tailor, Paglia reports!) and Clara Bow, “a madcap flapper”! Louise Brooks, Paglia tells us, “made landmark films of decadent eroticism”! Gosh thanks, Camille! Who knew? Also, Marilyn Monroe’s “influence endures around the globe.” It truly says this; it’s written like a high-school essay, and delivered in a tone of weary condescension.

Paglia’s Sexual Personae was first published twenty years ago, and since then the author does not appear to have offered us much beyond the news that she thought Madonna was very sexy. In 1990, the wild acclaim for Sexual Personae led people to suppose that Paglia would become a public intellectual of the rock-star stature of Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag or Bernard-Henri Lévy. That did not happen because Paglia is a nutcase who, among many other instances of self-promoting perversity, attacked Anita Hill, expressed contempt for Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf, Susan Faludi and many, many others, and went bonkers over Sarah Palin, commenting breathlessly, “We may be seeing the first woman president.” She also had something or other to say about some poems! Whatever. Paglia’s denunciation of Lady Gaga is about as perspicacious as her oeuvre since Sexual Personae might have led anyone to expect (plus, she still thinks Madonna was very sexy, “on fire”, “the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir”, etc.)

Lady Gaga is “in over her head with her avant-garde pretensions,” Paglia announces, going on to demonstrate her own total cluelessness as to what might constitute an avant-garde at this point. Like many another superannuated commenter on the modern scene, she has no problem deploring the Youth she makes no attempt to understand, despite that she lives “in the leafy suburbs of Philadelphia and have never moved to New York or Washington” because “as a cultural analyst, I want to remain in touch with the mainstream of American life.”

“Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions.” This nonsense calls to mind the time Paglia decided that all us poor rubes are worried about global warming because we “don’t realize that polar bears can swim!” and therefore, apparently, can’t drown. (True fact! Because the point is whether or not you can swim, as opposed to whether or not you can swim to, say, Hawaii. My question was, and still is: can Camille Paglia swim?)

Because Paglia cannot understand the new voices, she claims they “have atrophied.” Because she doesn’t understand the subtleties of communicating via text message, she claims the youngs are “communicating mutely,” which, what? Was communicating by letter in the 18th century also “mute”, “atrophied”? What does that even mean? Because she must not know any, I guess, she supposes the kids have “abandoned body language in daily interactions.”

Then there is Paglia’s complaint that Gaga is not sexy, that drag queens are far sexier than Gaga. Does it not occur to her that our whole world is already awash in “sexy” young women, singers, dancers, models, actresses, who are trying and trying and trying to “be sexy”, and/or that the public is maybe really so sick of that? Or that Lady Gaga’s appeal relies, in part, on precisely the fact that she inflates and distorts that “sexy” iconography in order to force the viewer to question his assumptions about sexuality, performance, gender?

As David Bowie was to Elvis, you might say, so Lady Gaga is to Madonna. Not so obvious, a little freaky, weird, a little ambiguous, not so much trying to arouse. Which is a very refreshing thing in the case of Lady Gaga, particularly when you consider all the billboards for Gentlemen’s Clubs around here, all featuring “sexy” girls with facial expressions so vapid and open-mouthed you can’t help thinking they must have been smacked over the head with a two-by-four before having been photographed. Please. It’s a good thing, to derail that, to provide alternatives to that.

The weirdest thing is that Paglia appears to suppose that Lady Gaga is even vaguely attempting to be “sexy” in the conventional way, as in, trying and failing. No. The force of Gaga’s appeal is in its very challenge to the old standards of “bombshell”, “chanteuse”, “star”, “diva” and so on. You’d have thought that an expert on sexual personae would have been able to figure that out.

RELATED: Pro Paglia: Lady Gaga is a Smug Diva who Exploits her Monsters and Gays

Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork and

Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

by Julie Klausner

Julie Klausner: You and I are, it’s safe to say, closet Camille Paglia appreciators.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper: Safe.

Julie: Closeted because she occasionally says crazy craziness, like when she wanted to rub herself all over Sarah Palin.

Natasha: Her political stuff is bonko but I intensely adore her cultural criticism.

Julie: When she got “politikul,” twas a folly. Yet, I think Paglia is a better writer than her fellow agitators like say your Katie Roiphe.

Natasha: Don’t bait me with my love of Katie Roiphe.

Julie: She’s also funny, she can spin an adjective and she’s persuasive.

Natasha: I love Paglia because she’s she’s bawdy and impolite and brilliant. But she is not pleased with the popularity of Lady Gaga.

Natasha: Julie, tell me your current position on Lady Gaga.

Julie: I liked “Bad Romance.” I liked when Gaga sat down and played the pee-yanny on “SNL.” There was always something INTERESTING but not EXCITING about her. I thought it was her lack of sense of humor, something Cher always had, in addition to crazy outfits, and then I thought it was her youth, but that’s not fair. And then Paggy nailed it: it’s her blankness. “Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions. They don’t notice her awkwardness because they’ve abandoned body language in daily interactions.”

Julie: Remember what Pauline Kael said after watching “Stop Making Sense”? That David Byrne “made autism fun”? Paglia is, I think, saying, that Gaga is making it un-fun again. Stop Making Fun.

Natasha: So, as a Paglia partisan and Lady Gaga apologist, *I* would say that the strain Paglia is most critical of, or bemoaning of, is the mingling of sex and death. The prop blood, the burning torso, the grotesque. But isn’t that what’s good? Doesn’t that visual play put the bite and the bitterness and the grand drama into sex?

Julie: I think Paglia accuses Gaga of using sex as mise en scene and that violence is the main course. It’s not about making “sex dark.” It’s about prioritizing The Fame, as it were, over it and knowing that what propels the fame is the chatter that comes along with making dark things about decay and teeth and blood because sex is cheap, daddy-o. Even Miley can do it. The other thing Cammy nailed I thought was her condescending “Little Monsters” stuff.

Natasha: Little Monsters do not come out well in this piece. Paglia: “She constantly touts her symbiotic bond with her fans, the ‘little monsters’ whom she inspires to ‘love themselves’ as if they are damaged goods in need of her therapeutic repair.”

Natasha: There’s no question that Gaga’s fan connection is self-interested is a “branding strategy.”

Julie: Whereas Madonna back in the day would appear not to give a fuck about her fans.

Natasha: Oh, Madge.

Julie: Gaga can be a smug diva with her little monsters lifting her throne as nothing more than fame cogs. Sex-and her “gays”-are accessories for her. Like Gaga showing up at the VMAs with gay soliders who were kicked out of the military for being gay — like they were a clutch purse.

Natasha: Well that’s some ridiculous Stefani-L.A.M.B. shit.

Julie: I think what’s most interesting about Paglia’s piece is what she says about the “sick” nature of Gaga’s asexuality: “This grisly mix of sex and death is sick, symptomatic of Gaga’s alienation from her own body.”

Julie: It’s like Gaga is like James Ensor.

Natasha: Ooh!

Julie: And Madonna is like Renoir, or Gaugin. Katy Perry meanwhile, is Jeff Koons. The ninny.

Natasha: But is the asexuality thing that absurd because isn’t sex kind of terrible right now?! For me Gaga is a creature of this moment. A moment of, as Pags puts it, ‘sexual anarchy’ and passionless digital reproduction.

Natasha: I mean that fucking people within this cohort is terrible. 18–24.

Natasha: While the little monsters are 16, they identify with 18-year-olds. And can you imagine what 16-year-old boys are like now?

Julie: No. I can’t. They have lots of browser windows open with different kinds of anal gaping in each window and Warcraft in others, and an IM window with a bunch of buddies. That’s what I picture.

Natasha: 4chaning/wanking.

Julie: It’s all a nightmare.

Natasha: “Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty.”

Julie: Well, Gaga always makes a thing of saying she’s celibate (except when she doesn’t) because that’s what she thinks is cute. It’s very 80s of her.

Natasha: I think it’s accurate! The fear of a dude sucking out your creativity through your vag. I’m surprised Paglia isn’t more sympathetic to it.

Julie: I thought dudes were the ones being afraid of getting their creativity and/or life seed left behind in the garbage-can womb of some lady, when they could’ve been busy creatin’ some art.

Natasha: Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae: “All phases of procreation are ruled by appetite; sexual intercourse, from kissing to penetration, consisted of movements of barely controlled cruelty and consumption. The long pregnancy of the human female and the protracted childhood of her infant, who is not self sustaining for seven years or more, have produced the agony of psychological dependency that burdens the male for a lifetime. Man justifiably fears being devoured by woman, who is nature’s proxy.”

Natasha: So isn’t Gaga just flipping the script?

Julie: On nature?

Natasha: On the anxiety of creative annihilation through sex.

Julie: After our creative appetite has been sated by carnal stuffs? I mean, I guess? But Gaga is not being sincere.

Natasha: Ah!

Julie: If I’ve learned anything from Conrad Birdie, it is: “You. gotta be. SINCERE.”

Natasha: Damn, Conrad.

Julie: By the way? The VMAs are on. And ACKKKK TAYLOR SWIFT IS ON MY TV.

Natasha: WHY IS SHE SINGING BAREFOOT? LIKE A WALKER EVANS TRAIN HOBO?

Julie: DISGUSTING. I hate this depression waif. I hate that she writes her songs too, for some reason that makes it worse. Is she homeschooled? I’ll be she’s homeschooled.

Natasha: Who doesn’t feel like a Little Monster when compared to Taylor Swift?

Natasha: THERE’S CURSIVE ON THE WALLS.

Natasha: Where did this bitch come from?

Julie: AMURRICA.

Natasha: No. Why is she barefoot? Is she going to pull up her dress and pee on the side of the stage?

Julie: I take back everything I said about Lady Gaga.

Natasha: Did Swift finally break you?

Julie: Yes. I thought Katy Perry was her counter point: male gaze versus vagina dentata, you know?

Natasha: Uh huh.

Julie: But no, it’s TAYLOR SWIFT. Little girls should all listen to Lady Gaga, and The Stooges and old Madonna. I concede. Like a prayer!

Natasha: That’s your syllabus, little monsters. Now here’s a maxi pad.

RELATED: Anti Paglia: Poor Camille Paglia Thinks Lady Gaga is Trying to be a Sex Symbol

Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper are both women.

(via)

“We don’t want our young people having loads of cheap booze and having an opportunity to get inebriated all over the place.”
-Welcome to Lymington, the least British town in Knifecrime Island. They probably hate glassing too. Disgraceful.

From the inbox: “Perhaps it’s my inner conspiracy theorist, but I noticed a curious addition to the new iPad commercial. It includes, among other things, a cover of Time magazine featuring Jonathan Franzen on the cover. Now, I wouldn’t think too much of this except that Franzen’s new book, ‘Freedom,’ includes a lengthy diatribe against the iPod and the way in which music has become so commercialized (and thus intrinsically a part of the capitalist society against which so many bands ‘supposedly’ stand in opposition). Knowing how vindictive Steve Jobs can be, I can’t help but think he intended the commercial to be a fuck you to Franzen, and even if he didn’t, who cares?”

Don’t be so negative, a lot of people care. Jonathan Franzen makes everyone crazy!

This is definitely worth a click.

Even if you are not a fan of the comedy stylings of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, I urge you to check out this clip from his latest routine just to appreciate the sheer craftsmanship. It’s not everyone who can segue from a Hitler joke to a bit about how pretty young girls want to fuck him because he’s loaded. And the kicker? A moment of genius. We are talking some Louis C.K.-level stuff right here.

The Economist takes a look at black people and white people Internet, finding that they are, in global terms (not individual terms!), two very different things. (And also that people flee services they feel are for poor people.) This includes Twitter: “In May Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, who research the display of social information, looked at the ten most popular hashtags on Twitter and discovered that most were used almost exclusively by either black or white authors.” Another researcher found that, across the Internet, “in their online life, American teenagers were recreating what they knew from the physical world-separation by class and race.” I won’t hold my breath waiting for any apologies regarding the lame white-people-based “you’re a racist!” backlash over my oh-so ground-breaking sociology work (sarcasm) in this burgeoning field. But also, all that science aside? Today is a beautiful day of racial and class harmony in the American-based social media world, when everyone comes together to beef about the VMAs. OMG, Chelsea Handler, am I right? And something something Kanye West! Yeah, I didn’t watch it but, thanks to Twitter, I feel like I did.