Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson Book

Paglia - as a friend of mine once said to her face at a signing - is a gateway drug. I got ahold of this in high school and it functioned as a syllabus for the next few years. She showed me how raunchy, perverse and gorgeously gilded Spenser can be. She turned me on to Gautier, Pater, and, above all others, to Baudelaire. I continue to return to her readings of Byron and Wilde. This book is nigh-impossible to read cover to cover. Don't try it. The prose is an unceasingly percussive hammering of vivid declaratives. Better to jump around, sampling chapters here and there. Paglia would have more of a reputation as a stylist if someone would extract and publish in a separate volume all the paragraph-sized prose poems scattered throughout this work of criticism. Pater's famous purpureus pannus on the Mona Lisa is tame stuff next to Paglia's peaens to Egyptian cat-worship and that bust of Nefertiti.