From a column Ivins wrote about Camille Paglia, way back in 1991:
What we have here, fellow citizens, is a crassly egocentric, raving twit. The Norman Podhoretz of our gender. That this woman is actually taken seriously as a thinker in New York intellectual circles is a clear sign of decandence, decay, and hopeless pinheadedness. Has no one in the nation’s intellectual capital the background and ability to see through a web of categorical assertions? One fashionable line of response to Paglia is to claim that even though she may be fundamentally off-base, she has “flashes of brilliance.” If so, I missed them in her oceans of swill.
Whole thing here.
(Via this MeFi thread on the occasion of Paglia’s return to Salon. I don’t read Salon unless someone I already read links something there, so I didn’t even know Paglia had been there before, much less left.)
