Kevin Kopelson

Kevin Kopelson is professor of English at the University of Iowa. An exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work, The Perfect Medium, is at the Getty Museum until 31 July.

Beauty + Terror: Robert Mapplethorpe

Kevin Kopelson, 30 June 2016

In​ New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with pleasure, certainly, maybe even bliss – what Roland Barthes called jouissance. But there would also have been an inexplicable, almost sickening lust, and the fear of being seen looking. If you could...

All about Me: Don Bachardy

Kevin Kopelson, 9 April 2015

I too​ was ‘a single man’ in the fall of 1999. And like the doomed protagonist, George, in the novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, I too was gay; I too was an English professor (on a one-term sabbatical back then); I too was middle-aged (at 39 years old then, whereas George is 58); I too was living in Los Angeles (although my teaching position is in Iowa City); I...

I want to be her clothes: Kate Moss

Kevin Kopelson, 20 December 2012

Many people​ believe that Jesus, when alive, was both human and divine, or both mortal and immortal; many people, likewise, believe that God himself, of the Old as well as the New Testament, is both spiteful and forgiving, or both hateful and loving. And while we all believe such contradictory things about ourselves, about other people well known to us ‘in person’ (friends,...

Diary: Confessions of a Plagiarist

Kevin Kopelson, 22 May 2008

I quote too much. Give me a good line – what am I saying? Give me a good paragraph – even a Proustian one – and I’ll shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy.

Letter

Bach’s Uncles

19 July 2001

Edward Said claims that illness prevented J.S. Bach from concluding the last piece in The Art of Fugue (LRB, 19 July). Said should know that you can’t compose a quadruple fugue without writing the ending first, and that the ‘missing’ final page of Bach’s final work, a self-inscribed musical epitaph Busoni re-created in his Fantasia Contrappuntistica, must have been misplaced – probably by...

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