HURRICANE CAMILLE BLOWS AGAIN

CAMILLE PAGLIA'S LATEST COLLECTION IS ONE BLISTERING READ

Academics ought to have a longer shelf life than pop stars. So maybe Madonna wasn't such a swell role model for Camille Paglia, a humanities professor at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. Sexual Personae, a rambunctious survey of gender identities published in 1990, made Paglia into feminism's Material Girl. In a whiny time in America that sanctified women as victims, she celebrated woman's erotic and emotional majesty. Just like that, she was the hot intellectual starlet of the '90s.

Alas, she loved notoriety even more than it loved her. The huffy reception being given Vamps & Tramps (Vintage; 532 pages), her...

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