(via ryan seacrest on instagram)

whilst i haven’t the time to perform a full close reading on this momentous moment, i do want to draw it to your attention for two reasons…

one specific query: ryan seacrest is aging WELL, right? or is it just me? do i have PhD goggles on because at this point there have been a few pictures i’ve seen where even aristotle onassis looks hot, so it totally could just be me. my tastes are a bit warped at present.

and one more general observation: few things in life or equally compelling in textual and video form. justin bieber’s recent interview with ryan seacrest is one of those rare things that is different yet equally amazing in both formats.

this is the video… (PLEASE NOTE: seacrest’s reaction to the fact that bieber has been working with a man named pooh bear is priceless)

this is a partial transcription…

Bieber: The title is called “What Do You Mean?”

Seacrest: “What Do You Mean?”

Bieber: “What Do You Mean?”

Seacrest: “Now, that’s something, that like, when you say that to somebody, like, you don’t understand what they’re saying to you? Right?”

Bieber: Well, like, girls are often like, they’re just flip-floppy. They say something and then they mean something else, you know? So it’s like, I want to, like: “What do you mean?”

Seacrest: Do you find when you ask somebody, a girl, what do you mean, that they tell you what they mean? Or do they still not always tell you what they’re meaning?

Bieber: They don’t always really tell me.

Seacrest: Like you’re supposed to read their mind sometimes.

Bieber: Yeah. I mean, I don’t really know. That’s why I’m asking, “What do you mean?” You know?

i mean, really. this is gold.

why hello, again.

so, fyi, this is not a new rumor. but because it’s been a whole year since this…

and even longer since this… mayhaps you have forgot.

lucky for you, i am in the middle of JACKIE: THE PHD, and i’m also in the middle of THE SEX LIVES OF DEAD PEOPLE: THE CONFERENCE PAPER, and so one afternoon i actually sat down and made a list to ascertain where we are and so’s have a running tally and i can tell you with some authority that where we are now, vis-à-vis MEN ALLEGED TO HAVE SHARED JACKIE’S BED, is this:

Bobby and Teddy Kennedy, Gianni Agnelli, Rudolph Nureyev, Marlon Brando, William Holden, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Charles Addams, Dr. Christian Barnard, Peter Cook, Pete Hamill, Robert Lowell, and Frank Sinatra.

AAAAAAAAAAAND according to the daily mail, that is “to name only a few.” i, for one, am still waiting for elvis, burt reynolds and ronald reagan. because those would actually be new gossip.

june 1975

how jackie went from being, in liz smith’s 1974 estimation, a woman who loved “ari’s rough and ready ways” to in sheilah graham’s mid-70s evaluation, “not a passionate woman” to being, by 2014, according to the daily mail, “a passionate woman who needed the closeness of men every bit as much as her philandering  husband Jack Kennedy needed other women” is one of the great questions of our time, fyi. (please, some future person, write JACKIE’S TABLOID SEX LIFE: THE PHD. i beg you.)

also, fyi, if you research mid-century gossip for any length of time you realize that basically 99.9% of the “shocking” and “new” gossip stories about mid-century stars are totally old news. someone, somewhere, has said them before. to such an extent that it is dispiriting that our modern world is not more creative.

but sinatra. let’s talk about sinatra. who knew jackie because he knew jfk.

but let’s talk specifically taraborelli’s claims about sinatra and jackie as recounted in the daily mail.

UNITED STATES – APRIL 16: Jacqueline Kennedy with Frank Sinatra at Jilly’s (Photo by NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)

sadly for all of us, the episode taraborelli recounts is not from this 16 april 1974 encounter where jackie went to sinatra’s concert in providence and then sinatra came back to new york with her and they met up with ari at jilly’s and sinatra wore this huge-ass honking medallion and an especially friar tuck hairdo. alas.

PKT4594-341110
JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS
1974
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Frank Sinatra leaving Jilly’s in New York after Jackie had attended Sinatra’s ‘COME BACK’ concert in Providence R. I. They flew together to Providence and back in his rpivate jet.

though please note how the pre-fab caption here totally obliterates ari’s presence at jilly’s and makes it seem like jackie and sinatra were on a date. fyi, they were not.

though this is- surprise!– what the movie mags did as well…

taraborelli’s source said that this all went down in 1975, which would be this:

The Night of The Visible Bra Black Checked Jumpsuit.

and yes, i’m conforming to gender norms by limiting the definition of the night to jackie’s clothes, but that is only because frankie’s clothes (and i have resisted the temptation to call him that this whole post but I CAN RESIST NO LONGER!!!) are harder to pin down with any degree of historical accuracy.

was it a blue suit or a grey suit? looks like the retouchers over at bettman/corbin archive got a little over-eager with the microsoft paint. so yeah. ok. The Night of The Visible Bra Black Striped Jumpsuit and The Suit of a Different Color. that is the night in question.

and, according to taraborelli, “it was at this point that Sinatra had a well- publicised dinner date with Jackie Kennedy Onassis in New York.”

this did happen. from what i can tell, it happened in september. it was reported at the time.

because you have to read 12 versions of the same story to assemble the collage of details, let’s go over to AP, which tells us what UPI does not, which is that they were not alone…

and NOTHING IS AS IT SEEMS: her jumpsuit was green.

on 24th september 1975, the gossip earl wilson observes that, since this was jackie’s first appearance in a cafe in a while (ari had died the previous march) it was likely that this appearance would “undoubtedly inspire many stories and articles about the new jackie beginning a whole new life.” a trend he seems to have tried to gotten a jump on by declaring this:

earl wilson’s proclamations are nothing if not under-stated.

come october, dorothy manners chimed in to tell everyone to calm the hell down because jackie and frankie had been friends for ages…

BOOM.

so let’s go back to this picture of them in their clothes of various colors accompanied by the guy in the elvis glasses…

and consider the rumor of jackie and frankie, version 2015.

the article is actually hardly about jackie, despite the headline being entirely about jackie. and PROPS TO THEM it is heavily cushioned in supposables and probablys…

in theory, one could argue this anecdote is double-sourced, because the second sinatra friend attests to “feelings,” BUT. when we break this down, what do we have?

what we have is sinatra bragging to two people that he slept with a famous woman. and, actually, the first one- whiting- wasn’t asking sinatra himself. earlier in the article, whiting is called one of sinatra’s “palls,” but here he simply recalls sinatra being asked by sinatra’s friends. this could be something whiting overheard. it could also, just as easily, be a story that was recounted to him after the fact. to parse the sentence structure: he’s recalling sinatra being asked something by other people. it does not specify that he heard sinatra being asked himself, nor that he himself heard sinatra’s reply.

i’m not saying sinatra didn’t brag. i do not know whether or not they slept together. i don’t even think it matters, though i would mention that kitty kelley has written biographies of both jackie and frankie and, if memory serves, never suggested such a thing, and i don’t know about you, but i don’t think we live in a world where kitty kelley would miss this.

but the point i’m making here is that this is essentially the story of some dude’s locker room bragging. and that things are never so clear cut as the daily mail’s headlines would have us believe.

this is a world where even the color of their clothes is open to interpretation. nothing is certain. nothing is true.

except the one thing of which we can be truly certain: these stories will go on and on and on and as they go on and on and on we will be pushed further and further away from who these people might have been. and maybe that’s ok. that is, after all, the nature of gossip. but it’s rather sad too.

i write about real people so i would think that. but still, think of all we miss…

as you may or may not know, i’m pretty much a huge big deal in the world of developing and casting lifetime movies that will never be made.

(via lifetime)

(and HOLY SMOKES, their new logo really raises the stakes, non? or is it just because i spend all my life and all my time thinking about history and the passage of time? and so the “your life. your time.” bit reads as a threat, which is not, i think, what the marketing geniuses who developed this had in mind.)

just to recap the legacy of potential PROGRAMMING GOLD i’ve brought forth simply in the last 2 1/2 years (whilst also doing my PhD, i might add, so IMAGINE what i could do were i doing this full time…):

connie britton stars in SHATTERED DREAMZ: The Duchess Fergie story, A Lifetime Original Television Event.

‘I’M INCREASINGLY DEPRESSED & MY LOVE LIFE IS IN RUINS’: The Macaulay Culkin Story, A Lifetime Television Event starring Charlie Hunnam.

Truman Capote: Just Desserts… The Lifetime Movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

THE PETER O’TOOLE: I NEVER WON AN OSCAR UNTIL THEY GAVE ME ONE LIFETIME MOVIE starring chace crawford.

plus, OF COURSE, fifty shades of aqua: starring ryan lochte as ryan lochte in the ryan lochte story, a lifetime television spectacular…

(via instagram)

alas, lifetime doesn’t listen to me and they are taking their programming in a different albeit interesting direction, as the new york times now reports.

let’s all step back and give a slow clap for this headline…

(via nytimes.com)

first, for the heavy lifting the word “unauthorized” is doing here. because, let’s be real. the word “unauthorized” is trying to excite us and stir up trouble when really all it does is signal that this is the lifetime equivalent of a VH1 behind the music in which the artist being profiled refused to be interviewed.

second, props to the NYT for the hysteria of the verb choice. “commits” has a certain THERE IS NO TURNING BACK RINGS HAVE BEEN EXCHANGED vibe, like we are all in this together from here on out. YOU GUYS, till ETERNITY, lifetime is hithertofor shackled to the production of television movies based on the production of television shows that were cancelled 20 years ago. a commitment that seems particularly ill-advised given the unattractiveness of the header pic.

look at this photograph!

(via nytimes.com)

my initial assumption was that these are the two people in charge over at lifetime who are forging this commitment to unauthorized movies and, due to their high commitment level and lack of authorization, they are concerned.

because, in combination with the headline, that scenario kinda makes sense.

and because, i think we can all agree, this equation is not one of equals:

(ABC Photo Archives/Getty Images/Lifetime via E!)

it is HOLLYWOOD. dreamland of illusions and magic. seriously riddle me this: WHY DOES HOLLYWOOD SUCK SO BAD AT FAKE HAIR???

i absolutely refuse to believe that is the best wig they could procure for someone who’s supposed to be channelling john stamos sex god.

never. i repeat, NEVER, would rebecca donaldson katsopolis have put up with that wig.

anyhoo, historical background: so last year, lifetime did a saved by the bell behind the scenes movie. which i spent the 31-second duration of the trailer laughing at…

then literally never thought about again (because, again, WIGS. EYEBROWS. all of the fundamentals of impersonation = wrong), which is saying something given that i spend my life thinking about such things.

this television movie had middling ratings, apparently, but those middling ratings were from a new demographic, and so lifetime has decided to milk that demo for all its worth and there’s 90201 and melrose place movies soon to come. (i predict buffy will follow. would to god they’d do dr. quinn.)

as the NYT notes, in MAJOR Pedantic Man fashion, this is to do with nostalgia.

(via nytimes.com)

this is not surprising because apparently: “Nostalgia, specifically for TV shows from the late 1980s and early ’90s, is at a fever pitch.”

given that the NYT’s is noticing this and they are not exactly ever the first girl at the dance when it comes to noticing cultural trends and are usually anywhere from 3 months to 3 years behind the times (AHEM), we can imagine that the aforesaid nostalgia has been building for awhile now.

(midnight in paris, © 2011)

adam gopnik has an amaze theory on this. go HERE. read it. then come back to me…

did you read it? if not, basically, he argues there’s a revival of the culture of 40-years prior, which he sees as signaling that the people who were children then have reached positions of power and are producing contemporary culture that reflects their nostalgia for the simpler times when they were young. (it’s a nuanced argument. i’ve very crudely reduced it’s complexities there. go read it in full.)

(midnight in paris, © 2011)

to this: BIG YES. though gopnik doesn’t delve into two things that are rather ginormo in our thinking about this. which are the everyday conditions surrounding the people being nostalgic for a given time and the broader historical context.

(midnight in paris, © 2011)

(midnight in paris, © 2011)

in this specific case of lifetime’s full house/90210/saved by the bell nostalgia, this nostalgia could signal a couple of things, though attempting to quantify them immediately wanders into murky territory because any generalization breaks down. so, for instance, i could say that the people my age remember watching these shows after school- and i’m talking full house and saved by the bell here- and now a lot of us have kids who are hitting elementary school and closing in on the age that we were then. so there’s a nostalgia having to do with a cross-generational cultural hand-me-downs, if you will.

more broadly, this nostalgia for the pop culture of the late 80s and early 90s could also signal a longing for “simpler times,” in light of ongoing military engagements, perceived international threats, etc.

(midnight in paris, © 2011)

i’m currently exploring a very strange revival of the 1950s during the summer of 1972, which seems a useful parallel here- particularly given the 50s twin concerns of consumerism and communism have echoes in the period of the 80s and 90s being evoked now.

(via google books)

in summer of 1972, it was the release of grease and, as life called it, a “search for a happier time, before drugs, Vietnam and assassination.”

(via google books)

over at lifetime, the success of their flowers in the attic TV movie, made execs ask: “What was nostalgic? What felt good?”

(midnight in paris, © 2011)

the NYT notes that this can have the opposite effect of “good,” and leave people sad and depressed and feeling old, but what interests me is the question of why now and why saved by the bell or full house or whatever is the answer.

(midnight in paris, © 2011)

while i think this is a question to which there will be answers one day, as gopnik notes, we are, in our own time, often too close to see it clearly. and so eventually we’ll be able to see the various currents within the culture that brought us to this moment of lifetime making made-for-tv movies about the behind the scenes goings on during the productions of the shows we loved in our youths. as it is, we’re still too close. it is too soon. it is still, in fact, happening. but it’s interesting nonetheless to note that it’s happening and how it’s happening and that it means something we’ll one day understand.

again, gopnik:

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M.seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time.

in the meantime, let us find beauty in the present:

(via instagram)

WHERE TO BEGIN? because, after driving away 79% of the people who might have read this, that title really raised the stakes for whoever’s left. props to ya’ll who’re sticking it out! <3 <3 <3

let’s begin with where i just was… this article on kurt cobain from a kurt cobain biographer. which, in case my future biographer is out there in the future reading this post and thinking what brought her to this moment??, i read immediately after reading this review of the new didion biography. just fyi.

except actually not “just fyi,” because that sequence probably matters. because this:

(via Vogue)

leads into this:

(via Time)

i am writing a biography of jackie onassis. i think about the two things raised in these statements quite a lot. (1) the idea that, in my writing, i am expected to bring jackie onassis BLAZING FORTH ALIVE from the page, through my words. and (2) the notion that we can ever know anything, with any certainty, about anyone.

kurt cobain’s biographer:

frankly, i, currently in the fog of biographical writing, am not sure where this leaves us.

the ethics are always dubious. we are- both biographers and readers of biography- janet malcolm tells us, “like the professional burglar.” i would argue reading any story about anyone else leads one into the same ethical territory (more perilously as it’s minus the illusion of a scholarly apparatus, which biography affords) and so we are, by now, largely a culture of burglars, culprits of an ongoing, mass burglary. so it feels a bit late to be waving the flag and asking we let dear kurt alone.

i say that. i would stand by that statement. but i am equally adamant in my stance that go set a watchman should never have been published and that harper lee is being taken horrible advantage of and that we, as a society, have let her down.

kurt cobain’s biographer (and, yes, my not bothering to know his name is contrary, but it also highlights the extreme oddity of how we biographers become the an extenuation- as though we were the employees of- the biographical subject… i cannot decide if this is a designation that bestows authority or removes humanity…) lumps the two examples together:

the argument can be made that the incidents are similar. i can understand how one might think that and yet also i think they are extremely different. i am aware that this represents a contradiction in my own thinking.

in his research on privacy, josh cohen has written of the cultural tendency to see intrusion into the lives of living people as partial and intrusions into the lives of the dead as a more total violation of the self. in her exploration of the marriage of sylvia plath and ted hughes, janet malcolm argues that this is because we identify with the vulnerability of the dead: in their helplessness and passivity, they mirror our own.

i do wonder if my approach to biography isn’t the exact opposite. because while my research is concerned with the afterlives of stories, and how we use familiar stories after the lives of the people upon which they are based have ended, to see that you have to have the before. they have to have lived. and when they are alive, we don’t use them any less.

what cohen and malcolm point to is a part of it, but i do not think it is the whole, and, writing that, i’m realizing i’ve done a dud thing here and evoked a series of lives that do not lend themselves to easy comparison (another contradiction: as, really, no lives lend themselves to easy comparison).

plath is a special case because the story of her life has become far more vivid since it ended. jackie is useful because her story was equally vivid when she was alive, as was- i would argue- cobain’s (though his story inflects much like plath’s because of the way he died- so this is a problematic parallel i’ll not push further). harper lee, in contrast, has maintained a compelling silence over the last 50+ years, a silence that- as jackie’s biographer- strikes me as quite typical of the separation of private/public life, which was typical through the 1950s and which underwent a radical change throughout the 60s, though it is often overlooked given all else that happened. (which, dear future biographers of warhol and didion, is something to consider…)

a confusing crowd i have brought to this party, but let’s push on…

the dead mirror our vulnerability. but so do the living. so also, i would argue, do our younger selves, which is where nostalgia becomes important.

i’ve been researching the 1950s, because i’m amazed by how quickly the baby boomers dismiss them and because i’m intrigued by the revival of 1950s popular culture, circa 1972. today, i found this:

(via The New York Times)

2 july 1972. and i wanted to reach across the distance of time and tell her, oh honey, we none of us do. could i do that, i would direct her to one of the most insightful things i have read. EVER. a line in the A.V. club’s 2009 recap of buffy, the vampire slayer, season 4, episode 1:

obvious, but easily overlooked. we are always waiting for something, for the story to work out and to end. quite bizarre, when you think about it, given the story’s end is the end. in our stories, it is our end.

i do wonder if this is part of the temptation to ransack the stories of the dead… their story is over. we flatter ourselves we can figure out what happened to them. whatever did happen is safely past and, therefore, no longer threatening and we can confidently look back upon it as though (1) there were no other way it could have gone and the people alive then were rather naive to  think it could have gone differently, and/or (2) had it gone differently, all of our lives and the state of our nation would have been better. (perhaps these scenarios are also a component of the continuing appeal of jfk for people who were alive in the 50s and 60s- it can be either coincidental or essential that his story invokes both.)

but all of this is about knowing, isn’t it? the living woman didion doesn’t fully emerge from the pages of a book. we must leave kurt cobain’s legacy alone because his biographer imagines this is what he would have wanted.

i am writing a biography of jackie onassis. i am deeply skeptical of biography. i wholly do not expect that someone who was once living will vividly emerge from the words i write. i will teach you something, i will show you things you did not know, i will make you FEEL. something. perhaps many things. probably none of which is that you actually knew jackie.

because i don’t think we ever know ourselves, much less other people. we do not know ourselves even though we are stuck with ourselves all our lives.

yesterday, i happened upon this 1978 profile of jackie, the main thesis of which was that we’re all too lazy to go and find someone else to care about and so we care about jackie because she’s there.

(Santa Cruz Sentinel, 23 November 1978)

which ended on this hilariously defeatist note: because she’s there. the opposite, of course, being that she is not there.

i have, of course, eloquently captured the swiftness with which this shift occurs through one of the stupidest/most profound things i have ever written:

the line separating the past and the present is perilously thin. thinner than we would like to think. and i think that, in some part, explains the contradictions. well, not explains. it accounts for them.

the dualism of the american ability to look back and say haha, remember the cold war, our naïveté, how cute! whilst we continuing pointing a finger towards russia and evoking every cold war rhetorical flourish at hand.

the dualism of the individual, so that cobain could write that he doesn’t want his journals read and then reverse himself a few lines later.

adam gopnik has written that, in history, we do not know what boat we are on until the iceberg informs us. the self seems engaged in a similar bind. we expect we can know joan didion by reading a book about her. we imagine that details can add up to a person, even though i for one would be horribly offended if someone suggested the same of me.

in his book on the life of marilyn monroe, norman mailer quotes virginia woolf saying that biography only accounts for 6 or 7 selves, when really we all have thousands. that is, you will note, a significant shortfall of selves. perhaps there is a titanic metaphor here as well. for biography can only bring a limited number of stories to shore. so much is left behind. so much abandoned in the dash towards completion, as the word count thins down.

gopnik surmises, “It is, perhaps, essential to life to think that we know where we’re going when we set out—our politics and plans alike depend on the illusion that someone knows where we’re going.” it is perhaps equally essential to life to think that other people are knowable, so that we can believe the same of ourselves- that we are each of us more than just a great mystery.

DO NOT READ MY DIARY… PLEASE FIGURE ME OUT.

to say no, to give up, not to try, seems the greater cruelty.

i have- quite late in the day for one writing a biography of jackie onassis- come to the late memoirs of the late gore vidal.

just fyi: in looking for pictures to illustrate my arrival at the late memoirs of gore vidal, i also arrived at this EPIC picture of young lagerfeld…

German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld poses with a teapot from his Memphis collection, and the new novel ‘Lincoln’ by Gore Vidal, 1984.
CREDIT: JURGEN SCHADEBERG

which, well…

but the delay in getting to gore winds up having been a rather wise- albeit unintentional- life choice made by my 2013 self, because it is probably only now that i am ready to deal with these memoirs, having now written a narrative so steeped in ambiguities that the word ambiguity has taken on ambiguities and, the other day, i had to double-check the definition.

to build on my prior contention that we never know anyone, not even ourselves, and we are all going to die…

because i am obviously in the business of lifting spirits… let’s talk about gore vidal.

Author, playwright, essayist and political activist Gore Vidal poses for a portrait at home on March 14, 1969 in New York City, New York.
CREDIT: THE ESTATE OF DAVID GAHR

first of all, let’s give credit where credit is due: vidal was, like, WAAAAAAAAAAAAY ahead of the curve in his use of the word palimpsest, a word that has returned to vogue in a big big way in academic writing in the last 5 years and shows up, now, in pretty much everything. true story:

well played, gore. (sadly, the same cannot be said for his frequent evocation of anaïs nin’s favorite: ensorcelled.)

less well played? DUDE. nearly every rumor for which i have excoriated poor old truman capote in the last ten years starts with you!

arising in your 1995 memoir, palimpsest– a wonderwork no less complicated, nor less frustrating than everything ever written by my man mailer (who i have not written about much here in the last 5 years but who has- in my offline research life- become a full-on, though no less complicated for its full-on-ness, love affair, often tempered by severe loathing and self-doubt).

(via esquire)

pages 309-312, most especially. the contents of which i was entirely familiar though i did not realize that this was their point of origin. 3 pages in which we are told that:

*jackie married jfk for his money

*she slept with william holden

*she probably slept with rfk

*because lee slept with jfk first

except…

and that except is everything. because the frame here is this:

vidal is in a cemetery filming a scene for a documentary. pages 309-312 are described as “scenes from the Jackie play” that he lets run through his mind as the camera cuts between him and a statue. it is variously described as “the fast-moving play in my head,” the drama idling away in vidal’s mind, and, again, as “the Jackie play.”

within this scene, vidal and louis auchincloss speculate about jackie’s sexual tendencies. george mcgovern tells vidal jackie told him that she once overheard the kennedy campaign aides talking about her like she weren’t a person, just a thing, like a state.

um… vidal is a dramatist. which begs the question: how real is the play in his head?

elsewhere, rfk (not unsurprisingly given their years long fued) is throw under the bus again, when vidal describes nureyev telling him of how, once, he was with rfk and rfk’s “own homosexual impulses… were very much in the air.” vidal writes that when nureyev says this, he smiles, “very much aware, firsthand, of the swirls of gossip that envelop the conspicuous.”

it is hard to square this repetition of gossip that will, by future biographers, become fact, with vidal’s acknowledgement- or lamentation, i cannot tell- of “gossip, endless gossip, which then congeals into history,” and then 100 pages later, his deplorement of how “fantasies congeal into fact.”

reading palimpsest, i felt that gore vidal was, across the ages, deliberately trying to make my life hard.

because the tendency with nonfiction is to want to believe. the word nonfiction implies that it is not fiction, which- if you believe in fact- establishes a dynamic suggesting that nonfiction is fact and can, therefore, be believed.

this is the central tension of writing nonfiction and it is also the central tension of reading nonfiction. belief. (or is just that i am an incorrigible doubter and so it is the central tension for me? am i describing an individual journey and imagining it is universal when it is, really, just me? or, are we all in this together?)

there is an inclination to want to believe that someone knows something for certain. that X, Y, and Z are true.

just as one would like to think that someone is in charge and we are going somewhere.

the suggestion that the whole world is just fumbling along trying to make it to tomorrow isn’t exactly life-giving so you can see why we’d not want to think like that. but that is still there. (cue my weekly reference to “two ships”…)

“how little understanding any of us had of what was actually going on at the time,” vidal writes, reflecting upon the administration of jfk. but really, how little any of us ever knows. and, therefore, how desperately we want to imagine that someone does.

i want to believe vidal.

i do not believe it is coincidental he makes that terrifically impossible.

declaring that he never reads anything written about himself, he spends much of palimpsest critiquing his appearances in the memoirs of his friends.

vidal has much to say about novels and biography. contending that the novel has ceased to be read or give pleasure, biography has become “mega-fiction sometimes posing as gossip.”

gossip and history are major themes as well but, in his memoir, vidal is surprisingly silent on memoir. lamenting a capote line misattributed to him, vidal supposes that “what others want you to be you are going to be, despite all evidence to the contrary.” then he promptly tells us what to think of everyone else.

the advantage of reading palimpsest and point-to-point navigation in quick succession is that the repetition stands out in extreme relief. whole stories are repeated though they differ slightly in the details and the telling and so they seem not to have been straight-forwardly lifted.

is this intentional? or a fluke of the passage of the intervening 10 years? did vidal re-read palimpsest before writing point-to-point? WHAT ARE WE TO BELIEVE???

bizarrely, i trust mailer in a way that i do not trust vidal. mailer gives the impression of letting it all hang out. vidal is… sneaky is the word i’m coming to though it is perhaps not the most precise one. with mailer, the joke is a shared one. with vidal, i’m pretty sure the joke’s on me.

the thing i struggle with here, the ambiguity that i keep picking at, trying to figure out, is the contradictions between what vidal is preaching and what he is doing.

how he can, on one page, decry the things said by capote but attributed to him, and then, a 100 pages later, surmise that rfk was bisexual because nureyev said that, on one occasion, he felt something “in the air.”

(srsly, had i known how much time i would spend as a biographer parsing the things that people felt in the air, i might have opted for a second career in meteorology.)

it’s hypocritical, and i mean that in the best possible way. for, it is an artful hypocrisy. a maddening one, as well, because vidal’s memoir gets taken as history.

there is an (intentional?) hilarity in reading palimpsest now, the irony of vidal’s complaints of how the biographers are beating down his door because everyone he ever knew now has a biographer as, in his text, he lays out a buffet of unverifiable biographical gossip on which biographers will feast for decades to come.

this is actually what i perceive as the great value of vidal’s memoirs and why i find the word “memoir” deeply problematic. it’s a word i use for lack of a better one, though i think that when we pretend there is a “face-value”- which is what, to me, genre classifications imply- to be had in the nonfiction works of writers like vidal and mailer, we do those works and those writers (not to mention ourselves) a grave disservice.

just as i struggle to call mailer’s marilyn monroe book a “biography,” because that is a term that feels restrictive (not to mention inaccurate, as mailer states)- clipping the wings of whatever it was mailer was trying to do- so it seems unnecessarily confining to call palimpsest a memoir.

memoirs are always subjective and, therefore, must be taken with a grain of salt. but a gore vidal memoir? a warehouse of salt is needed, non? not because he is a lying memoirist, but because he is using the memoir form to do something… sneaky. something more. he is, i think, going beyond.

into what, god only knows.

it is not coincidental that vidal’s campaign slogan when he ran for congress in 1960 was MORE WITH GORE.

it is also not coincidental that vidal himself was uncertain of precisely what the “more” was.

(note how many times here i have pointed towards intentionality.)

in picking up his memoirs and thinking, ah, this is gore vidal’s memories of his life, we put him in a box and obliterate that more. i think what he gives us is far more complicated and, for that, more interesting.

“each culture plays the games it needs to play,” vidal writes. the same goes for people. in palimpsest, vidal brings a blend of total nudity and burlesque. seemingly complete revelation (often about other people) punctuated by certain stories (usually about himself) that vidal coyly skirts.

having read palimpsest, i know the voice of vidal, but i’ve a greater sense of what i don’t know about vidal than what i do.

as opposed to reading norman mailer’s work (and apologies to both vidal and mailer for pushing this comparison so hard but it is the one most readily available to me). mailer leaves me feeling i know the voice and the man (so well that i am thoroughly exhausted by both).

if mailer is hot, vidal is cold. to carry this equation to its inevitable end, combined, they are probably richard nixon.

oscar wilde suggested that history was merely gossip, while the american writer/anarchist elbert hubbard (yes, uncle of l. ron, albeit not by blood) placed greater emphasis upon the story-telling and maintained that history was gossip that was well told.

jfk is said to have often (knowingly?) echoed wilde while, taking the long-view, the columnist sydney j. harris proposed that history was “gossip that has grown old gracefully.”

lamenting capote’s lying, vidal notes that “The squalor never ends once one gets involved with people for whom truth is no longer criterion.”

the squalor is equally endless when writing biography, a practice in which there are many people- with all their complexities and lies and the gaping disconnects between the things we say, the different people we say them to, the things we do, the things we want and the things we need, to name just a few. in biography, people are unavoidable. as are the resulting inconsistencies. in memoir too.

“how am i not myself?” the jude law character kept asking in i heart huckabees.

jfk is said to have once said (note how i must always inject the uncertainty- as if the man himself weren’t real and what we’re left with is just witty, scripted soundbites attributed to him by others). anyway, jfk is said to have said that “What makes journalism so fascinating and biography so interesting is the struggle to answer the question: ‘What’s he like?’”

the latter question carries the illusion of being answerable. do we keeping asking it and cobbling together replies because we will never quite know the answer to the first?

because biographical research takes one to all manner of rando places, i’ve been thinking about hair dryers today.

this isn’t really sooooooo random. the magazines i’m writing about were believed, at the time, to be the province of “The ladies under the hair dryers in the nations beauty salons” and because beauty parlors and hair dryers are two things that have rather radically changed within american culture in the last half century, it makes sense to do some research into what they were like and reflect on the changes that have come. 

remember this?

why no, you probably wouldn’t because that was the 1920s. but this might be more familiar…

i’ve been thinking about hair dryers because i want to get the historical detail right… for example, i’m pretty sure shampooing looked like this:

Elizabeth Taylor

because shampooing has basically always looked like that.

but did hair dryers look like this:

or like this:

the answer is obviously both, but do you spot the difference?

other than one looking modern and the other looking alien, the biggest difference is that one grants the user the ability to do other things while the other means simply drying one’s hair.

this is an important distinction. because lookit:

cannes, 1958

walker evans

they are all reading.

which isn’t to say that every woman who ever sat under a hair dryer spent the time reading.

what it does suggest is a moment now lost to us: the moment of stillness spent waiting for one’s hair to dry.

the loss of the sense of community that came from going to a beauty parlor is not inconsequential, but that’s a different discussion and one i’m less interested in today, because today i am all about hair dryers.

in 1965, for the benefit of men who wondered why their wives spent so much time at the beauty parlor, the columnist helen weiershause described the process like this: “Her hair is shampooed—rinsed—shampooed again—rinsed again—combed—cut—rolled—dryed—unrolled—combed—brushed—arranged—sprayed—further arranged—further sprayed—and away she goes!”

but she took pains to place special emphasis on the hair drying phase, claiming, “Time spent under a dryer is not necessarily wasted,” because women used it to write and read.

and she also noted: “A woman beneath a dryer is in a brief, secluded little world of her own. She can’t hear the conversation and laughter in the room about her. The time she spends there is all her own. To most busy, active homemakers and business women time spent quietly under the warm shelter of a soothing dryer is a peaceful experience.”

grace kelly

this is backed up by the fact that when improved motor technology led to new forms of hairdryers that were more portable, they were met with resistance. not because they looked CRAZY…

which they so totally did.

but because with their emphasis on speediness:

and multitasking:

they were anything but relaxing. and they did away with this genuinely relaxing moment of stillness that helen weiershause described.

this:

Audrey Hepburn, 1953

was becoming this:

women were not happy.

“For at least 87 per cent of American women her date at the beauty parlor is the only really sacred hour of the week,” the columnist inez robb wrote in 1965. i don’t know where she got her numbers, but the sacredness of that hour doesn’t seem to be suspect.

when the “Walk-Wear Home Hair Dryer” was released, robb received a letter from an irate woman in massachusetts complaining about the machine’s mobility, how the “extra long cord… lets hair dry while working.”

“when hair is drying, i don’t want to be mobile,” the woman wrote robb.

“i want to be supine, recumbent, homaloidal under a dryer in a beauty parlor. i don’t want to be up and working, attached by a cord, no matter how long and extra…”

“what annoys me,” she wrote, “is that some man- no woman would do such a thing- has invented a gadget to deprive me of the only 30-to-40-minute period each week when i enter nirvana.”

Sophia Loren, 1957

is hair drying even moderately relaxing now?

in thinking about this space in women’s lives and its removal, i’ve been reminded of how i used to, when i lived in the U.S. and subscribed to us weekly, look forward to sitting in the bath each tuesday evening after work and reading the magazine cover to cover.

Actor Edward G. Robinson portrayer of “tough guy” parts in the movies, does his best to keep a stern face as he underwent a bubble bath in a movie scene in Hollywood on March 17, 1948. He has his inevitable cigar. (AP Photo)

(which i illustrate with this image of edward g. robinson simply because looking for hair dryer images led me to it and when am i ever gonna have another chance?)

the thing about my reading in the bath wasn’t its decadence but its stillness.

now i don’t have a bathtub, so i paint my nails and do face masks.

lucille ball

all of which are time honored ways of guaranteeing an immobility that is refreshing. but they do not approximate the experience of reading gossip in the bath, and the change in the experience has been profound.

i now read gossip online. it is not relaxing. there are pop-ups and the pages don’t load quickly and then i have a stray click and they take me three posts beyond where i wanted to go. or i’m reading it on my phone and the battery runs down or i get distracted by a call or text or something. there is always something. it is not an experience characterized by stillness.

reading gossip is, in terms of experience, now almost exactly like reading an email, a far remove from holding a magazine while enjoying a warm bath.

in just the last 4 years- partly due to my move abroad but also due to changes in the availability of online gossip which have meant that i don’t need to have a subscription to us weekly to know the entire contents of us weekly‘s reports- that space in my life has almost completely disappeared.

like this:

the hairdryer used to provide a similar moment of stillness. because i’m rather obsessed with all of the details of lived experience that fall out of history, i’m particularly obsessed with still moments and the cultural shifts in which they are erased or revised.

the beauty parlor wasn’t a still place- it was a chatty community space- but the hair dryer was, and both played an important role in the mid-century american female experience. which means they played a big role in american life.

robb speculated that because “80% of American women do either all or 91.3% of their reading under the hairdryer” the hairdryer was “the most potent factor in American culture.”

she was teasing, but- because i’d spent all day sifting through newspaper columns trying to fill in the blank space of the cultural significance of 20th century beauty parlors- i couldn’t help laughing out loud at her next paragraph:

it’s truly amazing how unseriously we take the cultural ephemera of our own times. what robb finds laughable, i find significant.

i’ve just done a close reading of the weekly hour women used to spend under the hairdryer.

i have done this because, fifty years later, that hour no longer exists.

sophia loren

well, 40 years and some days ago. and, to bring us full circle, this happened to coincide with the aforementioned spate of 1975 rumors that she was hooking up with sinatra, so the story is frequently illustrated in the contemporary papers with a photo from The Night of The Visible Bra Black Striped Jumpsuit and The Suit of a Different Color.

which, OF COURSE, <3.

The Pantagraph [Bloomington, IL],
18 Sept 1975

because it was SHOCKING then. and it should still be SHOCKING (though having written that i’m not sure i believe it). and it, like, just is not.

Ottawa Journal, 23 Sept 1975

because we most of us know women who are working. and because most female celebrities are, to some degree, working women.

kim kardashian is a working woman, ya’ll.

via instagram

there’s actually a loooooooong history of female celebrities being working women, it’s just that, in the 1920s through to still even now, the work life of actresses was downplayed and their private lives emphasized.

true story: liz taylor was working too.

LIFE, 6 October 1961

their work often looks different. because it looks like life and like fun, we do not identify it as work.

we can see this dynamic at play in the way jackie’s story is told and in the way we write about first ladies more generally.

fyi, the position of first lady sucks. there, i said it.

and it sucks, from my perspective, because it is a job that is presented as not being a job.

so that jackie’s tenure as first lady is often portrayed as a time of party-giving and prettiness, punctuated by a little redecorating adventure.

and her legacy is reduced to Fashions.

the reasons for this are two-fold: (1) the position of first lady sucks, and (2) THE TIMES.

LIFE, 1 Sept 1961

and also she was genuinely interested in these things.

things historically characterized as “lady” things.

she repeatedly reminds everyone that the she is not redecorating but restoring and restoration is about “scholarship,” but, you guys: “scholarship” pretty much just looks like a bunch of people moving chairs around a room, no? a preposterously excessive number of people, at that, given the relatively few number of chairs.
even she is laughing like, omg, this totally downplays what i do!

this is one of the problems of writing. it doesn’t look that hard.

perhaps this is why we see more photographs of writers’ libraries than of writers writing. because the books are the physical evidence that some work has been done.

jackie’s work here is like that too. i see a lamp while jackie sees the many books she read and letters she wrote to bring that lamp back to the white house. she did the work so i don’t have to.

and so it is hard to quantify the work beyond saying the white house looked beautiful and the white house tour was the first full-length documentary narrated by a woman on network tv. which makes it a broadcast milestone.

the broadcast is History. but the restoration is not classified as work.

two of the many frustrating realities are this: a person can only be so bold as they want to be and a first lady is often only so bold as the times allow.

and so jackie’s white house work- and i’m duplicating the problem i’m complaining of here and reducing it to the restoration when really there is significantly more- is reduced to a feminine project sanctioned by her husband.

LIFE, 1 Sept 1961

OLINE, you may be asking, WHY DOES THIS MATTER?? well, check out her CV come 1975…

Ottawa Journal, 17 Sept 1975

notice how there is no mention of her work as first lady. which maybe appears totally irrelevant in this discussion because they are talking about her work in publishing, BUT.

AHHHHEMMMM…

the fact that i cannot find a bigger image on the internet perhaps testifies to the fact that we need to be paying more attention to this thing, because it was a huge big deal at the time.

28 June 1962

full disclosure: that’s the only page 1 appearance that i can find, but it was still acknowledged elsewhere and seen as one of her big accomplishments.

Bridgeport Telegram [CT],
7 July 1962

The Kane Republican [PA]
25 July 1962

25 June 1953

but we do not think of being first lady as a job. they didn’t then and i would argue we still do not now.

in march 1978, when gloria steinem puts her on the cover of Ms., the emphasis is on her current work in publishing. why does she work now? there is not an acknowledgement that she has been working all along.

jackie herself does not cast it as such either.

i don’t know that jackie would agree with my analysis of her career, but having spent more time in her papers than she probably did, i can testify to the fact that there is a hell of a lot of paperwork involved in being a former first lady. to be first lady involves exponentially more.

it is work. and yet neither steinem nor jackie portray it as such in 1978.

“What no one could have predicted,” steinem writes the following year, “was her return to the publishing world she had entered briefly after college– to the kind of job she could have had years ago, completely on her own.”

steinem is making a feminist point here, as am i- it just looks a bit different 40 years later.

jackie obviously couldn’t have been first lady on her own- but her time as first lady should not be a blank spot in her resume. it is a job she could not have held had her husband not been president but it is still a job.

to state the incredibly obvious: first ladies are people too.

laughably obvious, yes, but something that- because the position is dependent upon there being a president and because we do not value the first lady’s work- is, i think, often not considered true.

we all too often fail to consider them as independent people. STILL. which means we also fail to appreciate the complexities of their job.

jackie was, i would argue, never without a job. it is simply that we didn’t acknowledge what she was doing as work. and, sadly, we still don’t. which, i think, says something rather important about us.

as janet malcolm writes in the silent woman, her MASTERPIECE of biographical criticism, the biographer is “like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the loot and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”

i’ve been thinking about life-writing in terms of stealing quite a lot in the fortnight since andrew o’hagan spoke at the conference a colleague and i organized up in oxford on life-writing and celebrity. o’hagan’s question was whether our stories actually belong to us. it is a question to which i would answer wistfully but firmly: no.

(a discussion that i will primarily illustrate with random photos from sarah jessica parker’s instagram, because i’ve recently become obsessed with celebrity instagrams and because  <3 …)

[via sarah jessica parker, instagram]

i’m in the midst of winding down a PhD whose principle point seems to be that celebrities matter because they are people. real people.

they need to be real to be as effective as they are- if we are to care and their stories are going to matter to us- even if that realness is opaquely manufactured (their realness is perhaps even better if it is not entirely convincing).

coexistent with this, we need to be at liberty to pretend they are not real people to enjoy them to the fullest.

intellectually, we know they are real. imaginatively, we can do with them what we want.

we can allow ourselves to think of them as them and us as a we. as though we weren’t all just us.

this is why it is so jarring to see a celebrity in the flesh: it is the collision of the celebrity’s humanity and the fiction of him or her that we have assembled.

it is jarring because, in that assemblage, their humanity is one of the first things to go.

in celebrity stories, the celebrity is like a paperdoll whose narrative we try on and, in this process, they are immediately an other- not us.

[you guys, i don’t even know, but OHMYGOD, right? you want to put that story on, no? and, fyi, this is a gift of the internet more generally, not SJP’s instagram]

the things that happen to all of us when we are alive- celebrities model the high and low of that: everything from how to cope heroically with unexpected, tragic family deaths to the everyday experience of walking in 3″ heels whilst balancing three trenta orange mocha frappuccinos in a cardboard drink holder made from recycleables and walking two small dogs.

all of this exists in extreme tension: they are real and unreal, we know this and pretend we don’t, they are us and we are them, we steal their stories and do not imagine someone might steal ours- though, secretly, we may hope they do.

the thing about our lives, our stories, is that we like to think they belong to us.

but look how quickly this breaks down… for me to write a story about my childhood, i must write about my mother and father and grandparents and aunt. already, from birth, my story involves stories they likely consider theirs.

which is where it would perhaps be useful to step away from malcolm and o’hagan’s burglary metaphor, because- in family relationships, etc.- this doesn’t point to stealing so much as connection. we are all so linked that it is nearly impossible to tell one’s story without impinging on the stories of other people. (can you even imagine that plot? i am sitting in a dark room thinking only about myself in my present moment alone with myself.)

i may have stolen jackie’s story but, in doing so, jackie’s story has become inextricably wound up with the story of my life, as well as the stories of all of my friends and family who have spent the last 20 years hearing me bang on about her. jackie and i are so tangled up by now that while obviously her story remains distinct, everyone else’s story about me is likely to involve her.

i have written about this before but to pull a more recent, daily life example: yesterday, i telephoned a nun who used to be caroline kennedy’s sunday school teacher. in the two years since i interviewed her, she has become a friend. we send letters to one another across the atlantic and she is one of two people in the world authorized to call me by my first name.

i called her and she said she was just sitting down to write a letter to a friend and was planning on telling that friend about my project.

caroline kennedy does not know that i know the nun who used to be her sunday school teacher. it had never before occurred to me that the nun has told people i do not know about me, though it makes total sense that she might have done. and so there are people i do not know who know what i am doing and they have been informed by caroline kennedy’s former sunday school teacher that i am writing about caroline kennedy’s mom.

our stories are like ripples in water. we can no sooner rein them in than pull back the pebble in the millisecond before it hits.

we tell ourselves stories in order to live, joan didion writes. we also tell stories to make sense of the disorder of living, the messiness.

stories make the messiness make sense. but, because they are based on life, these stories we tell about life are also messy, a characteristic we often overlook because we prefer they streamline and simplify life rather than emphasize its incoherence.

we are, i think, all far more complicated than we like to admit, which means we are far more complex than any one biography could ever capture. (cue my ongoing and depressing assertion that we can never know anyone.) still, we like to believe we can read a book about someone’s life and feel we know them, that we know what they were really like and that we have approximated, across the expanse of time and pages and pictures and footnotes, the experience of what it was like to know them.

we like to think people can be known. it suggests that we, in turn, are knowable.

to achieve this, we prefer to see other people’s stories told with a simplicity and certainty that we would find deeply insulting were it used to tell our own.

we assume we are complicatedly knowable, and that our stories belong to us and are ours to share.

because we assume that they belong to us, we are often all too casual in bandying them about and also in our consumption of the stories of others.

this is not entirely our fault, as it’s a reality usually obscured. as malcolm writes, “the voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity.” similarly, the exuberance of gossip suggests we are simply having fun rather than- as lord mcgregor famously said in his early 90s condemnation of press coverage of the prince and princess of wales- dabbling our fingers in the stuff of other people’s souls.

we are all of us stealing stories every day, to such a degree that we do so unconsciously (did you notice that the image above is the first i’ve used that actually depicts sarah jessica parker?). stealing stories is a fundamental process of everyday life.

the difficulty lies in the fact that we do not realize how fundamental it is nor do we realize how it feels until it happens to us, at which point we may realize that it feels horribly wrong and, quite possibly, inhumane.

steve kandell has an amazing article on his family’s 9/11 experience and the 9/11 museum. go HERE, then come back to me.

this is the paragraph that has stuck with me for over a year:

Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark. Annotated divorce papers blown up and mounted, interactive exhibits detailing how your mom’s last round of chemo didn’t take, souvenir T-shirts emblazoned with your best friend’s last words before the car crash. And you should have to see for yourself how little your pain matters to a family of five who need to get some food before the kids melt down. Or maybe worse, watch it be co-opted by people who want, for whatever reason, to feel that connection so acutely.

this is a dynamic i think about all of the time when writing about jackie: the wrenching away of a story, the shift from personal to public, a private experience collectively owned.

the assassination of jfk was a national tragedy. it was a watershed event in television broadcasting. it was an astonishingly personal experience for millions of people. it was a snuff film. it was HISTORY.

it was also the worst day of jacqueline kennedy onassis’s life.

you would think we would emphasize that a bit more, particularly the biographers. but we do not. we see it as history, film, text, national story, personal memory. she is in it, of course, but it is not about her. even in books explicitly about her, still she feels ancillary. we are forever trying to shunt her off to the side.

she saw this. the week after her husband’s murder, in recounting to the historian teddy white how everyone aboard air force one wanted her to clean herself up before attending johnson’s swearing in, she says to white: “HISTORY! i thought, no one really wants me there.”

it isn’t just history. we try to clean her up still through the language we use to discuss that day. in the cognitive detachment and emotional sanitization that comes with our use of the word assassination, we politicize and dehumanize a murder.

she tried to control the extent of the story’s damage, granting interviews, authorizing a book- a doomed project because, as the author william manchester finally figured out, all she wanted was a blank page for the day of 22 november 1963. but that isn’t how history is written. it is not how stories are told.

and so there have been loads and loads of articles and profiles and books and movies, a pile to which i am, obviously, contributing because i do think her story is important and stories must be retold for each generation, and it is through the retelling that they are kept alive. but it is not something i do without some misgivings. because it is a story- hers and mine and countless other people’s- and i am painfully aware of how very little control any of us have.

we tell ourselves stories in order to live. we may be in them but they are not ours. like logs thrown on the fire, they illuminate and they burn beyond our control. we tell ourselves stories in order to feel alive and this is perhaps their most lifelike characteristic: like us, the stories are trying to survive.

a preemptive plea: please do not bombard me with hate because i am trying to find a way to write about someone whose politics you may not agree with and whose personality you may not like.

an anecdote: some months (ie. over one year) ago, i wrote a blog post on how i didn’t think i’d ever get around to writing about hillary clinton directly because writing about hillary clinton directly taps into too much of my own emotional baggage of growing up in the divisive media climate of the early 1990s. you can go read that at the link if you care to or take my word that it was a post about cultural analysis and FEELINGS and how it feels to be a woman and read how women are written about.

my cultural analysis of feelings garnered this comment:

which was hilarious, but also unnerving. because though this was a mild comment, i’d only written a blog post on my own feelings and could imagine the vitriol if i’d written something more substantial. the post receiving that comment was actually about the lingering effects of seeing the vitriol directed at HRC when i was growing up in the 90s. it is a vitriol i do not want to welcome in my daily life, and it is a vitriol that to this day surrounds HRC.

hillary clinton’s instagram is PAINFUL. i mean, i know many corners of the internet are painful, but i followed HRC’s instagram for literally less than one day before i realized that i could not let it into my life and unfollowed. i could not handle seeing the word “murder” so often in my instagram feed.

why this hate? i’ve wondered.

FOR YEARS. without diminishment.

it persists, in part, because she is still around and still in politics and still, as we all do, does stupid things. and it’s been 20 years of emotional buildup.

but it is beyond reason.

to the extent that though i said i’d never write a book about HRC, i’m simultaneously aware that my research methodology and biographical subjects are setting me up to do precisely that, should i ever want to.

but i do not know that i want to. i do not know that, emotionally, i could.

more and more i’m realizing that for me- and, i would hazard, for many of us- this comes back to a single word and, for my purposes in this post, i want to look at that word.

while we’re here, fyi:

i’ve mentioned HRC because, if we are to descend into the hell that is the feminazi phenomenon, HRC is our virgil.

come away with me…

way back in the early 1990s, there was beginning to be an internet to which like 10 people and all of the employees of the government had access. and there were beginning to be more cable channels. if i’m remembering correctly, in my early 90s girlhood, there were like 35 channels on our cable package. i honestly remember that going above 40 was a big, big deal and i think that was around 1998, and even then those were still the pay channels and there were maybe 1 or 2 we had of those, so it was a big deal of limited importance.

what i am saying is that there were fewer media outlets and the internet did not exist. what did that mean? we were, the whole lot of us over in america, exposed to a much more closely matched range of ideas and there was more of a congruity to our experience of the news.

reading the newspaper was an actual part of daily life for a giant number of americans, as opposed to the 23% today. somewhat inexplicably, reading the newspaper was actually a skill we were taught in my 10th grade geography class.

now, i can actually just only read publications that agree with me, or whose biases mirror mine. or my facebook feed- being full of my friends- can reflect back the views of people whose world views are also probably not far afield from me.

i don’t want to overemphasize how much of a development of the last 10-15 years that is, BUT. it IS hugely a development of the last 10-15 years.

and what it means is that i can curate my own experience of the news so that, if i want to, i have the option of reading reportage primarily written by people who agree with me and are like me.

that is not necessarily a critique, but it is essential background.

because in the early 90s you could not do that to the degree we can now. you had 30 channels, maybe. (if you had an antennae, you still only had about 5). and so the range of interpretations of the news was much smaller. cable news was pretty much just CNN.

i’ve a theory that WOLF BLIZTER’S THE SITUATION ROOM is a precipitating factor in the fragmentation and heightened emotion that characterizes the modern american media landscape. because when you had to have A SITUATION for four hours every afternoon,we were bound to wind up here.

that was a digression, but my point is that pre-THE SITUATION ROOM and the proliferation of cable news on MSN and FOX, a significantly higher percentage of the news coverage you watched would have contained news items you might not have liked and interpretations of those news items that you might not have agreed with.

hence my otherwise inexplicable girlhood encounters with mister rush limbaugh.

his influence on the america of the early 1990s was GINORMO and historical truthbomb: the republican revolution of the ’94 midterms was perceived, at the time, as a limbaugh victory.

NYT, 12 december 1994

more recently, limbaugh is famous for, in march 2012, calling sandra fluke a “slut” and “a prostitute” when she gave congressional testimony regarding her school’s contraception policy. the word feminazi was absent in his argument, but it has not wholly died out.

so, over here across the pond a few weeks ago, there was a feminazi resurgence, which quickly got lost in the allegations that, while at university, the prime minister did something naughty with a pig. but it was a pretty big deal while it was a pretty big deal.

and you can read about it here.

the daily mail, as you can imagine, was characteristically zen.

and the guardian did an article on how feminazi is the go-to internet troll term for anti-feminists. an article which included a shout-out to limbaugh:

but then distanced limbaugh’s use of the term from its current usage, which is something i find problematic.

a bit of etymology… limbaugh initially evoked the term feminazi in the context of abortion, saying:

I often use it to describe women who are obsessed with perpetuating a modern-day holocaust: abortion. There are 1.5 million abortions a year, and some feminists almost seem to celebrate that figure. There are not many of them, but they deserve to be called feminazis.

A feminazi is a woman to whom the most important thing in life is seeing to it that as many abortions as possible are performed.

limbaugh originally applied the word feminazi within the context of abortion, but the term quite quickly detached from that context, becoming a general catch-all for feminists. limbaugh himself used it as such.

not necessarily even the more extreme ideologies of the women’s movement- ie. feminists contending that women are superior to men- but also women fighting for equality.

significantly, though men can be feminists, only women are branded feminazis.

equally significant: this is a word that has, from the very beginning and with regularity ever since, been applied to HRC.

24 August 1992

12 October 1999

12 October 1999

2 August 2000

urban dictionary, 25 june 2006

Hillary’s “Feminist Problem”, CBS News, 15 June 2007

is it any wonder then that HRC arouses such strong emotions? in the american cultural imagination, she has been linguistically connected to the nazi party for over 20 years.

and is our contemporary shyness regarding the word “feminist” any wonder then as well? the word feminism has been associated with the nazis and murder, a gross distortion given its meaning of equality.

even meryl streep- who spent her birthday writing letters to congressmen begging them to support the ERA– is wary.

“I am writing to ask you to stand up for equality – for your mother, your daughter, your sister, your wife or yourself – by actively supporting the equal rights amendment,” streep wrote congress in july.

then, this week, when asked by time out london if she’s a feminist, streep says this:

as though feminism isn’t in favor of human beings.

you guys, if meryl streep is confused, heaven help us all.

for real though, this confusion makes historical sense. check it:

key passage #1: “i guess i am a feminist but i don’t see anything wrong with that unless one takes a violent approach.”

a bold statement from my 14-year-old self, and one which suggests how deeply connected feminism and violence were in american culture in the mid-90s.

key passage #2: “i hope my views weren’t out of line. i would never actually express them.”

i had enough problems.

i didn’t need to be accused of being a murderess.

we worry about the effects of literature so much that we ban books.

and we have enough of a national conversation around that that we also dedicate a week out of the year to the protest of the banning of those books.

via the east branch of the dayton metro library

but we are surprisingly, willfully ignorant to the effects of words and of stories from real life. the things our culture says about real people and the lasting impact those things have.

this is not a shout of CENSOR YOSELF!

it is an acknowledgement that there is an effect. an effect which it would behoove us to begin training our eyes to see.

the associated press

i see culture as being like those terrible magic eye posters from the 90s, where if you looked at it long enough a picture of a dolphin or the face of marilyn monroe would emerge. i looked at so many of those posters and saw nothing.

culture is like that, except i seem to have some rare gift for seeing it- or at least i flatter myself i do- which means i all too often sound like a conspiracy theorist and have to interject the self-aware statement that i know i kind of sound like oliver stone.

but, YOU GUYS. it fits together. though we can’t always see it, though we are sometimes too close, still it fits together.

and when you do see it, it’s like ohmygod, guys, JUST LOOK. how can you not see that? it is RIGHT THERE. the dolphin is RIGHT THERE.

that is how i feel about so much of my work. it is RIGHT THERE. why are we not seeing this????

but then some days i think it’s easier, better not to see. to overlook the way all the pieces connect and how the story we tell today is part of a story we’ve been telling since the beginning of time and nothing is new and the world is really like this and people are rather more mean than you’d like to imagine and it all just goes on and on as- lost in the business of trying to get to tomorrow- we  forget and so we live disconnected from our own pasts and all the cultural detritus that, over the course of our lives, informs our view of others and ourselves and our world. all that debris, scattered across all those years, it brings us to where we are now.

all that was once present and is now past is yet still visible in today.

so there you go.

i am tired. writing about HRC is depressing. i will leave you with a collage of cultural debris.

New Braunfels Herald, 10 May 1994

The Standard Speaker, 11 April 1994

News Record, 21 May 1994

The Salina Journal, 29 May 1994

28 august 2006

July 31, 2007.

23 january 2013

1 february 2013

“There was something about Hudson’s diagnosis that seemed to strike an archetypal chord in the American consciousness. For decades, Hudson had been among the handful of screen actors who personified wholesome American masculinity; now, in one stroke, he was revealed as both gay and suffering from the affliction of pariahs… Doctors involved in AIDS research called the Hudson announcement the single most important event in the history of the epidemic, and few knowledgeable people argued.”

-Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On

i’ve been working with movie magazine for YEARS and, after awhile, one gets rather inoculated to the crazy. and so looking at this copy of july 1969’s TV star parade, i was initially like, ooooh, everyone looks sort of like stained glass, and was prepared to leave it there. BUT NO WAIT.

because um… did you notice joe namath’s mustache??

true story: this is small beans compared to the TOTAL WONDER that is rosey grier’s needlepoint for men.

which is all of the things, all of them good, forever and ever amen.

but. we’re talking about namath here:

never mind what namath is saying, because i failed to copy this article so i actually do not know what that is about and have no way, at the moment of finding out. BUT, wait: what is happening on joe namath’s face, ya’ll??

if you grew up watching the brady bunch in TBS’s 3:05 p.m. time slot after every single day of elementary school as did i, then you know joe namath is supposed to look like this:

if you did not grow up watching the brady bunch, then you are maybe totally lost. poor you :(

but, from that one time bobby brady faked serious illness to lure namath to his house because he’d told some friends he knew him (why are problems on kid’s programming so often solved by faking serious illness?), we may remember namath as sort of dorky cheezeball hot.

maybe. if you’re into that.

but this fu manchu- or handlebar (there appears to be some controversy as to what to call it)- makes him instantly more interesting, no?

though he had it only briefly in november 1968, it’s apparently ranked the 8th greatest mustache in NFL history.

i mean, i was already gung-ho to go deep into analyzing it, but its being historical really sealed the deal.

so there was a lot of controversy around namath’s mustache- the question of whether it was inappropriate and a sign of dissipation and revolt.

San Bernardino County Sun, 21 November 1968

namath pooh-poohed it and said all the parents were being uptight and there’s nothing wrong with mustaches.

Albuquerque Journal, 26 November 1968

he continues to rock the stache and says he will until the jets win their division.

the cincinnati enquirer, 27 november 1968

the jets win their division and, still, namath has the stache.

Colorado Springs Gazette, 30 November 1968

ALAS. capitalism triumphs…

The Morning Herald, 12 December 1968

and lo! thus begins one of the greatest  endorsement careers of all time…

i defy you to watch this one and not get the song stuck in your head…

and, i do not know if this is real but there you go:

YOU GUYS.

i read the daily mail on the regular because it’s pretty much where all gossip stories start. so i’m aware of the mail’s howshallwesay… COLOSSAL PROBLEMS. but every now and again, there’s an especially egregiously awful article for which britney is required to express the resulting spectrum of emotions.

and yesterday, that was this:

which made me go:

theresa may is the UK home secretary, a position that means she is responsible for domestic things, like national security, policing, immigration, etc.

full disclosure: there’s a political layer to what i’m about to unpack. it’s right there in the article’s opening:

but i’mma let that be rather than bungle into UK politics about which i do not know enough and instead stick to what i do know and look at the dodgy gender business happening here.

may, during her tenure, has gotten coverage- by the daily mail– for what the daily mail has previously called her “bold fashion choices.”

it’s worth noting that the daily mail seems to have a bizarre preoccupation with may’s cleavage and her clothes. a preoccupation which, in 2013, gave us this amazing assessment:

and a rather epic presentation of supporting evidence.

which brings us to The Now and the mail‘s 7 october report on teresa may’s dress.

fyi, because this was the first thing i checked after reading the opening paragraphs, yes, this report is written by women.

which felt a bit

though i can’t totally say why.

maybe because it feels likw we should know better? because it is 2015? because, as the article goes on, it gets really really gross?

heavy emphasis is placed on the price-tag of the dress and also its detailing.

to the extent that, were it not EXCEEDINGLY clear that it was brought to us by the tesco bread and beer division, i would have wondered if this article was sponsored by roland mouret.

so what these reporters are doing here is a essentially a close reading of theresa may’s dress (and, of course, i am doing a close reading of their close reading #meta). starting with the price tag, onto the shoulder, down the front to the waist and then…

BOOM.

the exposed zipper! hand me my vapors!

to contextualize this just a wee bit, this is not a new trend. marc jacobs’ exposed zippers made a splash at paris fashion week in 2009. roland mouret was rocking it in 2010. it’s a look that gained mainstream popularity in 2011, when victoria beckham’s collections began incorporating it. so what i’m staying is that this trend is neither new nor that shocking. it’s not exactly cutting edge when you could buy it at h&m four years ago.

so what are we to make of may wearing this dress?

well, for one thing, TOTALLY FORGET EVERYTHING SHE SAID IN HER SPEECH ON IMMIGRATION. because this is about dresses and middle-age.

you guys, these are three of the worst paragraphs ever.

yo! FORGET WHAT SHE SAID AND THINK DEEPLY ABOUT HER BODY AS COVERED BY THIS DRESS AND RAVAGED BY THE REMORSELESS MARCH OF TIME.

oh but wait. no, really, THIS is The Worst Paragraph Ever:

yes, yes. we’ve now imagined the home secretary out of her clothes.

and then, THE VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH:

purely from a literary standpoint, this has to be the worst transition EVAH.

her clothes are on the floor. and i thought we were supposed to forget her speech. now, after we’ve undressed her, we’re supposed to remember her speech and note her “inner political steel”?

i have received no messages about her leadership or ability to connect. nor does the next paragraph illuminate either of these, though it does attempt a blow for gender parity:

a quick aside, because we are talking about a country wherein there was recently prolonged discussion of the prime minister’s genitals: i think there’s an important distinction to be made here.

the piggate discussion emerged from the publication of a book and had to do with an actual news story- a gossipy one, but news nonetheless. in contrast, the daily mail‘s article on may’s dress emerged from may wearing a dress, and the may reporting is actually a pivot away from a news story (her speech at the conservative conference). this is a story featured in “femail” so perhaps this shift is expected, but it’s still worth noting.

also, while the reporting around the cameron episode obviously lent itself to some visualization, none of the accounts i read came close to the voyeurism involved here in the mail‘s discussion of may (someone, prove me wrong!).

cameron’s genitals were evoked, but not imagined, whereas may’s body has, already in this article, been scrutinized and unclothed.

so it would be bad enough if it ended there. do you think it ends there?

IT DOES NOT END THERE!!!

the daily mail is usually high on pictures, short on analysis, so it’s rather inexplicable that we get 772 words more here. it is perhaps not surprising, by this point, that they are dreadful and incredibly derogatory towards women’s bodies in middle age.

YOU CAN’T HELP BUT WONDER WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF YOU PULLED IT ALL THE WAY DOWN??!?!?!

for real, hasn’t this article just made you decide once and for all that if you’re ever in a position of power, you will dress like a man? it is so not worth it. already, if ever i had political aspirations, they have been scotched by this article, as has my desire to wear any of the dresses i own with exposed zippers.

oh BUT WAIT. you know we’re gonna go deeper:

because it wasn’t enough that we’d undressed the home secretary… TWICE. now we’re going to imagine her underwear.

ok, guys, we’re almost done and we’re in it to win it. on we go… i will summarize: her shoes are boring, but the color navy was a wise choice. why? well:

coup de grâce, ya’ll.

the thing is, while this is an ESPECIALLY egregious example, it is an example of something all too common.

it’s memorable because it makes explicit ideas more often delivered as subtext: women are always sex objects, older women’s bodies are gross, women can only be powerful when they embrace traditional femininity and, even when they do that, they’ll be scrutinized ruthlessly.

for the purposes of this article, i don’t care about may’s politics. i hope no one in my life ever looks so closely at my legs as the daily mail just did may’s. not just because we wouldn’t do that to a man, but because we don’t usually do that to human beings.

i was writing something the other day and can’t for the life of me remember what it was, but i did wind up thinking about the old platitude that “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me,” which really winds up being a load of crock, no? words are horrible. words stick to the bone and leech in. 

after reading this article on theresa may’s dress in the daily mail, i thought i’d have a peek at the comments, which is so often where one’s faith in humanity goes to die. in this case, it was mostly where people who don’t like the cost of high fashion went to complain.

but there was, in the midst of it, a comment that pretty much summed up everything i felt after reading this awful article:

now i’mma do this real quick, ya’ll. because you know we have been here before so rumors about people’s sex lives are pretty much old hat to us, non?

today: ET and MR. conveniently, both 5′ 2″ (ish) [though do not quote me on that because i’m going on memory. this is a factoid i have not looked up. ET may have been 5’1″… or was that princess margaret? never mind. JASON PRIESTLY IS 5′!!!! see this is what happens when i write a blog post after 6 p.m.]

ANYEEEEWAY. these guys:

national velvet

behold them thar sparks!

so the daily mail, in their ongoing commitment to covering all bases, has an account for rooney fans…

and one for the taylor peeps…

their use of quotes in those headlines is MYSTIFYING. my lord.

anyhoo, it’s a veritable choose your own adventure!!! i’m going to stick with taylor. the article opens like this:

it’s only a bit further down that we hear that this claim didn’t actually arise from rooney’s former wife.

(had we been looking at the mickey rooney version of events, we might have arrived at pam mcclenathan sooner because the mickey rooney version of events begins with a link to the page six report from which this report originates.

and the page six report, in contrast to the mail‘s accounts, is almost entirely about pam mcclenathan [maybe the most impossible name ever to type] and betty jane [rooney’s then-wife who pam mcclenathan says told her that she caught them]…

so there’s that.)

two things about this:

ahhhhhhhhhhhhem:

and also… AHHHHHEEEMMMM….

by which i mean to emphasize the fact that rooney has died. so has elizabeth taylor, and so has betty jane (whom the daily mail fails to give a last name and which this people slideshow on the wives of mickey rooney informed me was baker).

his only emotional register for this film appears to have been “sour”

remember “feelings in the air”? remember jackie and sinatra? jackie and her brother-in-law? EVERYONE and rudolph nureyev? remember all of the dramas in the head of gore vidal?

because this is my legitimate research, i have an actual document entitled “jackie’s alleged lovers,” in order to keep track of how she went from being, in sheilah graham’s 1975 evaluation, “not a passionate woman” to being, by 2014, according to the daily mail, “a passionate woman who needed the closeness of men every bit as much as her philandering  husband Jack Kennedy needed other women”— a woman would, according to the daily mail, be said to have slept with everyone from Bobby and Teddy Kennedy, Gianni Agnelli, Rudolph Nureyev, Marlon Brando, William Holden, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Charles Addams, Dr. Christian Barnard, Peter Cook, Pete Hamill, Robert Lowell, and Frank Sinatra, “to name only a few.”

the restraint of “to name only a few” slays me. because when 15 qualifies as “a few” that implies there are whole phone books full of names yet to be revealed.

i mean, really, who knows? there are so many things we will never know for certain. as i say again and again, there are so many things we don’t know about the people we know, much less the people we don’t. but, and i say this as a person who knows a whole hell of a lot about jackie onassis without ever having known her, i’m mighty suspicious that this is all on us.

there are the stories we write and read and retell. i don’t know why but they are. and we seem to have an incredibly limited repertoire for how we retell them. basically, once you’re dead, it turns out you had a raging affair with everyone you ever met.

for the second time in a week, the daily mail commentators have surprised me:

to me, the truth of this report is totally beside the point because it is simply unprovable. it’s discouraging that a friendship between a man and a woman still leaves them open to such stories, but it’s nice to hear that rooney and taylor were life-long friends (a fact i had not known). and it’s wildly serendipitous that they had eight marriages each, a mathematical symmetry that seems appropriate for MGM child stars.

i do wonder if these stories, however unbelievable, aren’t also essential. (i wonder this thanks to the boat steward’s story about the marriage contract, which i may or may not discuss here at a later date [fyi, that is the first ever teaser for my book, so wait for it… coming 2017? 2020? 2979??])

i wonder if perhaps their very unbelievability doesn’t testify to our need for them. not because they’re tawdry, but because they keep these people alive for us. had this book not been coming out, there probably wouldn’t have been stories in the paper about elizabeth taylor or mickey rooney this week. given that i’m writing about taylor in my dissertation and just read a book on judy garland, it’s unlikely that a whole week in my life would’ve passed without me thinking of either of them, but for most people that would be the case.

these reports are intended to drum up publicity for a book, to get you to go buy it and read it. hey-o, here it is:

odds are you’re not going to buy it. odds are you’ll just read the reports. and maybe you’ll believe them or maybe you won’t, but you’ll have spent a few moments out of your day remembering elizabeth taylor and mickey rooney, perhaps marveling at that strange symmetry of their eight marriages and the lovely factoid that their friendship endured until the end of their lives.

it is a tawdry story, as relayed here. this story of young elizabeth taylor on her knees- a story that is, on the surface, upsetting and which would break my heart a little if i believed it. but i wonder if there isn’t a terribly innocent undercurrent to our interest in such things, in these stories of stars who are gone.

the central point of my dissertation is that celebrities matter because they are alive. maybe you are thinking, OLINE, HOW DID IT TAKE YOU THREE YEARS TO ARRIVE AT THAT POINT???? but bear with me.

celebrities matter because they are alive. even once they have died, we have the knowledge that they once lived, like us.

and in talking about this story, in reading and discussing this new piece of gossip about these dead people, is there not a fleeting exhilaration? is it the sensation that, in producing new stories about them, we have, however briefly, brought them both back to life?

i’ve written before about paperdolls. about how they are sometimes so haunting and we should all be using them to teach history because their pathos seems a particularly useful pedological tool. but i’m realizing i’ve not thought enough about dolls more generally. because, you guys, DOLLS… they really capture something about the human condition, no?

though it only happened about 20 minutes ago, i’m not entirely sure how i wound up falling down an abyss (the spelling of that somehow looks odd and i am now terrified of accidentally having written abbess) of jackie kennedy doll listings on etsy but, i tell you, they are a gift that gives.

i should define pathos, because it is a word whose definition i have to confirm on a regular basis, as i just did now.

miriam webster has a rather vague definition saying pathos involves emotion. not helpful, so let’s use google’s default definition, which i rather like because it frames it in term of argument.

i realize that “yourdictionary.com” may not sound like the most legit source, but this post is coming from “myhead.com” so let’s just go with it.

anyway, with that definition of pathos on the brain, get a load of this slow pan out…

pathotic! (a word i maybe just made up because why not) and ARE YOU NOT MOVED?!?!

poor jackie. poor us. POOR WORLD!  POOR HUMANITY!

imprisoned by cardboard, inhibited by a face full of hairnet, shackled by our identities, burdened by a plastic bagged bouquet, and with only a swaddled veil for companionship.

it is like something out of dante.

or perhaps it isn’t and perhaps you are not moved and you are like WHAT IS OLINE ON? i have been reading freud lately and trying to explain the nuances of our existence in time, so it’s possible i am too quick to emotion these days, which is saying a lot given my general excessiveness of emotion in every day life. but no, really…

doesn’t that move you at all?

ok, ok. if you are still like OLINE WHAT ON EARTH, just remember, i’m the one who brought you that lovely moment of reflection around the experience of hair-drying but a few weeks ago. all of which to say, come away with me in the belief that we are going somewhere good!

so dolls.

if i remember 20 minutes ago correctly, my musing began with this:

which seemed, an oddly catlike posture for a doll of the former first lady…

and an oddly intrusive one at that (her spanx are showing!). but it was nonetheless reasonable. and it got me thinking about dolls.

the solidity and insouciance of doll jackie’s pose there. she is both casually relaxed and tense.

look at the tension in the eyes. the hand on the hip.

is she sinking into the sofa and about to kick off her heels or is she about to leap from her recline and lecture us on 18th century vitrines?

from this angle, doll jackie expresses the same serene anxiousness that we see in real jackie’s white house portrait.

aaron schikler

(fyi, in my googling to make sure i was spelling schikler’s name correctly- i am not at all confident in my spelling today- the name aaron schock was ever so briefly suggested in auto-fill, which reminded me of schock’s downton abbey decor-related  congressional downfall, one of my favorite stories of last year and one which, i imagine,  jackie, were she alive, would appreciate.)

but it all depends on the angle. i once took many many pictures of a bust i owned of wolfgang amadeus mozart, of which only this one seems to exist:

i took all these photos because i was amazed by how much the change in angle effected (affected?) the emotion conveyed.

it was a bust. it obviously wasn’t changing. but like those paintings where the person’s eyes seem to be following you around the room, so a range of emotions seemed to move across the visage of this unmoving plaster.

i was amazed, perhaps, by how dramatically a change in angle affects (effects?) one’s looks. a horrifying thought because it means other people are privy to sides of your self to which you are blind and which may not be flattering. we are all, perhaps, not as attractive as we see ourselves, which is furtherly horrifying as there are already so many ways in which we are not attractive to ourselves. the number of ways we may be unattractive to others but of which we are not aware only compounds this litany.

anyway, we’ve been looking at her here:

but look at her here:

here i’m aware that her eyes are a mile apart and she is wearing waaaaaaaaaaaaay too much blush (which is a revelation of the close-up, not necessarily the angle), but also that she looks rather more like norman rockwell’s jfk:

albeit less smug and smizey.

and now, for the coup de grâce- the image that prompted this post and which, now that i’ve banged on for several minutes, will probably have far less impact that i initially intended, so i’ll just go ahead and…

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO DOLL JACKIE? (and yes, that was a blatant stab at trying to recapture the drama i’ve drained from this scenario by framing it in full caps.)

there’s something terribly feminine mystique about this image. not the doll, mind you, but the placing of the doll in this manner so that i might be moved to blow $100 and buy it. TO RESCUE HER.

wherewent her insouciance?!

also, wherewent her lifelikeness? it is only from this angle that i am realizing that she is far more wooden that i initially saw. lookit.

look at her shoes. barbie shoes. but wooden looking as well, as though she were at the forefront of a dutch clogs with kitten heels trend.

look at her hair. it is painted on, no? why did i assume it was doll hair? looking back at the earlier close up, it is clearly not.

it is painted on. were you, like me, so tantalized by her ear-bobs and broach and the blusher and the country mile between her brows that her trompe l’oeil hair entirely escaped your gaze?

now that i look at the close-up again, the slope of her shoulders is looking a little odd as well. i wonder how she would look standing up. i wonder if the person selling this doll specifically chose not to photograph her standing up because she looks wacky. is this a doll that only charms when seated? is that why doll jackie is crying into the lace?

because she is limited to postures of recline?

and what is she reaching for? to what does that extended right hand beckon?

it reminds me of the scene from meet me in st. louis, when john truitt’s tuxedo is stuck at the tailer’s shop and esther goes running back up to her bedroom and throws herself on her bed.

and when her sister rose asks what happened, esther replies, nothing, i just wish i were dead. that’s all.

because her boyfriend is unable to take her to the christmas dance and she may now have to go with her brother.

i imagine doll jackie has deeper emotional defenses. i imagine that, were doll jackie’s boyfriend unable to get his tuxedo out of the tailer’s in time for the christmas dance, she would manage stoically without wishing she were dead.

which suggests that, if it has come to this for doll jackie:

the situation is dire.

(is my repetition of this image increasing or decreasing its pathos? are you inured? do you wish i would stop? do you not care at all? you are still reading, however, so i assume you must have some emotional investment in this strangeness i am working through…)

fyi, context: doll jackie dates from 1961. the outfit is drawn from real life. real jackie wore this dress. or, at least, this dress is an homage to a dress real jackie wore.

it’s unclear whether the inaccuracy of the ribbon’s color and the suit’s shade- on doll jackie the ribbon is beige and the suit is brown while in the photographs the ribbon is clearly white and the suit is cream- is indeed inaccuracy or simply the relentless melt of time and its deleterious effects on doll clothes and ribbon hues.

jacques lowe

it is, you will notice, not the dread yellow dress picture for which she is so famous now.

jacques lowe

and the brown and beige makes for a rather blah contrast.

in your imagination, does jackie wear beige? in mine, she is always in brights.

in double checking this against the franklin mint’s doll jackie wardrobe- which does indeed have a skittles-esque palette- i am reminded that the franklin mint’s doll jfk is THE WORST.

and i am also reminded of reading, ages ago, in some profile, an aesthetic evaluation of clay aiken as looking like the love child of k.d. lang and howdy doody.

there is undoubtedly some howdy doody in this jfk doll’s genome, ammirite?

which, speaking of dolls and pathos…

arhghghhrhrrhhrhhghhghgh! does he make you want to save him or run trembling away?

and just to get this out of the way while we’re here, i’m limiting my exploration of doll jackie to etsy, but trust me, there’s pathos a plenty to be had on ebay as well…

so where were we? ah yes. with that peek into parallel worlds, i think i’ve just indirectly established how doll jackie might wind up here:

if it were my doll destiny, fifty years down the line, to be married to the spawn of howdy doody and shivering naked in red heels with cloth biceps and pelvis, i’d pull a face-plant too. that is not a future wherein one finds contentment.

it is not a future where one feels human nor loved.

but then we’re talking about dolls here.

i will now attempt to make my prolonged discussion of dolls have a purpose…

i have recently become cognizant of the fact that, in a single day, i casually see jackie’s face a ludicrous number of times.

like, ALL.OF.THE.TIME. she is in front of me, in my periphery, if not on my mind. 

this is a condition of writing about someone- you think about them a lot and their image is a part of that.

in my case, because i am writing about her, it’s exaggerated, but it’s part of the broader culture as well.

as thomas mallon has argued, the kennedys are already a “cultural screensaver,” popping up at random all over the place. this has always been part of their allure- they are so visible- and their endurance- they are still so visible.

the flintstones, 1961, S02E10

paris, august 2015

we can see this through the ridiculously wide range of products onto which their images are emblazoned.

earrings, anyone?

a jfk winestopper perhaps?

a commemorative rug?

a 1969 pendant cut from a kennedy half dollar which shows jfk smoking a pipe?

(which, without fact-checking, i’m going to declare a historical inaccuracy because he was more famous for smoking cigars, and i’m going to imagine that the embargo with cuba was ongoing in 1969 led to this historically inaccurate pipe pendant.)

my point being that there is a certain casualness, an everydayness to the kennedys’ image in american life.

for a huge percentage of the population, they are still a part of what richard dyer calls “the coinage of every day speech,” and which i would suggest is even more casual/influential because it is often occurring outside the realm of actual speech, as a visual phenomenon.

this is absolutely not new. part of what makes it so interesting is that it was happening almost from the beginning.

Yale Joel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, 1961

Yale Joel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, 1961

Yale Joel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, 1961

Yale Joel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, 1961

Yale Joel, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images, 1961

i’m edging up to a point about whether or not things have changed in this way.

is there a kim kardashian doll? there appears to be but do people actually buy it? my googling of kim kardashian doll mostly just brought up photos of kim kardashian in various doll-like poses rather than actual dolls based on kim kardashian.

it is not that we are no longer being sold things. kim kardashian’s app is hugely popular. kim kardashian is the author of a book. kim kardashian is frequently selling things and using her image to do so.

and no, no. i’m not setting up some parallel where the kardashians are the kennedys of our times (though, um, aren’t they kinda?), but rather i’m trying to get at a shift by deploying examples wherein kardashian illuminates that shift within a modern context.

so the selling is still happening. we are still being sold things through celebrity. an obvious point so i’m not sure why it just to me so long to establish it. perhaps because the point is actually not so much about the selling as about the encounters with the image that is also used to sell.

how many times a day do you see a kardashian or think about the kardashians? how many times a day does that name pop up in the sidebar of your screen?

my impulse is to see everything on a continuum and so i cringe at the thought of characterizing anything as NEW! because it is all, i think, part of an evolution (every teacher who tried to inculcate me with the notion of evolution as an unviable theory probably just shivered in horror). so that the response to the kennedys, their slippage into the things of every day life like wine-stoppers and dress patterns and paperdolls and rugs, was not necessarily new. it was a reiteration and so it looked different. and that difference made it look new.

is the way kardashian’s image circulates within our contemporary culture a reiteration of that?

but the kennedys no longer look new do they?

which is, perhaps, what these dolls really throw into high relief?

i mean, these guys look embalmed.

and seriously. doll jackie’s lipgloss here:

that lip gloss is shades of gossip girl, which are in no way historically accurate.

but this isn’t about accuracy, it’s about emotion.

this is going to seem like a digression, but it isn’t… last night, i was watching a movie from 1978. an unmarried woman.

which is amazing and you should all watch it on netflix this minute. in part, because young emily gilmore’s bitch-face is supreme:

but there was a realness to the film, by which i mean a texture to the interiors and the setting, which i realized came from the fact that it was set in 1978 and filmed in 1978 and also filmed in the new york of 1978. so it looked really really authentically 1978. because it was 1978.

it looked 1978 in a way that, despite all the attention to period detail and aesthetics, mad men never entirely looked of its time, because it was filmed fifty years after the fact.

there was, in even the grimiest scene, a high gloss.

so that even the scene above- mad men at its least chic- has a distinctly anthropologie vibe.

i’m beginning to wonder if anyone is still reading this. and, if you are, if it is simply to watch the spectacle of my trying to bring these 2,288 words back around to the pathos of doll jackies.

well, i’mma do it. because what the dolls emphasize to me, i think, is the wide expanse within that split- the way the present looks versus how it is portrayed in retrospect.

the doll jackie i found most moving was not this one:

though she would, superficially, seem more- to reevoke my made up word- pathotic.

she is literally caged in cardboard in a way which suggests some proximity to both a coffin and a guillotine.

i’m realizing now that her white gloves appear to be painted on so that she is denied the liberty of ever removing them, a creative and manufacturing decision which makes this doll jackie a strange throwback to the hans christian andersen nightmare, the red shoes.

all of which is intellectually and emotionally interesting but which does not add up to her moving me.

at least not as much as this:

i had not realized until writing everything you’ve just read that my response to this image and to this doll may be stronger precisely because when i first encountered her and it, i was informed of the date of origin.

a date which locates this doll within the safety of before. and which lends it a pathos which is contrived in everything coming after november 1963.

this guy is just plain not believable.

he is perilously close to this:

he’s too modern and therefore cartoonish. too obviously 90s or early 2000s.

this doll jfk knows i know what’s going to happen to him and he knows too. he is ready and grins in spite of it.

he is already in a box.

his wife is already braced for impact.

these dolls know what’s coming.

this doll, this 1961 doll, in contrast, does not know what lies ahead.

and so she sits back in her bloomers on her bed of lace alongside her price-tag and gazes out into the murk of the future. a future we all now know.

i’m personifying dolls. i’m reading deep meanings into the practicalities of their packaging. but i’m also suggesting the emotions we bring to inanimate objects and, more specifically, images.

images testify to the passage of time. as does the aesthetic distance from here:

beverly hills, 90210

to here:

the unauthorized beverly hills, 90210 story

or from here:

to here:

in the one she’s rather ordinary, not yet an icon. in the other, she is a star.

there’s a scarlett before the war vibe with this one, non?

from the scene at twelve oaks when she wants to tell ashley wilkes the secrets of her heart and so she is reluctant to nap.

there are, of course, vivien leigh dolls too, which i will include here solely because they collectively betray our culture’s alarming changes in attitude towards women’s weight…

and princess diana dolls and marilyn dolls and michelle obama dolls. there are dolls galore. dolls are, perhaps, an undervalued aesthetic form in our national life.

now i’m thinking of the time on sex and the city when standford tried to make it with the guy who had all the madame alexander dolls…

but what of this?

why does it seem so poignant? why am i tempted to have it blown up and framed? this, presumably, hastily taken photograph intended to make me shell out a hundred bucks on a fifty year old doll. why does it move me so much that i have written all these words and wandered down all these alleys of thought to try to explicate the emotional appeal it makes upon me?

i have written all of this, and i still do not know.

gender isn’t everything. it also isn’t nothing. which is what our haste to say it isn’t everything tends to imply.

immediately we downgrade it. in trying to make it less important we make it unimportant. so that, to discuss the experience of being a woman, i have to admit that being a woman isn’t the whole of my experience, and yet establish that experience as being valid enough to warrant discussion so that you won’t dismiss me for wanting to discuss it, whilst also making it seem like i don’t think it’s everything to such an extent that you won’t want to read what i’m about to write because (1) you think it doesn’t apply to you or (2) you hate my tone.

to lure you in as a reader, as a writer i must strongly scent this conversation with notes of que sera sera and c‘est la vie.

tone is terribly important when one is a woman.

i do not want to write about this. even more than i do not want to write about hillary clinton, i do not want to write about gender. but because i always wind up occupying the spaces i least want to stew in, here we are.

i wonder: is the worry of being shrill a feature of the male experience?

i also wonder: why do women always wind up doing admin?

time and again, it is women who are doing admin. because we are so organized. because we are so methodical. because we are so good at project management. because these are our natural gifts. because these are the gifts we have cultivated within ourselves.

in my pre-academic life, i was an assistant and an event planner. i am really good at admin because, in part, i am naturally a perfectionist organizer and that is where my experience lies.

so it is not all about gender. but it is also not nothing to do with gender.

i once read some study that said my brain is better than a man’s at the art of the multitask.

i hate writing about this because it opens up a decidedly not safe space and my way of cushioning that vulnerability is by protesting the fact that i’ve been moved into writing about it at all.

but there are things you can’t not write.

also half the description i wrote for this blog is feminism and feelings. it can’t be all celebrity and biography all the time.

in writing this, i am holding myself accountable to that. i am also proving to myself that i can do it. and that it is worth doing.

confession: i harbor doubts that it is worth the risk.

in preparing the draft of my dissertation, i noticed that i refer to all the men by last name and all the women by their first and last names.

in my first reference to woolf, i called her simply virginia. neither i nor the female proofreader caught this.

there are these male colleagues who never reply to emails. they don’t put up an away message either. they simply vanish and you are left to wonder if they have died.

(having written that, i’m suddenly aware of all of the male academics who have outstanding replies to me and am consumed by fear that they will read this, believe i am condemning them, and i will be penalized forever and cut off for good. to them [and fear not, you are not alone because you are legion], i would say, please do not punish me for acknowledging this reality!)

they have not died. they have gone off to islands or cottages or the library or wherever. they are working. they are writing and being geniuses. they are too busy, too involved in their work to communicate. they are at liberty to totally let themselves go.

i write that in such a tone because i am stricken with envy. i am jealous.

i have never known such liberty in my life.

i will never in my life, already i know, have that luxury.

i worry i’d disappoint everyone. i worry i’d let everyone down. all the people who need things from me, they would be upset. perhaps i am imagining that their need for me is greater than it actually is, but nonetheless i can have no such liberty because i would be unable to withstand the resulting guilt.

monday was the first day in two and a half years that i have not written. within those two and a half years, i continued to reply to emails. surely my ability to do this is not a result of some womanly ability to multitask.

there are these things that happen and you just know- you just know– that if the situation were reversed, if it involved a woman rather than a man, he would not get away with it.

if he were a she, he would be failing to do his job.

what’s worse: you know that if he were a she, you would believe that he was failing to do his job.

but he is not a she and he is working on his manuscript. and so you nod and smile and say, oh of course, he couldn’t make it to this meeting because he has a deadline. you do not ask aloud why he didn’t have the courtesy to write an email informing everyone of that fact.

again. if you are reading this and think it is you, it is not just you. it happens all the time.

please also note my continuing need to protect everyone to whom this applies.

it is because i fear i am sounding shrill. i am pathologically afraid of sounding shrill. i have felt, as long as i can remember, that i must never, ever allow others to feel that i sound shrill.

this is connected to my other great fear of making someone feel uncomfortable. i’d far rather i be uncomfortable than they.

i’ve been sexually harassed three times, specifically. by which i mean three times that felt major.

once on the tube. once on a transatlantic flight. and once verbally via email.

despite living in a society that openly discusses many things, these are not typically things we talk about. but if ever you do talk about it, you’re invariably bombarded with the stories of other women and you realize how un-extraordinary an experience this is.

that i have been sexually harassed three times feels so normal that the phrase sexual harassment seems unnecessarily alarmist. in turn, that the phrase sexual harassment seems unnecessarily alarmist feels unfair. it suggests that even the language i’ve been given to communicate my experience cannot be taken seriously because it is portrayed as being extreme.

we no longer have the language to describe how banal this experience is.

now i fear that i am sounding strident.

i am less afraid of sounding strident than sounding shrill because i assume stridency is a distant country whilst shrill is my natural register.

still, i’d rather not sound strident if it can be helped.

i do not want you to think i hate men or think i’m better than men or that i don’t shave my legs.

it honestly feels like those are the stakes when one is writing such things (what things? that men frequently don’t answer emails in a timely fashion, that there is a double-standard and that i have been harassed). simultaneously, it feels like those are ludicrous stakes and that i am being patently ridiculous to feel that those are the risks i run.

a lot of the time, my feelings do not feel valid.

women didn’t get the vote in switzerland until 1971. this was the fact at the end of suffragette which brought audible gasps from the audience of the screening i was at and it is now probably emblazoned on my mind forever.

i wonder how suffragette will perform in america. will it perform at all. or, because it fails to represent every version of female experience, will it just quietly fade away and there won’t be another movie on the women’s movement in the next decade because audiences failed to go see this one in appropriately huge number.

gender is not everything but it is not nothing. as a little girl, i always played first lady, never president. a regrettable, albeit understandable, failure of imagination.

sally ride went into space so i knew i could do that. but, as the president was never a woman, the best i could hope was to be his wife. whether my prospects have altered in the decades since remains to be seen.

in first grade, the most evil teacher i ever had forbid me from talking in class or raising my hand. it was, she said, more important that the boys should learn.

when i kept talking, she took me to the principal’s office and made me call my grandmother and confess to her that i was being naughty and would not shut my loud mouth. (my grandmother- my savior- told me she loved me anyway and that i could talk all i wanted when i got home.)

how do we do it? a friend asks. how can we just disengage mentally and not let it get to us? 

learn from this, learn from me, a mentor- my hero, my guide- tells me later that same day. be very careful what you say yes to, otherwise you’ll be doing admin the rest of your professional life. 

i am a woman. i am aggrieved. i am making it all about gender. i am making it worse that it is.

actually, no. i am acknowledging what it is.

having written that, i fear what i have written will now be characterized as a feminist rant.

i hate when things i have written are characterized as feminist rants because the phrase feminist rant is a way of saying angry woman, which is a way of saying you don’t need to take this seriously.

we need to take this seriously. that isn’t strident. it is true.

in forth grade, the girls were separated from the boys and taken to a neighboring classroom where we were shown slides of naked women, told we would begin bleeding at any moment and that it was our job to thwart the advances of boys from then on.

the boys, they informed us later in whispers, watched an episode of teenaged mutant ninja turtles and ate snacks sent by someone’s mother.

my father has for years told me a story about how at a conference he went to there was this woman who was doing all the work- signing everyone in, overseeing all the arrangements, orchestrating the whole event. he thought she was a helper. later in the conference, she took the stage and gave a talk. she was, in reality, an expert in her field.

this has always been an anecdote about hustling, about machinations. a story about taking the lead in organizing things so that you can get to know everyone in your field and advance yourself.

i have always interpreted it as being the academic equivalent of pulling one’s self up by one’s bootstraps. from it, i have drawn courage.

it is only now that i see it for what it probably really was: in academia, most often it is women who are doing the admin.

this is not to say that there are no men who do admin. of course there are. but it is to point out that the people in administrative roles in higher education are disproportionately female.

and that there are reasons for this.

when i was twelve, i was drawn to jackie because she was beloved. i have lately come around to loving her for the fact that everyone universally hated her voice. it was, they said when she died, her only flaw.

were she an actress, this would’ve done in her career. she was not an actress, so she got away with it, but just barely as it persists as her most frequently cited imperfection. one of two, the marriage to onassis being the other.

but the marriage to onassis has been, for the most part, culturally erased. the voice, alas, we are stuck with, in all its awkward inhalations and curious drawls.

personally, i love it. probably because everyone hates it. but also because, without it, she is silenced.

we make fun of jfk’s accent. we do not characterize it as a flaw. we do not suggest he would’ve done better to have shut up. we take for granted that he had things to say.

when i was learning to drive, the instructor told all the girls in the class to always look under their cars to make sure a lurker wasn’t hiding beneath and to carry the car key between the knuckles of the index and middle fingers of their right hands, so they could wield it like a knife blade in case of attack.

this was, we were informed, part of the experience of driving while a woman.

15 years later, walking in chicago at night, i’d be halfway home before i’d notice that, in my coat pocket, my house key had found its way between the knuckles of the index and middle fingers of my right hand and was waiting, like a blade.

in some ways, i am always on guard. we are taught that we must be.

a colleague mentions that someone who’s been supportive of my work has a reputation. the sensation i feel upon receiving this information is of having been robbed.

because i thought he was engaged with my work. now the idea has been introduced that perhaps i thought too much of myself. perhaps my work is not as important and interesting as i had imagined. perhaps it was never about my work at all.

intellectually, i do not believe this is true but his reputation now intrudes.

now i wonder if his recommendation letter will be valuable or if, aware of his reputation, people will just assume he wrote it because i’m one of his girls.

what i feel i have been robbed of is my voice.

i wasn’t a feminist because i thought feminism meant burning bras and being angry. i thought this because i was a girl of the 90s and that is how feminists were portrayed when i was growing up.

and so, as an adult, when people would say, oh of course you’re a feminist, i’d pooh-pooh it, trilling, oh no no, i wear dresses and lipstick and am a whimsical, jubilant girl. i buy my bras at h+m.

i wasn’t an idiot, but i was ignorant. i did not know what feminism was, didn’t know it meant that we are all equal.

that i didn’t know that makes me angry. as does the fact that so many people still do not know.

(it’s hard not to apologize. it is so incredibly difficult to refrain from saying i’m sorry at the end…)

come, let us look at this closely.

and let us begin by noting that, thanks to the oddities of the daily mail‘s online layout, no, this is not liz taylor at 16. it is a marks & spencer’s conspiracy to get us to buy cashmere.

this is the image they reference.

it is located four paragraphs down and it is, indeed, an image of the actress elizabeth taylor at age 16.

so, ET has had a busy few weeks for someone who has been dead for four years. as you may recall, she was recently romantically linked to mickey rooney, because someone who knew rooney’s former wife said rooney’s former wife once told her that she once saw them engaged in what- were it the 1970s and were this jfk’s sex life- we would call hanky-panky. you can read my unpacking of that rumor here.

i am particularly interested in this more recent installment for what it teaches us about the coalescence of such stories. because it appears WE ARE IN AN AMAZING HISTORICAL MOMENT, YO!

a fact is being born.

as you may or may not and do not have to remember, the rooney stories were dated october 10th and 11th. this next story is october 17th. look at how it has altered.

this is the headline from the taylor version of the rooney story:

and this is the new liz story:

it’s worth noting that none of these men (lawford, flynn, reagan, kennedy, stack) were mentioned in the preceding article, which was all about rooney.

and that is where this article picks up… with rooney:

there is, you will note, in this passage, no questioning of this source’s claims. “the affair” is exposed as having been “revealed.” the fact of its occurrence seems here not to be in doubt.

this is insidious.

that’s a strong word, but an appropriate one, because the insidiousness of this claim and its statement as fact is that it seems to validate further insidiousness, compounding the initial insidiousness, so that what we wind up with is a string of self-perpetuating insidiousnesses.

seriously. dear famous person, heaven help you if you die. you will posthumously be made to sleep with everyone you ever knew.

especially if you are a woman.

the pronouns are hard to follow here. the she of the first paragraph is rooney’s ex-wife betty jane BAKER (whose last name the daily mail appear still not have identified). the her of the second paragraph is taylor.

and note how it is the “revelation” regarding taylor, taken from this biography about mickey rooney, that is “far more shocking” than rooney having been involved with taylor. in rooney’s involvement with taylor, it is taylor’s involvement that is shocking.

note also how rooney is a passive bystander here rather than a predator. it is taylor who is on a “sexual conquest.” it is taylor who is shocking though, as we are told, this episode is allegedly occurring in june 1946, when taylor was 14.

but this is an article about taylor not rooney, and so this episode from the rooney book is really just an excuse to go dig back in the archives and excavate some old claims about taylor. #dailymailbookclub

from a “RECENT” book published in 2012:

full disclosure: i have not read this book. i am familiar with the authors because i have not read their other books, one of which is on the life of jackie onassis and another of which was on the lives of gore vidal, truman capote, and tennessee williams- a book about which i have written here.

fyi, if you write about the sex lives of mid-20th century dead people, you will frequently encounter the work of these authors. if you read gossip on the daily mail about the sex lives of mid-20th century dead people, you will frequently encounter them there as well.

in the daily mail, the fact that these are rumors printed in a book, legitimizes them. a legitimacy undercut by the fact that they are in a book published by blood moon productions. which, well, doesn’t that sound like the cullens got into publishing?

when it comes to celebrity biography, blood moon productions is clearly occupying a lower rung than the daily mail‘s reports would suggest.

i say this as someone who repeatedly and avidly advocates for the importance of the lower rungs of entertainment. but one of the tensions within my advocation is my awareness of the latent sexism within these stories (see above) and their gradual institutionalization as Biographical Fact. precisely through their recounting in more mainstream newspapers and magazines.

i stopped reading. let’s continue.

HA.ZZAH.

the thing is: how many people get this far? how many people who aren’t me get to this point in the article? true story: i- in writing about this article- wrote all of the above before reading through to this point.

let’s be real: the mail‘s admission about these claims is more jaw-dropping than the claims themselves.

that it comes after an oral sex scene, the loss of taylor’s virginity, the suggestion of a possible rape, two flings and a threesome with a president and a GIANT visual jump of two photographs and a video…

which i had to zoom out on 9 times to get it into a single frame, means there is an enormo space in which we can conclude the article is over and click away. which means we would miss the crazy beautiful Birth of a Fact which is to come.

so the claims “were unsourced, involved only people who were dead, and were frankly too outrageous for many to credit.” BUT LO.

exhibit a:

exhibit b:

which, well, um… i truly do not understand the claim being made about biography here. someone, please interpret.

exhibit c:

the combination of exhibits a and c seems to suggest that b means that, because there was no evidence, biographers were left with a less racy story. which is apparently an untenable circumstance we cannot let stand.

ahhhhhhhhhhhem:

DO YOU SEE WHAT HAS HAPPENED HERE??!

oh the distance we have traversed between unsourced claims involving dead people which were too outrageous to accept to a story from someone about what someone else said now providing credence to those same claims.

this is gossip transmogrifying into institutionalized fact.

i see it time and again in jackie’s story, but it is hardly ever so blatant as it is here. so god bless the daily mail for providing elizabeth taylor’s future biographers with a nearly precise tipping point of factualization.

the next 16 paragraphs are committed to vivid description of elizabeth taylor’s adolescent sexuality.

i’mma skip the details of the various relationships as printed here, because those paragraphs above just made me very sad. basically puberty, nail polish and peasant blouses = slut, all of which brings us here:

i keep coming back to the sex lives of dead people not because i particularly care about the details of the sex lives of dead people. (though i realize it is probably rather hard to take that claim seriously given just how often i have written about them here.) i keep coming back to them because they keep coming up, and because they are very pronounced instances of the violence we inflict upon the stories of others.

again, a strong word, but one which seems apt. particularly because of the casual way in which it occurs in the stories of women.

look at the number of times the daily mail‘s reporter has noted that these claims are kind of crazy. look at how, despite unconvincing biographical evidence, taylor’s body and sexuality are continually deployed to justify and validate these claims.

riddle me this: what would constitute a half-truth of that story? especially given the entirety of this article has been premised on the idea that it is true.

the headline blared that “a new book raises extraordinary questions,” a thoroughly inaccurate statement of what this article is trying to do.

in reality, it is leveraging the new book to talk about an old book (the porter/prince 2012 book) that was so fantabulous that it couldn’t be taken seriously. and, using the new book, it is legitimizing the old book’s claims. since i imagine .002% of readers made it to the part of the article where that aim becomes transparent, presumably it has been a success.

the majority of readers will see the headline, collect the name-checks, and elizabeth taylor will be assumed to have slept with these men. 

i don’t know that this changes anyone’s lives, but i do think it adds up.

and you can argue that we do this to men too, but i would argue right back that we do not do it in the same way. even in the initial article on rooney, the women in his life were disproportionately punished. it is made very clear that this is a circumstance in which women pay a significantly higher price than men.

sex is, in these stories, something men get to have, in addition to their lives and careers. for the women, it is all too often the only story they get.

i write about the sex lives of dead people because, for dead women, it seems your sex life is often the only story anyone wants to tell.

i write about it because that is boring and i do not think she was.

and no, no, ALAS. he is not taking my unsolicited career advice and starring in a salvadore dali biopic so my unsolicited career advice still stands.

via adrien brody, instagram

no, instead of improving upon his craft, my boyfriend adrien brody has branched out. into other crafts.

just the words “art basel” are, to me, a time machine back to demi moore, 2012. so my first thought was to immediately mentally insert my boyfriend adrien brody into all those pictures. like a paper doll.

via adrien brody, instagram

my second thought- because it was late at night and i wake up at 4:30 a.m. so my mental processes and sheer ability to read suffer a major drop off around 3 p.m., which is when i was reading this (and, yes, i just suggested that 3 p.m. is “late at night”), was that my boyfriend adrien brody would be debuting his work at lululemon…

which, y’know…

except not.

so my boyfriend adrien brody is going to be an artiste.

which perhaps calls to mind a certain someone else…

via james franco, instagram

as my other boyfriend alan cumming asked benny in circle of friends: WHO IS THIS… THIS SOMEONE ELSE??

ahhhhhhhhem.

via perez hilton

it feels a little franco, non?

riddle me this: does any actor branching out into other artistic mediums now feel a little franco? (despite people’s ability to produce work in multiple mediums being nothing new.)

my former celebrity boyfriend james franco’s art is now five years old. this realization, in turn, begged the question of the status of james franco’s many degrees, which led me to wikipedia where the length of the “education” section of james franco’s entry made me laugh out loud.

via wikipedia

(for the record: it is three paragraphs longer than stephen hawking’s.)

oh bless him.

via james franco, instagram

there was a moment in late 2009-2010, where i thought james franco and i were destined to be together. we were rocking the same glasses and typewriter. he had an art show and of course it had a crazily pretentious title that made no sense and of course it consisted of upwards of five different artistic mediums and of course it explored sexual confusion and a romantic encounter between spock and james t. kirk. all of which was like a siren call to my 2010 self.

then we all got a little older and he dyed his hair blonde and i dyed mine red and moved to london and things fizzled out.

(though this is making me rethink the fizzling…)

via james franco, instagram

and i now hold this as yet un-interrogated belief (let the interrogation begin!) that, to some degree, franco has ruined diversification for everyone.

simply in having so many careers (in 2013, paste tried to break them down and came up with 11).

i appreciate full-onness as much as the next person, but let’s be real: to be simultaneously enrolled in an MFA at columbia, the tisch school, and brooklyn college whilst attending the MFA program at warren wilson is beyond.

i am not laughing at franco getting an education. i am laughing at franco simultaneously getting four educations.

via james franco, instagram

to enroll in one degree program is a bold life choice. to enroll in four is… madcap? madness? ridic?

i’m trying to dig into my emotional response here to understand the full meanings of what i think of as franco-ing.

it carries a connotation of doing so many things that none of them can possibly be done to the fullest of one’s ability.

everything he is doing is creative so there is integration in that sense, but still…

via james franco, instagram

i think what i am suggesting is that, in going so over the top, in doing all of the arts rather than focusing on one or two, franco is now a sort of poster-person for professional excess. by which i mean an excess of careers.

so that when i hear my boyfriend adrien brody is exhibiting art at art basel, i immediately think franco!

and, in thinking franco! i am thinking that my boyfriend adrien brody’s art will be indulgent; i am dismissing it. despite the seriousness of its subjects (ie. violence in american culture) and my own work’s involvement with those same subjects.

i am helped in this dismissal through the word choice of the article bringing me this news about my boyfriend adrien brody, which is perhaps not surprising as it’s coming from page six.

via page six

where the word “recreationally” does my boyfriend adrien brody no favors.

as it renders as play and casts in the realms of drug usage and raves something which has more likely been an ongoing serious interest.

via adrien brody, instagram

true story: i suspect everyone’s serious interests would sound ludicrous if filtered through the prose of page six.

what i’m not quite managing to get at here, and which has nonetheless been behind this whole blog post, is the problem of indulgence.

by extension probably also the problem of privilege but that’s such a loaded term now that i do not want to go there and indulgence also, in this case, seems more apt.

via james franco, instagram

it appeared to me in 2010, and still appears to me now, indulgent for franco to have been enrolled in four degree programs.

in thinking about privilege or indulgence we almost always think personally. it is my privilege, my indulgence, your privilege, james franco’s privilege. these conversations almost never hold institutions to account. specifically, the thing that grates most for me here has less to do with franco and everything to do with the institutions who accepted him.

sidenote: i do not want to undercut franco’s talent. i believe he is talented. but i also believe columbia, the tisch school, brooklyn college, warren wilson, and now yale were pleased as punch to have The James Franco enrolled and to have the stardust associated with celebrity enrollment.

and i think it is that other side of this equation that is so annoying- the allowances institutions make for people who are well known.

but that’s not sexy at all and so, somewhere in the circuits of our brains, it gets flipped and thrown back at the person for whom such allowances are made.

via james franco instagram

so that james franco sucks because james franco is ridiculous because james franco tried to earn four degrees.

to be clear, i’m speaking as superficially as possible here- plumbing the superficial response rather than analyzing the biographical fact of franco’s enrollment or education. because i think franco actually matters very little in the story of james franco getting four degrees. something which may sound absolute bonkers given that franco is ostensibly the protagonist.

via james franco, instagram

but he’s the protagonist out of necessity. because the story becomes ludicrously complicated and far less interesting when we tilt it the other way:

so that columbia, the tisch school, brooklyn college and the MFA program at warren wilson suck because columbia, the tisch school, brooklyn college and the MFA program at warren wilson are ridiculous because columbia, the tisch school, brooklyn college and the MFA program at warren wilson collaborated in helping james franco simultaneously earn four degrees.

which story do you want to read?

via james franco, instagram

i’m trying to get at something beyond sour grapes here, because i think that is the first impulse. to say that i am mocking franco, i am failing to take him seriously, because i am envious of his success.

that may well be true in part, but i don’t think it reflects the complexity of the emotional response or the entirety of the dynamic, which is what the less readable version of this story (the columbia, the tisch school, brooklyn college and the MFA program at warren wilson angle) suggests.

a friend and i have a term for this: the funnel.

there are people who are in the funnel and there are people who are trying to get in the funnel. some people are born in the funnel, some people are not. and that’s not to say that once you’re in the funnel, you’re in for life or that it’s easy. rather, it’s that certain allowances will be made for you because you have made it.

celebrities are in the funnel. and so franco can get into columbia and tisch, and the first public exhibition of adrien brody’s recreational art can occur at art basel.

oh geez, i’m realizing now that this blog post is arcing into a description of the life and times of dan humphrey.

so it is privilege but it’s privilege that we tend to read as indulgence and pin onto the person.

so that when i saw that my boyfriend adrien brody was exhibiting at art basel, i thought, oh god, he’s franco-ing, and by that i meant that he was indulgently dabbling in other arts when really he should be in a dali bio-pic.

via adrien brody, instagram

what i didn’t think was, wow. art basel and this lululemon gallery are exploiting my boyfriend adrien brody’s celebrity. which is, possibly, equally the case.

there’s a give and take here that tends to be obscured by the fact that we focus on the celebrity.

adrien brody is exhibiting his art. that is the story and he is at the center of it. but, in brody’s story, there’s a whole art industrial complex behind that story which we fail to see and that industrial complex is, i would argue, at the heart of the feelings such stories provoke.

via adrien brody, instagram

in franco’s story it’s an educational industrial complex and franco’s story is especially useful because it is so visible and so extreme.

i imagine he’s a nice guy who likes learning and props to that. really, so what if he has 11 careers?

via james franco, instagram

this ties in, bizarrely, to our inability to see the careers of women. perhaps we are over-able to see the careers of men. sadly, it seems we take none of them very seriously.

it’s one thing for franco or brody to be an actor. to do something more, to branch out, tests our patience.

i say this as someone who has, for over a decade, laughed at my boyfriend adrien brody’s earnestness over “making beats.”

that is a totally valid life choice, and yet i have treated it with derision to such an extent that it has become a family joke. a circumstance which, presumably, has more to do with my own insecurities about non-traditional career paths (hell, this whole post could have to do with that) than with adrien brody.

via adrien brody, instagram

i’ve no exciting conclusion to this mind-wander. there is no tidy ending so i’ll just leave it here…

via james franco, instagram

gloria emerson was in my dreams last night.

in twenty years, i’ve had a grand total of two jackie dreams, so gloria emerson is already giving her a run for her money.

gloria emerson by dorothy marder, End of War Rally, Central Park, May 11, 1975

gloria emerson and jackie were friends. apparently going waaaaaaay back into the 1950s, when they ran in the same social circles and emerson was dating a kennedy friend.

in 1974, emerson wrote a profile of JKO for mccall’s. it is one of my favorite pieces of contemporary writing on jackie.

and it is one of the great tragedies of my research life that i have been unable to locate photographic or archival evidence of this friendship between them.

especially as it seems to have been important.

asked about her life had she not married, JKO once said she envisioned her life might’ve wound up looking like gloria emerson’s.

gloria emerson by richard avedon

gloria emerson was the new york times‘ reporter in saigon in the early 1970s.

how does that fact reshape your view of jackie?

UPI, Roswell Daily Record, 11 February 1979

she also OWNED john lennon in this interview where he and yoko suggest smiling will bring peace.

so much of life, or our experience of the world around us, is what i’mma call THINGS IN THE AIR.

(feel free to credit me with that incredibly precise phraseology when discussing this later with all yo friends.)

by THINGS IN THE AIR, i mean things we’re aware of without paying much attention to them or really caring. and also things which appear to be disconnected and of seemingly very different importance but which nonetheless coexist in our minds because we are simultaneously aware of them. like, THIS.

or, my simultaneous awareness this morning of kim kardashian, virginia woolf’s biography of roger fry, today’s weather, the egyptian antiquities minister’s disavowal of ben carson’s claim that the pyramids were built to store grain, and the possibility of uterine transplants.

so there’s that. but what particularly interests me within that is the shift that may occur with any story, where it transitions from casual interest into a story with- sometimes extreme- personal and emotional significance.

ahhhhhhhhem…

we can be casually aware. then something happens (very often, it seems, death, MURDER, something either incredibly natural or illegal!) and our interest shifts into full on.

i’m tempted to say this is the transition into story, but that seems foolish. perhaps it is more precise to say that it is that this is the point at which the story decisively enters our own story.

early evidence of my ongoing facial emotional incontinence

it is undoubtedly a moment of emotional connection.

i’ve written again and again and again and again about how i was aware of jackie before i was interested in jackie. (if you do not know the story of the cheerleaders and hard copy and the badly xeroxed worksheet, go here for a refresher.) and how, with her death, that dynamic fundamentally shifted- a circumstance with which anderson cooper’s channel one news report, the 23 may 1994 episode of hard copy, and this issue of TIME had a lot to do…

TIME, 30 may 1994

all of those things came together in that moment so that i was no longer just aware of jackie but i was interested in her. and also, significantly, i cared.

i wanted to read more and wanted to know more. there were now wants and needs around a life i’d previously been aware of but cared nothing about.

this was, i have come to believe, in huge part to do with the times. i was interested in jackie because her story was interesting, but i think it resonated for reasons very much having to do with the timing- a very precise cultural atmosphere existing in spring 1994– and i was able to read her story because, in may/june 1994, it was everywhere.

her story had been everywhere for awhile, so it’s not like it wasn’t already available to me had i gone looking for it. but there was an urgency to its telling now and a hyper-visibility that made my interest far easier to indulge. she was there.

via google image search

and magazines and tv specials led to biographies and other magazines and an MA and, eventually (god-willing), a PhD.

the entry of jackie’s story in my life felt, even at the time, ground-breaking.

it’s easy, in retrospect, to amplify it, to make it bigger and more dramatic than it was then because we now have a better sense of where it would eventually lead. but, you guys, it was pretty damn big.

enough so that, i felt the need one night over dinner at the taco bell on highway 96, to announce to my parents that i was going to begin collecting editions of life magazine with jackie on their cover.

via google image search

i also spent much of that summer writing a series of HILARIFYING diary entries trying to figure out what had happened.

great in number because, having left my diary behind at the summer youth camp, i then rewrote many of my deep thoughts on jackie (and dick nixon), only to have the original diary resurface so that i’m left with double the thoughts.

this entry in particular- where, in the new diary, i attempted to reconstruct the events of the previous months- is particularly illuminating. the banality! the historical intrusions! the baby-sitting!

via my diary, late 1994ish

in retrospect, it’s clear that, in these diary entires, i was doing some sort of autoethnographic triage.

it is highly possible that i am still trying to do some sort of autoethnographic triage- trying to figure out what happened, trying to explain the shift i described earlier, trying to pinpoint the moment when we begin to care and to dig deeply into the site of that wound.

there was a moment last spring in the writing of my jackie book where it became clear that nixon was a major player in the story i was trying to tell. this was a REVELATION. and yet…

richard nixon comes up in my diaries all of the time. he was already there, from the beginning. i see that now.

and i am surprised by how often i mentioned jackie and nixon together. in my memory, there is only her, but he nonetheless seems to have somehow vitally paved the way.

via my diary

if my own biographer were to ever come along and read these entries, it would appear that i always had a complete vision of the book i was going to write.

this interpretation would be very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very WRONG.

(how often biographers must make such assumptions. how often we must get it wrong.)

i clawed my way through the dark forest of this story. it is only after the fact that it looks inevitable. it is only after the fact that it looks like richard nixon was lurking in the shadows all along.

(this is one of the great devastations of writing: the realization that if you do it well, it will look as though you’ve simply pointed out the obvious.)

in sotheby’s kennedy family homes auction catalog, 2005

nothing about this was clear.

in may 1994, almost immediately, with jackie, i felt something momentous had occurred in my emotional life which was not apparent to the outside world and which also did not seem to make any sense AND which was vaguely embarrassing in its excess.

i was trying to figure out through writing- in the tones of someone who’d just read all of jane austen’s novels- why i so suddenly cared about jackie so much.

via random small pieces of paper inserted into 1994 diary

my retrospective assumption that all of this had hugely to do with timing and context has evidentiary support.

i appear, at the time, to have been very down on america…

via my diary

there is also an embarrassingly moralistic tone…

via my diary

i went to see gone with the wind at the bfi this weekend, and i see hints of the opening poem here.

via youtube

so that my longing for the world of jackie onassis and richard nixon (!!!) was very much rooted in a nostalgia for the past. this isn’t surprising given that the wall-to-wall coverage of jackie’s death in 1994 was characterized by the same.

rather hilariously though, these are the dimensions of her story that least interest me now. this is precisely the very conventional telling that i have subsequently rebelled against.

in july 1994, i write of my interest in jackie:

via my diary

that full impact was hugely positive. and i do believe i was initially drawn to her, almost instinctively, because it was apparent that she was beloved.

but, once the dust settled, all that the way we were… business became the least interesting thing about her story. because, y’know…

give me props for knowing his name was rupert

i mentioned accessibility earlier and i’ll return to it now.

other stories were available. i had a casual interest in princess diana, for example, which had much to do with the availability of her story.

i was aware of her. how could you not be?

via google image search

but i do not know that i ever really cared about diana and, if i did, it was certainly not in the same way.

my diary entries on diana- of which there are very few- seem to support this interpretation. they are strangely clinical. i relate factoids of her life in the same tone as i relate the downing of planes and the coming of tornados.

this entry is a few years after jackie, when i was even more keenly aware of the sense that one day everyone would want to read my diaries and my penmanship had accordingly morphed to carry the weight of my historical duties… (please cherish with me the adolescent pomposity inherent in inclusion of the current temperature and the precision of the time stamp.)

via my diary

note how her impending divorce (which did feel like a monumental  plot development at the time) is totally eclipsed here by the more personal realization that biblical stories may not be factually real…

there is a patness to any interest i had in diana. perhaps this had to do with her britishness. more likely it had to with the sense that there seemed to be far fewer unknowns with diana. jackie, in contrast, was an ongoing mystery.

i wondered, what must she have been like?

i know i wondered this because i wrote about my wonderings in GREAT detail.

and i know that i was aware, in that summer of 1994, that my own interest in jackie sprung from her omnipresence.

on 7 july 1994, within the 2nd most obnoxious thing i have ever written about jackie onassis (the worst BY FAR is the 4 august 1994 entry, which concludes with the declaration that, were i given the opportunity to have a conversation with jackie onassis, i would tell her she was a survivor and quote the lines “don’t let it be forgot/that once there was a spot…”), i indicate as much:

via my diary

let’s all shudder at the unfortunate word choice of “splattered” to describe photo usage in print. then let’s laugh at the notion of her image being splattered across the seas. and no let’s note how this is SO FANTASTICALLY WEIRD, non?

i was just barely 13. and the repeated refrain throughout this one-page document that i produced in the corel office suite and printed on my dot matrix printer on the ivory marbled paper i only used on special occasions because i thought it was more expensive is that something momentous had occurred which i did not understand and i was quite sure that it had something to do with increased visibility in the media.

this is alarming because (1) it is basically my research interests in a nutshsell and (2) i was thirteen!!!!

this girl!!

she didn’t have a clue, but already she was peering into the weird and wondering.

parents be good to your pre-teens because i’ve this theory that when you’re 12 or 13, you’re opened up to the world in a way that is either new or different or heightened or, i don’t know, just plain fuller.

in palimpsest, in a section where he argues that movies shape us as we’re growing up and he talks about his childhood desire to be a twin, gore vidal mentions that he was 12 at the time.

perhaps not compelling evidence and i do not know that my 1994 self would have agreed, as she saw the interest in jackie as part of a pre-existing narrative:

via my diary

the narrative of my weird interest in people after they have died. a rather reductive way of classifying it, i’d argue now, as i don’t think it’s entirely to do with death but rather, again, about accessibility, as there are multiple cultural forces at work here and i now know that stories often become more accessible around anniversaries or deaths.

my interest in elvis had much to do with this completely ludicrous 1992 bill bixby special tv special…

but also my family’s interest in elvis and TBS’s annual elvis week every summer, during which they ran two elvis movies every morning.

the interest in gone with the wind was prompted by georgia public television’s airing of the 1988 documentary the making of a legend: gone with the wind during a fundraising marathon. this was probably the first documentary film i’d seen and paid attention to and i was mesmerized by the behind the scenes-ness of it.

and i’m pretty sure the road there was paved with paper dolls…

the 1994 narrative here of my weird interest in people after they have died is blatantly inaccurate in a number of respects, chief among them the fact i was interested in living people, especially the life narratives of figure skaters. (those mini-bios CBS ran during the winter olympics were crazy compelling.) so i’d suggest there was a little self-editing happening here for historical purposes.

but there’s also some truth to it.

i write a lot about how the narratives of living people mirror our own uncertainty in life but posthumous narratives offer a certainty. we know how the story went. it is ended, settled, if not solved.

i was 13. life was high drama. everything was uncertain and the world appeared to be falling apart. adam and eve were not real.

but jackie, she was safe, beloved and her story was over.

obviously it wasn’t or i wouldn’t be writing it now, but i do wonder if that explains the shift from sixth grade to eighth, the shift from her being a face on a women’s history handout to being someone i cared about intensely. there was, at the core of that, a loss.

via my diary

let’s be real: had jackie lived, it’s unlikely i would have ever seen her, much less met or known her. let’s thank god for that because i apparently would have told her she was a survivor and quoted camelot and that would’ve been awkward for us all. but, my lamentation here is an articulation of a loss.

it is an acknowledgement of the limitations of my knowledge and my own life.

never in my life will i know jackie onassis.

there are things i can never do. already! and i was discovering this at on 13. the reality there is knowledge that, due to the restrictions of time and space and life and death, i will never have.

at the conclusion of the bombastic death scene he concocts for marilyn monroe in his 1973 book marilyn, norman mailer writes:

norman mailer, marilyn

i’ve suggested before that perhaps the rumors of people’s sex lives are never-ending because they are a way of keeping those people alive. obviously not in a literal sense, but in a figurative one.

his or her story is still visible. we are still talking about it. they are still with us. it is a way of unconsciously convincing ourselves that people still matter after they are gone. and, by extension, that we matter.

time goes swiftly. one minute you are living history then you are history, as i so famously and repeatedly wrote in 1994.

via my diary

and yet…

have you ever wondered, what is the ultimate celebrity disaster? 

well, lo, THE DAILY MAIL PROVIDES.

kanye and KK had their kid. they named it saint. pete wentz also has a kid and it is also named saint. et voilà.

given that we’re not exactly new to this game, we’re all rather media literate around here and we’re all survivors of “The Sad, Solitary, Alone Taco Bell Incident” and the one time macaulay culkin was “healthy and happy” because he was seen carrying a hudson news bag at laguardia, i’m assuming we can all identify that what is happening here is actually the daily mail engaging in fervid speculation in order to conceal the fact that this story of “the ultimate celebrity disaster” is actually a story about pete wentz going to the airport yesterday afternoon.

accordingly, we are treated to this stunning narration of photographs we can look at for ourselves:

and this exciting recounting of things readily available elsewhere on the internet:

along with this patently false claim that wentz “didn’t crack a smile,” positioned directly over a photograph where he appears to be in the process of doing precisely that.

if not even the mail‘s claims of pete wentz’s lack of smile reflects reality, how can we take any of this story seriously? this factual disconnect calls everything into question.

does casual travel really involve a hoodie and an arnold schwarzenegger shirt?

is saint even really that unusual a name if two celebrity couples have now used it?

does pete wentz even care?

is this really the ultimate celebrity disaster?

and also, in what i would identify as the central, latent anxiety of this dramatic narration of these photographs of pete wentz arriving at an airport yesterday afternoon: is kanye really a genius?

(images from the dailymail.co.uk)