Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics

by Wayne Koestenbaum

"Cleavage is very 1960 it shows off the new permissiveness. (Look! we can reveal most of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts!) Cleavage is not nudity. Cleavage is a 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.

Genres: Essays

338 pages, Paperback

First published February 29, 2000

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

[Grover]

This book is the perfect combination of a wide-and-widely queer thinker, a deep valuation of fashion and great critical reviewing of literature and culture. You're reading about a gay man's relationship to cleavage in his life, and a concise examination of emily dickinson's writing as "private democracy."

It's totally hot, it's smart, it makes me laugh, it makes me a better reader and writer.

[Sam]

Glancing.

Read "Reading":

Here, in summary, are the phrases that matter to me, and that crystallize a chill, unprofitable, ghostly aesthetic, the poetics of indifference, which I have begun, slowly, to pursue, though I know it will always elude me: Couldn't care less. You didn't care a damn anyway. Gradually I came to worry about my mother less and less. I stopped imagining. There is no penny, no slot. The light, if any, appears. He seemed very moved. I've always felt that I've written more by not writing than writing.

and

Ask of your own life the same hard question: what if you stare fervently into your own mind and discover nothing there?

[Erin Tuzuner]

A surreal blend of intellectualism, personal remembrance, celebrity, and fashion.

[Kkee]

Don't know but I've decided to stalk him; suspect he would understand.