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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Perhaps what’s gathered here is not an interview at all Precisely what it is, we’ll think about in a moment but first, the familiar, giddy ritual of introductions I think I should introduce Wayne Koestenbaum with great ceremony, the sort that might have anticipated the arrival of some of his great, glamorous past subjects like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Judy Garland or Maria Callas Or else I should opt for something bright, anarchic and bawdy, echoing the kind of introduction that might have heralded the entrance of Harpo Marx (another of his much-loved subjects… or objects?) whilst still performing in vaudeville Taken with this particular approach, I’ve found a suitable soundbite, borrowed from his pal Bruce Hainley which describes his work as resembling ‘a late night drunken three-way between Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag’, all present and correct though we might add to this ménage-a-trois the poet Frank O’ Hara, or Georges Bataille at his most mischievous, making room for Walter Benjamin no doubt somewhere in the shadows   The best introduction, maybe, is simply his work Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of many books including The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (2012), a heroic undertaking in which every frame of Harpo Marx’s onscreen appearances is analysed as per Koestenbaum’s dictum, ‘We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death’; Humiliation (2011), on the varieties and pleasures of shame; Hotel Theory (2007), a typically playful text, half meditation on the cultural history of the hotel, half imaginary dialogue between Lana Turner and Liberace, placed side by side on the page and without the articles ‘a’, ‘an’ or ‘the’; and Andy Warhol (2001), a nonpareil portrait – though ‘case study’ is maybe a more fitting term – of the artist in all his fascinating blankness, which expertly dissects his peculiar body and extraordinary art He has also authored many books of poetry – including Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films (2006), The Milk of Inquiry (1999) and Rhapsodies of A Repeat Offender (1994) – and works of fiction while teaching at the City University of New York   So if this

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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poetry

Issue No. 2

Letter to Jim Jarmusch [Broken Flowers]

Jon Thompson

poetry

Issue No. 2

What they’ll know of us in future years: the large interiors of our suburban homes were designed by others...

fiction

September 2015

The Afternoon

Wolfgang Hilbig

TR. Isabel Fargo Cole

fiction

September 2015

Nothing new on Bahnhofstrasse! — These are the first words to occur to me upon arrival. With the word...

feature

September 2013

A God In Spite of His Nose

Anna Della Subin

feature

September 2013

‘Paradise is a person. Come into this world.’ — Charles Olson   In the darkness of the temple, footsteps...

 

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