“No one took this further, with more imagination and daring…At a time when American groups would often dress down—affluent suburban kids disguised as Appalachian farmers or Canadian lumberjacks – Bowie quite deliberately dressed up.” David Bowie’s sartorial legacy.
The Man Who Clothed the World
“The void was me.”
Recommended Reading: an excerpt from Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss’s The Desert Places.
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Paris, I love you
There’s an excerpt of Rosecrans Baldwin’s new memoir in GQ. Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down comes out next week!
Disgrace
Do you think J.M. Coetzee‘s Disgrace should be made into a movie starring John Malkovich? Someone does–see the trailer here.
Walking the Cigar
We all have our obsessions. A friend of mine moved to New York City about a year ago and has made it his mission to catch a glimpse of Gay Talese taking his cigar for a walk. He’s been unsuccessful thus far.
Reading Tonight at Housing Works
New York-area readers are invited to come tonight to Housing Works bookstore in SoHo, where I’ll be appearing at 7 p.m. alongside the Norwegian wunderkind Johan Harstad. We’ll be reading from and discussing A Field Guide to the North American Family and Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Music courtesy of Brooklyn’s The Sweaters (not to be confused with The Cardigans.)
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Trigger Warning: Literature
Students at the University of California Santa Barbara, Rutgers, Oberlin, and others have been requesting “trigger warning” labels on literature from The Great Gatsby to Huck Finn. In The Guardian, University College London Professor John Mullan snipes, “You might as well put a label on English literature saying: warning – bad stuff happens here.”
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Extremely High Dive
When Electric Literature tells me that Jonathan Lee has “unleashed a literary bombshell of a novel,” I set aside my skepticism of the hyperbolic and give it a look. Lee’s High Dive “asks us to look at the plethora of thought and self-indulgence—that beautiful minutia—that flourishes in an unharmed life, and to consider how much generous freedom there is in nonviolence.”
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