“I now address the graduate students. This is a time of enormous opportunity for you. There is an ossified political establishment of invested self-interest. Conformism and empty pieties dominate academe. Rebel. Do not read Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, and treat as insignificant nothings those that still prate of them. You need no contemporaries to interpret the present for you. Born here, alive now, YOU are modernity. You are the living link between the past and future. Charge yourself with the high ideal of scholarship, connecting you to Alexandria and to the devoted, distinguished scholars who came before you…Let your work follow its own organic rhythm. Seek no material return from it, and it will reward you with spiritual gold…All of civilized life is a dance, a fiction. You must learn the steps without becoming enslaved by them. Sitting out the dance is not an option.”
— Camille Paglia, Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders (via humanformat)
(Source: asthepoemsgo, via queerencia-deactivated20130103)
