My 1980s Other Essays

Author : Wayne Koestenbaum
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 0374533776
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My 1980s and Other Essays written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new book of essays by the cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum, author of The Queen's Throat and Jackie Under My Skin"--

Author : Wayne Koestenbaum
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1593765959
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Figure It Out written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Whatever his subject―favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O’Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence." ––Parul Sehgal, The New York Times “Toward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.” Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and “assignments” that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger’s leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for “stranger”; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend’s stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: “Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.” “Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.” “Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.” Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from “one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today” (John Waters).

Author : Allan Bérubé
Publisher : UNC Press Books
ISBN 13 : 0807877980
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My Desire for History written by Allan Bérubé and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology pays tribute to Allan Berube (1946-2007), a self-taught historian and MacArthur Fellow who was a pioneer in the study of lesbian and gay history in the United States. Best known for his Lambda Literary Award-winning book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (1990), Berube also wrote extensively on the history of sexual politics in San Francisco and on the relationship between sexuality, class, and race. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, who were close colleagues and friends of Berube, have selected sixteen of his most important essays, including hard-to-access articles and unpublished writing. The book provides a retrospective on Berube's life and work while it documents the emergence of a grassroots lesbian and gay community history movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Taken together, the essays attest to the power of history to mobilize individuals and communities to create social change.

Author : Wendell Berry
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780865470262
Total Pages : 340 pages
Book Rating : 4.6X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Recollected Essays, 1965-1980 written by Wendell Berry and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These eleven essays, selected by the author from five previous collections, provides us with a single volume tracing Mr. Berry's desire to 'make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place.'

Author : Wayne Koestenbaum
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781932698589
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Notes on Glaze written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 2010, the Brooklyn-based quarterly magazine Cabinet invited poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum to begin writing a regular column. Entitled "Legend," the column had a highly unusual premise. Every three months, the editors of the magazine would ask Koestenbaum to write one or more extended captions for a single photograph with which they had provided him; drawn from obscure vernacular, commercial and scientific sources, all of the images were unfamiliar to the author. After 18 installments, Koestenbaum concluded his column in the winter of 2015. Notes on Glaze, featuring an introductory essay by the author, collects all the "Legend" columns, as well as their accompanying photographs. Refusing the distancing language of critical disinterest, Koestenbaum's columns always locate the author in intimate proximity to the subjects portrayed in the photographs and to the impossibly variegated cast of characters--ranging from Debbie Reynolds to Duccio, the Dalai Lama to Barbra Streisand; from Hegel to Pee-wee Herman, and Emily Dickinson to Cicciolina--that pass through these texts. Wayne Koestenbaum (born 1958), a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, has published 17 books of poetry, criticism and fiction, including My 1980s & Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point Press, 2012) and The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012). His most recent book of poetry, The Pink Trance Notebooks, was published in 2015 by Nightboat Books.

Author : Edmund Morris
Publisher : National Geographic Books
ISBN 13 : 081298322X
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book This Living Hand written by Edmund Morris and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the multitalented biographer Edmund Morris (who writes with equal virtuosity about Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) was a schoolboy in colonial Kenya, one of his teachers told him, “You have the most precious gift of all—originality.” That quality is abundantly evident in this selection of essays. They cover forty years in the life of a maverick intellectual who can be, at whim, astonishingly provocative, self-mockingly funny, and richly anecdotal. (The title essay, a tribute to Reagan in cognitive decline, is poignant in the extreme.) Whether Morris is analyzing images of Barack Obama or the prose style of President Clinton, or exploring the riches of the New York Public Library Dance Collection, or interviewing the novelist Nadine Gordimer, or proposing a hilarious “Diet for the Musically Obese,” a continuous cross-fertilization is going on in his mind. It mixes the cultural pollens of Africa, Britain, and the United States, and propogates hybrid flowers—some fragrant, some strange, some a shock to conventional sensibilities. Repeatedly in This Living Hand, Morris celebrates the physicality of artistic labor, and laments the glass screen that today’s e-devices interpose between inspiration and execution. No presidential biographer has ever had so literary a “take” on his subjects: he discerns powers of poetic perception even in the obsessively scientific Edison. Nor do most writers on music have the verbal facility to articulate, as Morris does, what it is about certain sounds that soothe the savage breast. His essay on the pathology of Beethoven’s deafness breaks new ground in suggesting that tinnitus may explain some of the weird aural effects in that composer’s works. Masterly monographs on the art of biography, South Africa in the last days of apartheid, the romance of the piano, and the role of imagination in nonfiction are juxtaposed with enchanting, almost unclassifiable pieces such as “The Bumstitch: Lament for a Forgotten Fruit” (Morris suspects it may have grown in the Garden of Eden); “The Anticapitalist Conspiracy: A Warning” (an assault on The Chicago Manual of Style); “Nuages Gris: Colors in Music, Literature, and Art”; and the uproarious “Which Way Does Sir Dress?”, about ordering a suit from the most expensive tailor in London. Uniquely illustrated with images that the author describes as indispensable to his creative process, This Living Hand is packed with biographical insights into such famous personalities as Daniel Defoe, Henry Adams, Mark Twain, Evelyn Waugh, Truman Capote, Glenn Gould, Jasper Johns, W. G. Sebald, and Winnie the Pooh—not to mention a gallery of forgotten figures whom Morris lovingly restores to “life.” Among these are the pianist Ferruccio Busoni, the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, the novelist James Gould Cozzens, and sixteen so-called “Undistinguished Americans,” contributors to an anthology of anonymous memoirs published in 1902. Reviewing that book for The New Yorker, Morris notes that even the most unlettered persons have, on occasion, “power to send forth surprise flashes, illuminating not only the dark around them but also more sophisticated shadows—for example, those cast by public figures who will not admit to private failings, or by philosophers too cerebral to state a plain truth.” The author of This Living Hand is not an ordinary person, but he too sends forth surprise flashes, never more dazzlingly than in his final essay, “The Ivo Pogorelich of Presidential Biography.”

Author : David Malet Armstrong
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Nature of Mind, and Other Essays written by David Malet Armstrong and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Harry Elmer Barnes
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Revisionism, a Key to Peace and Other Essays written by Harry Elmer Barnes and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Wayne Koestenbaum
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 0374709769
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book My 1980s & Other Essays written by Wayne Koestenbaum and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 lodestones: 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.

Author : Phillip Lopate
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0525436278
Total Pages : 929 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Glorious American Essay written by Phillip Lopate and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 929 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate "Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves—sometimes critically—to American values. We see the Puritans, the Founding Fathers and Mothers, and the stars of the American Renaissance struggle to establish a national culture. A grand tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity. Lopate has cast his net wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, literary, polemical, autobiographical, and humorous essays. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is a dazzling overview of the riches of the American essay.