Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, she clearly did. I think she had an identity, though. Camille is a complex subject of her own, but she has an idea of herself that she needed to stay in the academy because she felt that teaching and interacting with actual humans was a way of preventing the aristocratic excesses of people like Susan Sontag, which I think is absolutely fair enough. I can’t imagine Sontag as a professor. That’s just not who she was. But I think that Camille — the reason she’s a fascinating person, I think, is that she both satirizes a lot of the aspects of the celebrity culture that Sontag was a part of — and a very successful part of — while also having quite a lot of excesses of her own. I don’t know if you saw when Sinéad O’Connor died a few months ago, a few weeks ago. There was this clip going around the internet of Camille saying, “If I were Sinéad O’Connor, I would hate myself too, and I would want to kill myself.” This was before the internet. Now, if you say something like that, you’re putting yourself out there as a kind of “I’m an obnoxious person on the internet.” But this was 30 or 40 years ago. In fact, Sinéad does kill herself and does have this very miserable life and was abused, and all this. I think Camille is . . . I’m not going to write a book about her, but I think that there is a book to write about her because she both criticizes and also embodies a lot of these questions. I once did a podcast with her, and I think of all the guests we’ve ever had, she produced the greatest number of words and greatest number of words per minute. Oh my God, I remember I had to type down the first time I talked to her. The first thing she said to me, which I thought was hilarious — I said, “Is this on the record?” She said, “Everything I say is on the record!” Which I thought was hilarious because so many people would whisper in the corridors and try to make themselves interesting. She owns it, and yes, she talks really fast.…

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