Wayne Koestenbaum returns with a zesty and hyper-literate
collection of personal and critical essays
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
lodestones: literary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolano, 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.
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