Camille Paglia is back writing for Salon.com and her new piece (which I won’t link to since you have to pay) is hilarious — unintentionally. She muses on a certain celebrity death as follows: “Anna Nicole Smith’s sudden death in a Florida hotel, only five months after her son’s death three days after she had given birth to a daughter in the Bahamas, struck me as terribly sad. ABC’s Nightline called via my publisher for comment, but I felt far too upset to go on TV.”

For Camille, this death has a where-were-you-when-you-first-heard-about-JFK significance: “I heard the first bulletins about her death on the car radio as I was driving home from campus last week. At the Popeye’s drive-through (where I was ordering Cajun wings), I blurted in agitation to the window lady, ‘Anna Nicole Smith just dropped dead — tell everyone!’ — which she promptly did. The staff inside (all African-American) were startled and incredulous.”

No, I am not making any of this up.