Customer Reviews

Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics

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Although I am a fan of Koestenbaum, I was less impressed by Cleavage than I was by The Queen's Throat or Jackie Under My Skin. However, I do feel that this book has some merit, and I like the writing style. Although some of the essays are more interesting than others, I think this book is worth reading, if you like Koestenbaum. I don't recommend it as an introduction to him, however.

At his best Koestenbaum, wit, ardent fan, astute critic and antic camp, riffs on his idols and his passions to intoxicating effect. Bringing high and low perspectives to bear on his varied subjects here, he flaunts his knowledge (wide-ranging) and queerness (all-consuming) and dares to go out on to the high wire without a net (e.g. "I want to fail in the most beautiful way, to write something so like a parallelogram it baffles every critic and excites the raven-haired young androgynes.") Whether he is writing about his underwear (he starts out from home) or his favorite diva (he ends up at the theater), he lets his imagination run amok, trusting that his daunting intelligence will step in later to ground the musings in the everyday that we all will recognize (it does). Fans of his "Jackie under My Skin" and "The Queen's Throat" will adore this even zestier collection, although some others may feel that a shorter, more focused array of delicacies would have made this very good book a masterpiece of its genre. On a more pedestrian but essential note, Koestenbaum's "Cleavage" will also make you laugh like nobody's business.

An omnivorous culture vulture who feels as comfortable discussing Franz Schubert as Rambo -- in fact, both in the same breath -- Wayne Koestenbaum believes that ''it is our job, as observers, to wrest meaning from events and objects.'' Koestenbaum is a semiotician of the trivial and the effete and writes a rarefied designer prose. At their best, the essays collected in ''Cleavage'' can be as intense as poetry, and are, occasionally, elegant. At his worst, Koestenbaum, the author of ''Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon,'' produces overwrought, hysterical writing that keeps drawing attention to itself at the expense of the subject at hand. He is given to declarations like, ''I must collect my thoughts about underwear or I will have an epistemological breakdown''; he also describes himself as ''a blurted-out obscenity or nonsense syllable, a case of fashion Tourette's.'' Under such circumstances, perhaps the most telling essay is one on logorrhea; it is an unapologetic defense of what Koestenbaum describes as ''the affliction of those whose desires and whose sentences are old-fashioned, purple, tumescent, waiting to be evacuated.''

I don't know who these goons are that keep putting down Wayne Koestenbaum, but he's one of the best contemporary writers out there, and this is an absolutely brilliant book -- a compilation of the best of his cultural essays over the past years. Don't let a couple of lamebrains dissuade you from this marvelous book -- Koestenbaum has a lot to say about modern culture, the cult of stardom and the experience of being human, and he says it with remarkable insight and grace. Highly recommended.

Koestenbaum affects, throughout every essay in this collection, the pose of the breathless, trivial, glib narcissisist, as enamored of fashion and movie stars as he is of himself. He seems to have anticipated much of the criticism which could be (and has been) levied against him, particularly in his essay "Logorrhea." Yes, he tacitly admits, he does tend to gush, and he does obsess about what other people would consider trivialities,--but didn't James, Proust, Wilde, Barthes, and other irresistible gay aesthetes? Isn't this just what a brilliant aesthete can do, transfix his audience with his charming reveries, and show how the seemingly trivial actually demostrates deep truths about our culture? Isn't this an important political strategy?

The answer to these questions he implicitly poses is very much "yes"--that is, *if* you happen to be Henry James, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, or Roland Barthes. Koestenbaum is not in their league, and where he aims for charm and brilliance he comes off instead sounding both dippy and drippy. It's a pretty pointless read, and his self-indulgence comes off as infuriating rather than irresistible.

What? Is he kidding? Was the publisher in the bathroom when this was bought? By the way, the author curated a show called "Bathroom" so maybe that's where he met the editor of this book. Ugh! Wait 'til this is on the .99 table if you really want to read this -- it will be there before the summer, I'm sure.

This collection of previously published "essays" by the self-absorbed poet and celebrity-seeker about town demonstrates, if nothing else, Koestenbaum's remarkable talent for turning absolutely anything and everything around so that it's about HIM. Really scraping here is a NY Times mag piece about His dreams about movie queens, which reads as if it were dashed off while he was filing his nails or something. Plus other skin-crawling, mind-boggling mis-uses of prose about Melanie Griffith, Liz Taylor (she makes Him feel like a man -- imagine that -- but please, spare us the imagery), and other godawful ramblings. This guy should have taken a cue from Kate Hepburn and just called this book "Me." You'll want to take a very hot shower after reading this. But it's doubtful you'll be able to dispel the icky feeling it gives with just water....