Background
Koestenbaum, Wayne was born on September 20, 1958 in San Jose, California, United States.
("Cleavage is very 1960s: it shows off the new permissiven...)
"Cleavage is very 1960s: it shows off the new permissiveness. (Look! we can reveal most of Elizabeth Taylor's breasts!) Cleavage is not nudity. Cleavage is a promise: 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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345434609/?tag=2022091-20
(More meditative, more provocative than his previous, much...)
More meditative, more provocative than his previous, much-praised work, The Milk of Inquiry is Koestenbaum's strongest collection to date. Its most ambitious gesture is a long poem, "Metamorphoses (Masked Ball)," a sequence of 115 bawdy, speedy sonnets, spoken by mythological figures ghosting as historical personages-among them, Orpheus speaking as Elvis, Proserpina speaking as Freud, Adonis speaking as Cleopatra, and Daphne speaking as Wilde. Short lyrics that show this opulent writer at his most austere and a long autobiographical poem round out the collection.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0892552395/?tag=2022091-20
( "These latest poems reach swoony, unforeseen heights of...)
"These latest poems reach swoony, unforeseen heights of mental raucousness and worshipful style."—Dennis Cooper "With a nod to Woody Allen's story 'The Whore of Mensa' Koestenbaum proffers that largest of sex organs—the mind—and entices with erudite and smuttily trenchant wit. Charming, teasing, brainy and slightly Seder-Masochistic, this collection asks that age old question, 'is Crisco Kosher?' The answer might surprise you."—D.A. Powell Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of nonfiction, two books of poetry, a novel, and the libretto for an opera, JACKIE O.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1885586434/?tag=2022091-20
(An intimate depiction of the visionary who revolutionized...)
An intimate depiction of the visionary who revolutionized the art worldA man who created portraits of the rich and powerful, Andy Warhol was one of the most incendiary figures in American culture, a celebrity whose star shone as brightly as those of the Marilyns and Jackies whose likenesses brought him renown. Images of his silvery wig and glasses are as famous as his renderings of soup cans and Brillo boxes-controversial works that elevated commerce to high art. Warhol was an enigma: a partygoer who lived with his mother, an inarticulate man who was a great aphorist, an artist whose body of work sizzles with sexuality but who considered his own body to be a source of shame. In critic and poet Wayne Koestenbaum's dazzling look at Warhol's life, the author inspects the roots of Warhol's aesthetic vision, including the pain that informs his greatness, and reveals the hidden sublimity of Warhol's provocative films. By looking at many facets of the artist's oeuvre-films, paintings, books, "Happenings"-Koestenbaum delivers a thought-provoking picture of pop art's greatest icon.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1497699894/?tag=2022091-20
( Jackie Under My Skin is a passionate investigation of t...)
Jackie Under My Skin is a passionate investigation of the ways Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis transformed America's definition of celebrity, identity, and style. In a gallery of fantasies and tableaux, Wayne Koestenbaum explains the late first lady's hold on Americans by examining the myths and metaphors that we've attached to her. An exuberant paean to a great star, Jackie Under My Skin is also a meditation on fame, mortality, and the difficulty of defining desire.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312429231/?tag=2022091-20
( Hotel Theory is two books in one: a meditation on the m...)
Hotel Theory is two books in one: a meditation on the meaning of hotels, and a dime novel (Hotel Women) featuring Lana Turner and Liberace. Typical of Wayne Koestenbaum’s invigoratingly inventive style, the two books one fiction, one nonfiction run concurrently, in twin columns, and the articles a,” an,” and the” never appear. The nonfiction ruminations on hotels are divided into eight dossiers, composed of short takes on the presence of hotels in the author’s dreams as well as in literature, film, and history. Guest stars include everyone from Oscar Wilde to Marilyn Monroe. Hotel Theory gives (divided) voice to an aesthetic of hyperaesthesia, of yearning. It is an oblique manifesto, the place where writing disappears. A new mode of theorizing in fiction, in fragment, through quotation and palimpsest arises in this dazzling work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1933368691/?tag=2022091-20
( Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove’...)
Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove’s last recital in Europe from his planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, "the town of dead water." At home in tiny East Kills, NY, Theo begins jotting in 25 notebooks, purchased all at once and addressed to his mother. Theo’s wife, aside from servicing two of Theo’s twenty daily erections, will have nothing to do with him. The other eighteentaken care of by male hustlers, random strangers in YMCA locker-rooms and naked piano studentscontribute to Theo’s sense of dissolution as his "comeback" approaches. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960’s, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira’s guidance towards one final, full celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by piano playing relatives, prostitutes, muses and manipulators; poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family and popular culture.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932360530/?tag=2022091-20
Koestenbaum, Wayne was born on September 20, 1958 in San Jose, California, United States.
Bachelor, Harvard University, 1980. Master of Arts, Johns Hopkins University, 1981. Doctor of Philosophy, Princeton University, 1988.
Associate professor English, Yale University, New Haven, 1988-1996. Professor English, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York City, since 1997.
(An intimate depiction of the visionary who revolutionized...)
( Jackie Under My Skin is a passionate investigation of t...)
( Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove’...)
( Hotel Theory is two books in one: a meditation on the m...)
(More meditative, more provocative than his previous, much...)
(This book should be of interest to students of English li...)
( "These latest poems reach swoony, unforeseen heights of...)
("Cleavage is very 1960s: it shows off the new permissiven...)
(Book by Koestenbaum, Wayne)
(Book by Koestenbaum, Wayne)
(Book by Koestenbaum, Wayne)
(1st)