I've been obsessed with Camille Paglia ever since high school, when my friend Julia and I would devour her weekly Salon.com column and obey every criticism she made of politics and pop culture. I know that she's an amazing columnist and essayist, but I'd never read one of her many books. So yay for receiving her new one — "Break, Blow, Burn" — on my birthday!

I've only read her introduction, but already I can tell I'm going to love this book. She writes about how we "live in a time increasingly indifferent to literary style" and gives a quick shout-out to blogs:

The Web (which I champion and to which I have extensively contributed) has increased verbal fluency but not quality, at least in its rushed, patchy genres of e-mail and blog.

"Rushed" and "patchy" is exactly how I would describe the state of blogs these days, including my own. As Camille says, "Good writing comes from good reading," so my plan this summer is to read more and, subsequently, to write more and better.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Camille, she is totally insane, and I love and respect her for that. The last time I checked, she is a libertarian, anti-feminist feminist who doesn't believe in rape and worships prostitutes as the goddesses of our time. "Break, Blow, Burn" is a collection of 43 poems (from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell) along with her interpretation of each one. I was so relieved to read that her unusual views on politics and sexuality extend to poetry, as well — this is her analysis of a late-1950s TV commercial for M&M's that had been "burned into [her] memory" since childhood:

A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise longue, said in a twanging Southern drawl: "I'm an M&M peanut / Toasted to a golden brown / Dipped in creamy milk chocolate / And covered in a thin candy shell!" ... I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.

If she gets wet over an M&M's commercial, I can only imagine her analysis of Hughes...