E! Entertainment

by Kate Durbin

E! Entertainment is conceptual writing at its juiciest. Durbin takes on the stylized, extra-real drama of MTV's hit show The Hills, the first TV catfight ever on 80's soap hit Dynasty, the Chanel wardrobe of Lindsay Lohan at her highly publicized stolen necklace trial, and the tragic CNN news video of a drugged, clown-faced, pregnant Anna Nicole. E! Entertainment reveals the tragic scripts of these women whose post-private lives our culture dismisses as inherently frivolous and suspect, even as they are relished as spectator sport.

"E! Entertainment is a well-crafted fusion of high concept literature." -Silverlake Jubilee

"I think it’s really cool that you write books about pop culture. I read your chapters on Lindsay Lohan & Anna Nicole Smith—love them both." —Josie Stevens, star of the hit E! reality TV show Married to Rock

"There is no one sporting hypermediaflesh like Kate Durbin’s. With E! Entertainment she strips the TV image from its old curves, reupholstering 2D-packed pixelshit into clipped components, sentences, where somehow less surrounded they take on the shape of psychically deformed wallpaper. These are our icon baths hobbling toward you, reciting script-prayer in mime of sleep, and now Durbin is their lord." —Blake Butler, author of the Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

"Kate Durbin is the brilliant combination of Warhol and Warhollian superstar—both pop satirist and performance artist. Courtroom defiant La Lohan, the clownish pathos of Anna Nicole Smith: these are Durbin’s Jackie O’s and car crashes. Her new conceptual poetry book, E! Entertainment, is both rapturous and ravaging of pop culture, sending up the paparazzi’s glare, the vampiric obsession with the lives of reality starlets, endlessly reported on E! news by fakebaked anchors with colgate smiles. Particularly poignant in this collection is Durbin’s opening piece on MTV’s The Hills, in which she narrates in microdetail the tedium and tragedy of reality TV, its scripted mumblecore, the punctures and weird rhythms, the edited, dramatic pauses, how nothing is said but there’s something bubbling underneath. All this Durbin builds to the (soap) operatic, into a backstabbing tragedy (later she counterpoises the toxic girls on The Hills with another televised catfight, in her piece on Dynasty). With Durbin’s meticulous slowdown we begin to read in between the lines, a meditation on these girls, their lives." —Kate Zambreno, author of Green Girl

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

40 pages, Unknown Binding

First published November 19, 2011

About the author

Kate Durbin is a writer and artist from Los Angeles, California. Her books include Hoarders (Wave Books), E! Entertainment (Wonder), The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), and ABRA (1913 Press). ABRA is also an iOS app that is "a living text," which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature. In 2015 and in 2020, she was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia.

Kate's writing has been published in Art in America, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Flaunt, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her website is www.katedurbin.la.

Reviews

[⏺ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shot of Luca enjoying the book. He doesn't have French manicured nails.

[Liza · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a good idea! Totally mesmerizing. Also looks great.

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fascinating and some sharp descriptions. Love the juxtipostional (word?) nature of The Housewives section.

[Casey Clough · Rating 4 out of 5]

E! Entertainment is an odd little book - with shocking pink pages that feel beyond apt for the content. The book is a little bit poetry, a little bit... non-fiction, I guess? It is largely comprised of synopses of reality tv episodes - Real Housewives, Kim Kardashian's televised wedding preceding her 72 day marriage, some televised events like the Amanda Knox trial. The synopses are sometimes literal transcripts of what's happening on screen, highlighting features of the shows that are oft-ignored, like the landscapes shown in transition scenes, the cheesy royalty-free music, etc. At other times, they serve as biting commentary on the things we notice about reality stars - their bodies, their nails, their over-the-top homes, the glossy state of their lips. It was a quick read, I found it both funny and a little sad, and I think it's probably for you if you enjoy reality TV and more out there works of art.

[Blaine Wajdowicz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. And different. It's as if someone is watching these shows and transcribing everything they see literally, to be reproduced on a script or screenplay

[Alex Borden · Rating 3 out of 5]

In theory, this book was written for me. But I found it to be mostly transcription pointing out the oddities of reality tv and I wished it had built on it more. Love the premise.

[Hetian bias · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Kate Durbin is pop culture’s stenographer.”
—Heidi Montag

[Lisa Flowers]

http://tiny.cc/rcwcew

[Carrie]

Entertaining.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of realator-type descriptions of various pseudo-posh bedrooms, all owned, it becomes increasingly clear, by Hugh Hefner, all permeated by a restrained yet sleazy misogyny.

[Sarah Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Durbin's writing is crucial.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant through and through. I wrote about the chapbook Kept Women, included here, for Fanzine: http://thefanzine.com/images-of-kept-...

[Madeleine Maillet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulously weird and funny.