My 1980s and Other Essays

by Wayne Koestenbaum

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 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.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Queer, Art, Memoir, LGBT, Criticism

336 pages, Paperback

First published August 13, 2013

About the author

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Reviews

[Hank Stuever · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe more like 2.5 stars, but not three.

I've been a real fan of Wayne Koestenbaum's since "The Queen's Throat" in the early/mid 1990s (and "Jackie Under My Skin," "Hotel Theory," and "Humiliation"), for both his style and in substance. So I'm sorry to say that "My 1980s and Other Essays" was a disappointment for me, mainly because of my expectations. (Koestenbaum? On the '80s? Step right up!)

There are 39 pieces collected here, written by Koestenbaum during the 1990s, 2000s and early '10s, most for magazines and art/literary journals, but also some blog entries. The title essay is pretty strong, unless, of course, you were really hoping for something about the '80s that most of us picture when we say "the '80s." Koestenbaum's 1980s were spent becoming Wayne Koestenbaum and getting as smart as he is, diving deep into literary theory and criticism, art, imagery, opera. (My 1980s were spent, well, let's just say several rungs down the intellectual ladder.) The last pop song he says he listened to in the 1980s was Blondie's "Call Me" in 1980. He's not ignorant of mass culture and he certainly thinks a lot about artifice, marketing, pornography, among other things.

So, the book is not quite what it looks like from the inviting Polaroid (Warhol) cover of Debbie Harry. Trudging through most of these essays (I couldn't finish them all -- many are about about art and photography, but without any pictures/illustrations of what he's discussing), I was struck by how easily Koestenbaum does "Koestenbaum." I felt I could place a bowl on a table and tell him to write about it and, rather quickly, there would come a preciously segmented literary essay about the bowl, the table and Wayne and Susan Sontag. It gets old; you start to see right through it. Example: Much later in the book, in a piece that's ostensibly about Debbie Harry, there's this segment: "The terror of being unable to explain Debbie Harry's sublimity is built into the experience of apprehending it -- the terror of being stranded with the gorgeousness, either as its proprietor or as its last living witness."

Whuh? If you're so fascinated by Debbie Harry AND Debbie Harry happens to live in your apartment building, how is it better to hole up in your apartment and write strange little essays about the essence of her and never once interview her? Talk to her? I realize an essayist is not obligated to turn into a journalist, but at some point you also have to confront the fact that you're not writing about anything fully.

There are pages and pages like this; it begins to feel like a literary con and it's startling to see him crank it out like a Play-Doh fuzzy pumper (a toy that is in fact a central part of another essay). Part of the problem is there are too many pieces here and a lack of curating; we don't need his entire freelance-writing oeuvre all crammed onto the same plate like this. I'm sure these pieces read better when given 20+ years of breathing space among them, instead of being read one right after the other. It seems like the point of a collection of a writer's essays -- a greatest-hits album, as it were -- should mostly just include the best of it, not all of it. Or just the hits with a couple of remixes.

I'm still a fan, but I've realized I need to read him in discrete doses.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wayne Kostenbaum wrote the best book on Andy Warhol, which is a pretty good thing because there are a lot of good Warhol books out there - but he was the first one who wrote the book regarding Warhol's sexuality and how that affected his art and his world. At the time I found that fascinating. And I am sure there were other books that touched on Warhol's queerness, but the Kostenbaum critique and study was the one for me that was an "ah ha" moment.

"My 1980'S & Other Essays" is his first collection of essays from various publications. What is interesting is that he writes about other writers, artists, and film figures, but it very much reads to me as a memoir of sorts. I like essays where the author merges into their subject matter, and it becomes their story of sorts. I know this drives certain readers koo-koo, but for me, it is what I love.

In parts it reminds me of Joe Brainard's "I Remember (specifically the leading essay "My 1980s") and it is always cool to read a contemporary writer commenting on the New York School of writers. A collection of essays is very much a greatest hits package. Some are stronger than others, but overall it is a very satisfying collection of Koestenbaum's work.

[Patty Gone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is portraiture through reviewing, through meditation, and much like Dave Hickey's collection, Air Guitar, this collection hits on all the author's major influences (Roland Barthes, James Schuyler, Susan Sontag, pornography, photography, Abstract Expressionism, opera, 1950's film). Koestenbaum's "all-over painting" format (most essays sliced with numbers or section dots) allows the essays to accumulate ideas, to be mediations rather than proofs. Koestenbaum looks at his subject matter from every side: he digs into their biography, his own autobiography, as well as the aesthetic object, and he attempts to understand why it pleases him, how it effects him. He cites Proust's obsession with a woman sitting far off in an opera box to justify his pop idol worship (Debbie Harry, Anna Moffo). He analyzes the star as well as the aura around them, and attempts to understand why he's caught in their webs. Koestenbaum gets his mesh of autobiography and meditation from Schuyler. Writing about the artist Forrest Bess, Koestenbaum says, "Maybe half the reason someone becomes an artist...is to experience uninterrupted solitude. The supreme craving may be for solitude, not for art." Ever the NY aesthete, Koestenbaum steps back to understand his love affair with writing, painting, and personality.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s the Warhol Polaroid of Debbie Harry on the cover that got me. It reminds me of my 1980s, too. There’s something about the style. It’s hard to see when you’re embedded in it, but with time it solidifies into something distinct. Probably because I forgot the stuff that doesn’t fit. Wayne Koestenbaum finds a way to fit a lot in MY 1980s AND OTHER ESSAYS, which isn’t really about a decade, but collects the more recent nonfiction writings by the poet and critic on an array of topics from Myra Breckinridge and the erotic ecstatic of ass to poetry and visual arts and more. It’s all written with passion and intelligence from a unique angle. What kept me away too long was my mistake in confusing Koestenbaum with Chuck Klosterman, which speaks to my dyslexia, not to any similarities between the two. At least I don’t think so. I’ve never read Klosterman because his focus seems superficial and lame, while Koestenbaum’s is deep, sometimes almost too deep. On occasion I had to wonder was his interpretation based on a deep reading of the source material or simply a feature of his creative mind going off? Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s what separates the critic boys from the critic men. He even acknowledges this in an essay before dismissing it. One thing I can’t do is dismiss Koestenbaum. He’s a hoot.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the fact that it feels overlong and that several essays did not hold my attention, there's a wealth of great work here. More than any individual piece, it is the sense of self-examination that I take away from this collection - a sense that I, as a reader and a writer, must be able to consciously understand the way that I synthesize my cultural influences. So often we just let them affect us - but it can not only show us something about ourselves but it can, I daresay, make us better consumers of culture to know exactly what it is (or to even try to understand, even if we fail) that makes us love it so much.

More at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/05...

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first time reading Koestenbaum, and from the reviews saying it isn't up to snuff, I'm glad I started here.
The essay on Lana Turner, a piece I'd been looking forward to, does go a bit overboard, undermining Cheryl Crane's queerness in the service of lurid speculations about Johnny Stompanato's oscar, but the descriptions of Deborah Harry's "Lancelot voice," and Blossom Dearie, who "gave it less in order to give it (secretly) more" are so spot on and gorgeous, you'll hear them as you turn the page. If this is a low point, I'm happy to keep going.

[Lucas Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book impulsively on Amazon over a year ago. When I started reading it this summer I knew it would be an occasional book for me. Koestenbaum is a wonderfully quirky writer. He has perspectives and insights that are funny, disturbing, and often quite moving. The personal essays and ones on poetry and writing were easy to connect with, but at least half of the book collects the author's art criticism. He also writes frequently about opera. Many of these essays were extremely interesting, but I also skipped several of them.

[Chelsea Martinez · Rating 3 out of 5]

I forgot writing like this still exists; transported back to being in college, the tiny blip in my life when I read seriously about art and started to understand the way in which scholarship that isn't scientific welcomes the personal; still confuses the hell out of me. Feels sillily 4th level recursive to comment on it any further (some of it a writer commenting on another writer's comments on a painting, for example).

[Gus]

I read it prematurely. I could not keep up with him. You can hear the obsessiveness in his writing. The photo of Debbie Harry on the front is perfect. So are his obsessions and observations. I am really in a rut with reading. No book begs to be read. I'm sad and also bored but it's been since seventh grade.

[Olivia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Koestenbaum is a skilled storyteller and essayist, and I appreciate his style. I don't think I'll be looking for more of his work, though--I flipped through this collection but never really got caught up in it.

[Thuraya]

Can't get through this one. Too dry - interesting concept told in the most un-interesting fashion ... I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy it at all. I have never just given up on a book...this is my 1st to abandon.

[Ron S · Rating 2 out of 5]

Susan Sontag, John Ashbury, Cindy Sherman, Lana Turner and Roland Barthes are just a few of the subjects in the many short essays collected here. Very academic, queer, intellectual and NYC in tone and perspective. Sprinkled with gold.

[Erin Tuzuner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The banal, hyper-literate, and celebrities experiences of Mr. Koestenbaum are endless. Endlessly fascinating, frustrating, brief, and delicious. These essays invite higher learning, voyeurism, fetish, and detachment.

[Trytten · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's pretty much the pretentious ramblings of an affluent white man... I've never read any of his other work/am not familiar with him in the slightest, and that may have affected the lens in which I read this collection of essays.

[Francine Dibacco · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I don't want to brag about my hypersusceptibility to purple and to orange, but I didn't survive the twentieth century to lie to you about my clandestine relationship to color."

[Madeleine · Rating 4 out of 5]

delicious!

[Patrick Ellis · Rating 1 out of 5]

Crap

[Alessio]

“He was a major apostle of extraneous, minor pleasures.”

Wayne Koestenbaum, winner of the literary wet T-shirt contest. The sentence as plumose spectacle: erupting into fireworks, cascading with a tickle. Essays of strict stipulations and soft stimulation: Stevensian at times; cosmophagic (caveat: a Euro-American cosmos); sustained by its gravitational orbit around the fetish object. Like all aesthetes, I seek liberation through attention and a paradise in the supplemental.

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Koestenbaum, essayist and poet, wears his influences on his sleeve.
As an essayist, his primary influences are Susan Sontag (mentioned in several essays, but especially "Susan Sontag, Cosmophage", written shortly after Sontag's death in 2004) and Roland Barthes (mentioned in almost as many essays as Sontag, but especially "In Defense of Nuance").

Susan Sontag, my prose's prime mover, ate the world. In 1963, on the subject of Sartre's Saint Genet (her finest ideas occasionally hinged on gay men), she wrote, "Corresponding to the primitive rite of anthropophagy, the eating of human beings, is the philosophical rite of cosmophagy, the eating of the world." Cosmophagic, Sontag gobbled up sensations, genres, concepts. She swallowed political and aesthetic movements. She devoured roles: diplomat, filmmaker, scourge, novelist, gadfly, essayist, night owl, bibliophile, cineaste . . . She tried to prove how much a human life - a writer's life - could include.
- "Susan Sontag, Cosmophage" (pg. 43)


A key to the mind and body of the great Roland Barthes - whose books, though they come in pieces, can't be skimmed or summarized - is the word laceration, a melodramatic synonym for wound. Barthes wasn't a masochist. But he understood agony. He knew that subjectivity - consciousness - demanded an initiator experience of being ravished: Cupid's dart takes aim at Saint Sebastian. "Where there is a wound, there is a subject": throughout Barthes's work, and certainly in A Lover's Discourse (perhaps his most aching performance), lacerations take centre stage. He wasn't histrionic about roundedness; he liked lacerations because they made appearances complex, and because they banished banalities.
- "In Defense of Nuance" (pg. 51)

As a poet, his primary influences are the New York School poets Frank O'Hara (the subject of "Frank O'Hara's Excitement"), John Ashbery (the subject of "John Ashbery's Lazy Susan"), and James Schuyler (the subject of "Epitaph on Twenty-Third Street"). Not to mention Hart Crane. "Without Crane," the author posits, "there would have been no Frank O'Hara or John Ashbery" ("Hart Crane's Gorgeousness", pg. 73)

The highest respect we can accord a work of art may be to say nothing about it. And therefore I have written virtually nothing, until now, about the poems of Frank O'Hara, though they have done more to shape my aesthetic and erotic life than any other single influence. Breaking my silence, I want to celebrate one aspect of O'Hara's work: its excited devotion to the state of excitement itself. Excitement, a quality separable from its object and catalysts, was O'Hara's stock-in-trade; excitement seems a simple matter, although, like most visceral events (breathing, sleeping, eating, shitting), being excited can be broken down into a thousand parts, episodes that elude the taxonomist's grasp.
- "Frank O'Hara's Excitement" (pg. 75)


A John Ashbery poem behaves like a lazy Susan. Spin it an get whatever condiment you want, without having to say "pardon my reach."
His poems offer a model of writing-against-fatigue, a method of incorporating lethargy in the compositional act: "I'm too tired to write" and "I want to write" can coexist, sing together , in utterances equally industrious and dithering. How hard down an Ashbury poem work? Very hard. Not hard. Call it the lazy Susan sublime.
- "John Ashbery's Lazy Susan" (pg. 84)


Quoth a plaque on Manhattan's Twenty Third Street:

 DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF
 JAMES SCHUYLER
 POET AND PULITZER PRIZE WINNING 
 AUTHOR OF THE MORNING OF THE POEM AMONG
 OTHER WORKS, WHO LIVED AT THE CHELSEA HOTEL
 FROM 1979 UNTIL HIS DEATH IN 1991 
 PRESENTED BY 
 FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX
 JULY 1993. 

On a public epitaph, words divided into centred lines, broken, resemble poetry, if only visually.
- "Epitaph on Twenty-Third Street" (pg. 95)

Koestenbaum's subject matter shows a remarkable range. Indeed, the author is an appreciator of the arts. He, like Sontag, aspires to the highest rank of cosmophage. He consumes opera singers, painters, and filmmakers. In light of which, the collection reads like a menu for a six course meal. The first course including the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the opera singer Anna Moffo. The second course: Sigmund Freud and Elizabeth Hardwick. The third course: Lana Turner, Cary Grant, and Brigitte Bardot. The fourth course: Diane Arbus and Andy Warhol. The fifth course: Debbie Harry and Marcel Proust.

The sixth course, however, is a notable departure. (Dessert?) Rather than a menu with completed dishes, the author offers the reader a number of recipes. The essays become interactive as the reader is encouraged to take the recipes and do with them what they will. The recipes may be a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the author's process, they may be connect-the-dots, or they may be "Play-Doh Fun Factories". In any case, they are thoroughly amusing!

Write a Jean Rhys imitation. Include five examples of understatement. Include one hyperbole. Include one sin. Structure the piece not as a narrative but as a definition or a lesson.
*
Write seven paragraphs of self-praise. Use no adverbs, or few.
*
Write a history of your neighbours. In the middle, ask questions of an artwork, and intrude a bodily urge as a way to interrupt or cut open the prose.
*
Make a list of abandoned writing projects. Say why you abandoned them.
*
Make a list of media you gave up (e.g., watercolours). Say why.
*
Describe five unlikely locations for the erotic.
*
Discuss a specific prescription drug's relation to politics.
*
Write about a crime. Use repetitions. End the first paragraph with a surprise.
*
Make a list of worries. Interview a famous person. Combine the two.
*
Imitate David Antin.
*
Discuss a shopping quandary.
*
Deflation: write about a "scene" that's supposed to be exciting but actually isn't.
*
Quote a line from a novel or a poem. Selfishly manipulate and misuse the quote.
*
Follow Gertrude Stein's direction: "Dismantle a prevailing shawl or pleasure."
*
From memory, describe a scene from a movie you haven't watched in years. Then, see the movie again, and write a second description of the scene.
*
Respond to Fernando Pessoa's work but don't mention his name. Include one dream, one movie title, one embarrassment, one scientific term, one capital city, one real name, one fictitious name, your birth date.
*
Use anaphora to write a portrait of someone you know very well, too well.
*
Write ten blurbs. For ten different books. In the manner of Marianne Moore.
*
Write ten blurbs. For the same book. In the manner of Marianne Moore.
*
Write about a colour without mentioning its name. Include a sentence you enjoyed or hated from Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour.
*
Interpret a Lorine Neidecker poem. Go as far as possible into the absurd.
*
Write about the occult.
*
Write about utterly rejecting your influences and your environment.
*
Write about a town, not here, where you wouldn't mind living.
*
Write about aa witch or warlock you know. Use as many street names as possible. Include names of businesses.
*
Write about disorientation. Include twenty words you've never used before. Among them should be at least three verbs.
*
Write a rebuttal to a Laura Riding poem. Structure your piece as a curt dialogue - stichomythia.
*
Write an application letter for a job. Make the letter a covert defines of a literary movement.
- Assignment (pg. 298 - 300)

Reading Koestenbaum's essays has been a steady source of inspiration. I strongly recommend that any reader of Koestenbaum enhance their reading of his essays by indulging in his various references, whether or not they are directly related to the subjects of his essays. For example, Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" (from "Epitaph on Twenty-Third Street"), Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (from "The Rape of Rusty"), or Douglas Sirk's The Imitation of Life (from "Why Art Is Always Emotional").

Koestenbaum has introduced me to a number of curiosities. Things I may never have discovered otherwise. For example, filmmaker Ryan Trecartin (in "Situation Hacker", the title derived from a line in one of Trecartin's films: "I define myself as a situation hacker.") I must say that this particular essay, however well the author articulates his affinity for the filmmaker, overlooked many apt references. Which is surprising, considering how prominently the author uses such references in his other essays. For example, It would have been apt to compare Trecartin's films to Jean-Luc Godard circa 1960-1967, David Lynch's Inland Empire, Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job!, or Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments. If nothing else, these examples support the Zeitgeist theory. The article (written in 2009), however, couldn't have predicted the relevance of relevant references such as The Truman Show Delusion, and the film based on the syndrome Reality.

Furthermore, reading Koestenbaum's essays has inspired me to reconsider works that I may have dismissed or otherwise neglected. For example, James Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem , Roberto Bolaño (I loved him when I first read him but my fanaticism led me to stray), or Play-Doh (from "Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics").

[Myles Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

can't get over how excited i was to finally find a critical theory fangirl in a world of critical theory fuckheads. really, some of these essays could just have been titled "OMG SONTAG!!!", "BARTHES 4EVR!!!", "EVE SEDGEWICK : :-D". most people who drop names like this can't convince me they've read past the introductions - and almost nobody focuses on the giddy pleasure of how these writers reorient the world of art and ideas into a more explorable, less easily explainable place.

kostenbaum's approach - circling around what it is that drives him crazy in a poem, a painting, a performer, an idea; getting so drugged and giddy on language and description and association that he don't care if he's made or missed his point - is so much more revealing of both his subject and of how much criticism itself is an artistic practice (whose closest relation, koestenbaum writes, should be poetry, not prose).

also excited to read a man both unabashed about his obsessions with female celebrities (lana turner, deborah harry, opera divas!) but also probing about where such attatchments might come from and how they might paste over these personas in the act of pinning them up. it's a needed counter to the prevailing assumption in some stratas of male subculture that sensitive, aesthetic men have some mystical proprietary right to claim talented, famous women as their own household gods (and, when the spell is broken, or when other famous women don't meet this standard, also demean, deride, dehumanize). only ever encountered this kind of critique in my favorite essay from john water's role models, where he explains how he got over his ironic investment in his idea of "the Manson girls" by actually befriending the incarcerated Leslie von Houten.

(all of which in turn inspires me to try to account for my own fixations on gena rowlands, shelley duvall, all my girl groups, etc.)

very happy to be alive and reading in a time when critics like kostenbaum, or hilton als, or sarah nicole prickett, are challenging the assumption that criticism is impersonal, expository, unambiguous, focused on fitting its subject into some tired interprative frame or tallying up some pissant list of pros and cons.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

finished in a post-twenty-one-hour all-nighter daze, distracted by how perfectly the cover and the quimby's bookmark i was using (found and taken from a graphic novel in powell's) matched with the fabiana's bundt cake i was eating on a blue-and-white china plate. it was almost unbearably charming, alliterated, arranged, which is sort of you feel after reading a lot of wayne koestenbaum at once. which is, like, fine! if you're reading koestenbaum without making peace that his work is like entirely about his subjectivity, about the experience of being wayne koestenbaum experiencing a work of art, then you're reading him wrong. it's not about learning from his conclusions so much as learning from the perspective from which he reaches his conclusions. however his conclusions about susan sontag in his essay "susan sontag, cosmophage" are almost entirely correct, and i used to go to the co-op and pick up this book and reread that essay every couple months or so. it's nice to own it now.

[Jennifer Irving · Rating 5 out of 5]

everything is important/meaningful even if you're not sure why, there is at least 5 essays in this book that focus on Lana Turner, maybe even just her hair, and some of my favourite people like Roland Barthes and Debbie Harry, as well as taking markers of queer culture like passing and using them as a structure for cultural analysis. The best essay concerns my number one girl, Susan Sontag, whom Koestenbaum calls a “cosmophage,” or someone committed to “eating” the world by experiencing (and making art about) as many different facets of life as she could. I need to read it again - perhaps immediately. It makes me excited to go and immerse myself.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently discovered this author and I love him. He writes sort of cultural criticism but his use of language is so precisely perfect and he's extremely funny. I esp liked the essays on Lana turner, Susan Sontag, Debbie Harry, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol and Diane Arbus. He's an intellectual who analyzes pop culture among lots of other stuff--including poetry, classical music and other writers. I didn't rate it higher only because about a third if these essays concern material I have no knowledge of, so reading a critique, regardless of how eloquent and funny, wouldn't mean much to me.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idea-wise, this is definitely Wayne Koestenbaum lite. It's also really scattered thematically; the only strong section was Part IV, with its impressionistic close readings of various works of art.

The most maddening part of this book, however, is that it has NOTHING to do with the 80s. The essays were nearly all written in the 2000s, and there are barely even glancing mentions of the decade -- except the titular opening essay, which is basically just a really hipster diary entry.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love some of Koestenbaum's older books so much that I still compulsively buy everything he writes. I think this is maybe where I finally get off the train, because while there are some amazing pieces here (i.e., his memorial to Sontag), there is just so much that seems like it could have been markedly better with tighter editing. Like the Ryan Trecartin piece starts out so sharp but then it just goes on and on.

[Alex Wexelman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too erudite. I quite enjoy criticism, however, Koestenbaum dredges up the dustiest words in his vocabulary and thus causes his already opaque points of reference to founder under the heavy pages of the dictionary to which you'll inevitably be clinging to for dear life. "The Unbearable Blightness of Mick Jagger's Nipple Hair, as Understood Through the Taxonomy of Susan Sontag's Theory of Photography." All right, I get it man, you're smarter than me, you happy now?

[Rafael Pajaro - Rafa · Rating 3 out of 5]

FINALLY finished reading this. I'm SOO rusty with theory and criticism since college even if it is on the light side. Gave me a lot to think about, pay attention to, or simply be dismissive of/distracted by re: my own writing or cultural consumption. Koestenbaum is a very stylish writer.

[Monica]

read only bits incl. chapter on Lana Turner.

[dc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am better and smarter for having read this.

[Yuliya · Rating 2 out of 5]

the Blondie essay was really great...