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My 1980s And Other Essays
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Book Synopsis My 1980s and Other Essays by : Wayne Koestenbaum
Download or read book My 1980s and Other Essays written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new book of essays by the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin"--
Book Synopsis My 1980s & Other Essays by : Wayne Koestenbaum
Download or read book My 1980s & Other Essays written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate collection of personal and critical essays on the 1980s, including essays on major cultural figures such as Andy Warhol and Brigitte Bardot. Wayne Koestenbaum has been described as "an impossible lovechild from a late-night, drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag" (Bidoun). In My 1980s and Other Essays, a collection of extravagant range and style, he rises to the challenge of that improbable description. My 1980s and Other Essays opens with a series of manifestos—or, perhaps more appropriately, a series of impassioned disclosures, intellectual and personal. It then proceeds to wrestle with a series of major cultural figures, the author's own lodestars and lodestones: literary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolaño, James Schuyler), artistic (Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol), and simply iconic (Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Lana Turner). And then there is the personal—the voice, the style, the flair—that is unquestionably Koestenbaum. It amounts to a kind of intellectual autobiography that culminates in a string of passionate calls to creativity; arguments in favor of detail and nuance, and attention; a defense of pleasure, hunger, and desire in culture and experience. Koestenbaum is perched on the cusp of being a true public intellectual—his venues are more mainstream than academic, his style is eye-catching, his prose unfailingly witty and passionate, his interests profoundly wide-ranging and popular. My 1980s should be the book that pushes Koestenbaum off that cusp and truly into the public eye.
Book Synopsis Figure It Out by : Wayne Koestenbaum
Download or read book Figure It Out written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Whatever his subject―favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence." ––Parul Sehgal, The New York Times “Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.” Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and “assignments” that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger’s leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for “stranger”; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend’s stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: “Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.” “Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.” “Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.” Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from “one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today” (John Waters).
Book Synopsis My Desire for History by : Allan Bérubé
Download or read book My Desire for History written by Allan Bérubé and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube (1946-2007), a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990), Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Berube's life and work while it documents the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.
Book Synopsis Forty-one False Starts by : Janet Malcolm
Download or read book Forty-one False Starts written by Janet Malcolm and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013
Download or read book Cleavage written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Cleavage is very 1960s: it shows off the new permissiveness. (Look! we can reveal most of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts!) Cleavage is not nudity. Cleavage is a promise: not sight, but on the verge of sight." [p. 138] In this brilliantly shrewd, hilarious collection of essays, cultural critic and acclaimed writer Wayne Koestenbaum exposes all that provokes, intimidates, heartens, and arouses us in matters of style, celebrity, obscenity, and art. Armed with a bold curiosity, a stinging wit, and a subversive sense of wordplay, Koestenbaum reflects on a dazzling array of subjects. Here are the outsized emotions inflamed by Sophia Loren, Robert Mapplethorpe, and locker-room nudity . . . vivid dreams of flirting with Bill Clinton and resurrecting Bette Davis from the dead . . . the intangible joys of thrifting . . . the true meaning of masculinity . . . and the indelible sensation that two scoops of vanilla flesh, heaving incongruously in a 70-millimeter musical, made on a young boy of impressionable age. From the rigors of a day spent with Melanie Griffith ("Melanie Time") to the healing powers of a gray Prada suit ("Diary of a Suit") to moving meditations on the importance of reading ("Why I Read"), this volume is an irresistible exploration of culture and identity in America. If celebrity is--as Koestenbaum suggests--an earthquake, then Cleavage is the aftershock.
Download or read book Circus written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of a “dazzlingly seductive” fever dream written in “brilliant poetic vernacular” (Bookforum) by a beloved poet and cultural critic, now with an introduction by Rachel Kushner. For five years, concert pianist Theo Mangrove has been living at his family’s home in East Kill, New York, recovering from a nervous breakdown that derailed his career, and attempting to relieve his relentless polysexual appetite in the company of male hustlers, random strangers, music students, his aunt, and occasionally his wife. As he prepares for a comeback recital in Aigues-Mortes, a walled medieval town in southern France, he becomes obsessed with the idea that the Italian circus star Moira Orfei must join him there to perform alongside him. Extravagantly (and tragicomically) describing his hallucinatory plans in a series of twenty-five notebooks, he assembles an incantatory meditation on performance, failure, fame, decay, and delusion. "If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this. --John Ashbery
Book Synopsis Garner's Quotations by : Dwight Garner
Download or read book Garner's Quotations written by Dwight Garner and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of favorite quotes that the celebrated literary critic has collected over the decades. From Dwight Garner, the New York Times book critic, comes a rollicking, irreverent, scabrous, amazingly alive selection of unforgettable moments from forty years of wide and deep reading. Garner’s Quotations is like no commonplace book you’ll ever read. If you’ve ever wondered what’s really going on in the world of letters today, this book will make you sit up and take notice. Unputdownable!
Book Synopsis Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability by : Paul K. Longmore
Download or read book Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability written by Paul K. Longmore and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Personal inclination made me a historian. Personal encounter with public policy made me an activist.'
Download or read book Icon written by Amy Scholder and published by The Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this collection commissioned by Amy Scholder, nine original essays explore the specific and personal impact of cultural icons.” —Publishers Weekly Whose poster hung on your wall as a teenager? Whose record did you wear out? Whose life story could you not resist? Fascination works in mysterious ways—it can be born out of inspiration, or repulsion, or both. In these daring essays, some of the most provocative writers of our time offer a private view on a public figure. In the process, they reveal themselves in beautiful and unexpected ways, blurring the line between biography and memoir. Original essays include Introduction by Amy Scholder, Mary Gaitskill on Linda Lovelace, Rick Moody on Karen Dalton, Johanna Fateman on Andrea Dworkin, Danielle Henderson on bell hooks, Hanne Blank on MFK Fisher, Kate Zambreno on Kathy Acker, Justin Vivian Bond on Karen Graham, Jill Nelson on Aretha Franklin, and Zoe Pilger on Mary Gaitskill “A smart plunge into fandom’s sober fringe.” —Wayne Koestenbaum, author of My 1980s and Other Essays
Book Synopsis Uncovering Stranger Things by : Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
Download or read book Uncovering Stranger Things written by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Duffer Brothers' award-winning Stranger Things exploded onto the pop culture scene in 2016. The Netflix original series revels in a nostalgic view of 1980s America while darkly portraying the cynical aspects of the period. This collection of 23 new essays explores how the show reduces, reuses and recycles '80s pop culture--from the films of Spielberg, Carpenter and Hughes to punk and synthwave music to Dungeons & Dragons--and how it shapes our understanding of the decade through distorted memory. Contributors discuss gender and sexual orientation; the politics, psychology and educational policies of the day; and how the ultimate upper-class teen idol of the Reagan era became Stranger Things' middle-aged blue-collar heroine.
Download or read book The Fun Stuff written by James Wood and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects twenty-five essays critiquing the modern novel, analyzing the works of such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon.
Book Synopsis Letters From Prison and Other Essays by : Adam Michnik
Download or read book Letters From Prison and Other Essays written by Adam Michnik and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1986-08-06 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the voices that speak to us from Poland today, the most important may be that of Adam Michnik. Michnik now sits in a jail belonging to the totalitarian regime, yet his first concern--and herein lies one of the keys to his thinking, and one should add, to his character--is with the quality of his own conduct, which, together with teh conduct of other victims of the present situation, will, he is sure, one day set the tone for whatever political system follows the totalitarian debacle. His essays are the most valuable guide we have to the origins of the revolution, and, more particularly, to its innovative practices.
Book Synopsis In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories by : Delmore Schwartz
Download or read book In Dreams Begin Responsibilities and Other Stories written by Delmore Schwartz and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 1978 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight stories portray the world of the New York intellectual during the 1930s and 40s, probing the conflict between ambitious, educated youths and their immigrant parents.
Book Synopsis Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design by : Michael Bierut
Download or read book Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design written by Michael Bierut and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design brings together the best of designer Michael Bierut's critical writing—serious or humorous, flattering or biting, but always on the mark. Bierut is widely considered the finest observer on design writing today. Covering topics as diverse as Twyla Tharp and ITC Garamond, Bierut's intelligent and accessible texts pull design culture into crisp focus. He touches on classics, like Massimo Vignelli and the cover of The Catcher in the Rye, as well as newcomers, like McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and color-coded terrorism alert levels. Along the way Nabakov's Pale Fire; Eero Saarinen; the paper clip; Celebration, Florida; the planet Saturn; the ClearRx pill bottle; and paper architecture all fall under his pen. His experience as a design practitioner informs his writing and gives it truth. In Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design, designers and nondesigners alike can share and revel in his insights.
Book Synopsis Living and Sustaining a Creative Life by : Sharon Louden
Download or read book Living and Sustaining a Creative Life written by Sharon Louden and published by Intellect Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this day and age, when art has become more of a commodity and art school graduates are convinced that they can only make a living from their work by attaining gallery representation, it is more important than ever to show the reality of how a professional, contemporary artist sustains a creative practice over time. The forty essays collected in Living and Sustaining a Creative Life are written in the artists' own voices and take the form of narratives, statements, and interviews. Each story is different and unique, but the common thread is an ongoing commitment to creativity, inside and outside the studio. Both day-to-day and big picture details are revealed, showing how it is possible to sustain a creative practice that contributes to the ongoing dialogue in contemporary art. These stories will inform and inspire any student, young artist, and art enthusiast and will help redefine what "success" means to a professional artist.
Download or read book Coming Home Crazy written by Bill Holm and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arranged by letter of the alphabet, with at least one entry per letter, these short pieces capture the variety of daily life in contemporary China. Topics include dumpling making, bound feet, Chinglish, night soil, and banking.
