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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
According to Koestenbaum, culture is all around us: in movie magazines, paparazzi, Robert Mapplethorpe's photos, Princess Di's dresses and, of course, Liz Taylor. After deconstructing gay men and opera (The Queen's Throat) and prominent first ladies (Jackie Under My Skin), the ever-observant Koestenbaum has assembled in these 49 reprinted essays an idiosyncratic overview of the state of U.S. popular culture as well as his own mind. His charm and power as a writer reside in his ability to wed his own obsessions with the most serious and the most frivolous of cultural manifestations. For him, a meditation on Oscar Wilde's trial prompts the statement, "I... believe that desire is extreme and anti-social." An essay on Elizabeth Taylor moves easily from her looks to his own gender identity: "After watching Elizabeth Taylor movies I feel eerily masculine. Her beauty shoves me out of maleness and compresses me back into it." In a less astute or self-aware writer, such leaps might read as simple narcissism or miscalculated post-modern posturing, but Koestenbaum is able to combine personal writing and cultural analysis in a way that advances both with poise and intelligence. While some of the pieces are less substantial--such as his quirky short essays on envy and masochism--Koestenbaum delivers when he writes most personally. "The Aryan Boy," an introspective essay on masculinity, homosexuality and Jewish identity, shows the author at his best: moving, insightful and fueled by his ability to shock, provoke and challenge.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Sex and aesthetics are all well and good, but its stars who claim pride of place in this miscellany by academic gadfly Koestenbaum (English/CUNY; Jackie Under My Skin, 1995, etc.). Though its divided into six parts on topics ranging from Dress and Undress to Reading, this collection of occasional pieces, whose original provenance ranges from Parnassus to Allure, breaks down into two larger units: unabashed celebrations of popular culture and cultish figures like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and more gnomic, cryptic analyses, or replications, of the tensions of contemporary culture. In these latter piecesespecially in the 12 prose poems of The Locomotive EmpressKoestenbaum is often opaque, banal, or portentously playful, but he is never staid. His unapologetic delectation in himself, the dreams he constantly retails, and his reactions to cultural marginalia (I consider sexual liberation to be a subset of fashion liberation, he remarks at one point, and later confesses: I am afraid of my underwear) gives his profiles of stars from Liz Taylor to Dawn Upshaw a canny infatuation compounded equally of postmodern irony and Rex Reed. He revealingly tells Alec Baldwin: I feel a burning need to meet stars, and its easy to see why: His worship of icons from Melanie Griffith to Gertrude Stein, like his graphic fantasy of himself as Bill Clintons lover, validates the star-struck persona he delights in discovering in the most unlikely contexts (I am a woman of Dada. . . . I am exhibiting a hectic, touristy relation to my own passions). Koestenbaum even manages to find himself in the mandarin Stein, whose austere demands on readers couldnt differ more from his own eagerness to please himself and everybody else. Logorrhea is the hallmark of contemporary discourse, rules Koestenbaum. Readers who arent frightened by that prospect will enjoy passing the odd hour with this latest collection from the Donald Barthelme of the nonfiction aisle. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
See all Editorial Reviews
According to Koestenbaum, culture is all around us: in movie magazines, paparazzi, Robert Mapplethorpe's photos, Princess Di's dresses and, of course, Liz Taylor. After deconstructing gay men and opera (The Queen's Throat) and prominent first ladies (Jackie Under My Skin), the ever-observant Koestenbaum has assembled in these 49 reprinted essays an idiosyncratic overview of the state of U.S. popular culture as well as his own mind. His charm and power as a writer reside in his ability to wed his own obsessions with the most serious and the most frivolous of cultural manifestations. For him, a meditation on Oscar Wilde's trial prompts the statement, "I... believe that desire is extreme and anti-social." An essay on Elizabeth Taylor moves easily from her looks to his own gender identity: "After watching Elizabeth Taylor movies I feel eerily masculine. Her beauty shoves me out of maleness and compresses me back into it." In a less astute or self-aware writer, such leaps might read as simple narcissism or miscalculated post-modern posturing, but Koestenbaum is able to combine personal writing and cultural analysis in a way that advances both with poise and intelligence. While some of the pieces are less substantial--such as his quirky short essays on envy and masochism--Koestenbaum delivers when he writes most personally. "The Aryan Boy," an introspective essay on masculinity, homosexuality and Jewish identity, shows the author at his best: moving, insightful and fueled by his ability to shock, provoke and challenge.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Sex and aesthetics are all well and good, but its stars who claim pride of place in this miscellany by academic gadfly Koestenbaum (English/CUNY; Jackie Under My Skin, 1995, etc.). Though its divided into six parts on topics ranging from Dress and Undress to Reading, this collection of occasional pieces, whose original provenance ranges from Parnassus to Allure, breaks down into two larger units: unabashed celebrations of popular culture and cultish figures like Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and more gnomic, cryptic analyses, or replications, of the tensions of contemporary culture. In these latter piecesespecially in the 12 prose poems of The Locomotive EmpressKoestenbaum is often opaque, banal, or portentously playful, but he is never staid. His unapologetic delectation in himself, the dreams he constantly retails, and his reactions to cultural marginalia (I consider sexual liberation to be a subset of fashion liberation, he remarks at one point, and later confesses: I am afraid of my underwear) gives his profiles of stars from Liz Taylor to Dawn Upshaw a canny infatuation compounded equally of postmodern irony and Rex Reed. He revealingly tells Alec Baldwin: I feel a burning need to meet stars, and its easy to see why: His worship of icons from Melanie Griffith to Gertrude Stein, like his graphic fantasy of himself as Bill Clintons lover, validates the star-struck persona he delights in discovering in the most unlikely contexts (I am a woman of Dada. . . . I am exhibiting a hectic, touristy relation to my own passions). Koestenbaum even manages to find himself in the mandarin Stein, whose austere demands on readers couldnt differ more from his own eagerness to please himself and everybody else. Logorrhea is the hallmark of contemporary discourse, rules Koestenbaum. Readers who arent frightened by that prospect will enjoy passing the odd hour with this latest collection from the Donald Barthelme of the nonfiction aisle. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
See all Editorial Reviews
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