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“... New York’s Guggenheim Museum contains in an annex a covert Robert Mapplethorpe gallery, a sober exhibition space which, like the masterpieces of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become ...”

“... I began this feuilleton in a hotel room, the Hyatt Regency in Houston, Texas: a Didionesque locale. (Caryl Phillips once told me that he liked to write his books in faraway hotel rooms. I admire that. It brings to mind Janet Flanner at the Ritz and James Schuyler at the Chelsea.) Joan Didion has often noted transiency’s allure, a writer’s necessary alienation from fixed address ...”

“... Rudolph Valentino, according to his first-rate biographer, Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly cauliflowered’ left ear. Most photographs hide this ear, as did his protective cinematographers, so I must struggle to imagine it. If I were to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or to his legacy, I might entitle it ‘In Search of Valentino’s Slightly Cauliflowered Left Ear ...”

“... I have no special love for the voice of Enrico Caruso, perhaps because it does not need me to rescue it; classic, impervious, it awaits eternity – it has already arrived at eternity – and demands no fan, no patient posthumous acolyte, to alchemise it. The Caruso voice, as his son describes it, in Enrico Caruso: My Father and My Family, a story as pathetic, plodding and perverse as any I have read, is a pure column of air; without flaw, it assails low and high notes alike with plump machismo, sometimes sobbing, sometimes finishing off the breath with a punctuating snarl ...”

“... I read star biographies to find out how stars see themselves and how they see each other. Though I am interested in their behaviour, I am more interested in the curves and austerities of their cognition. Huge gulfs divide a star in daily life from a star on screen; the style in which a star executes an action (film role, household chore, errand, ambassadorial mission) is not the style in which she secretly contemplates her colleagues ...”

“... One event dominated Tennessee Williams’s life: his sister Rose’s bilateral prefrontal lobotomy, performed on 13 January 1943, two years before The Glass Menagerie, the play he forged from her condition, was first produced. He rarely mentions the lobotomy in his private notebooks, the fragmented daybooks which he kept for much of his life, and which have now been edited, with sumptuous photographic and biographical supplementation, by Margaret Bradham Thornton, to whom devotees of Williams should be grateful ...”

“... withdrawal. No wonder that his exemplar is Andy Warhol. ‘Warhol distrusted language,’ Wayne Koestenbaum writes on the first page of his smart biography; ‘he didn’t understand how grammar unfolded episodically in linear time, rather than in one violent atemporal explosion. Like the rest of us, he advanced chronologically from birth to ...”

“... second passage, by the way, first appeared in a letter I wrote to the English professor and critic Wayne Koestenbaum (also Jewish). Wayne, too, is someone with whom I’ve identified. (In his case, though, it’s because he reminds me of Steve, my openly gay yet truly mean brother. Or rather of the nice brother I’d ...”

“... of pornography from the ‘light’ (good) desire of eroticism. Compare that to remarks made by Wayne Koestenbaum in these pages: ‘It is because Mapplethorpe’s images are jerk-off grist that they should be of surpassing interest to serious students of the imagination.’* For Mapplethorpe, although Barthes didn’t know it, all such self-portraits ...”

“... remains a self-doubting book. Questions refuse to go away. In the first chapter, Felski quotes Wayne Koestenbaum working through his obsession with a Brahms concerto: ‘Did I feel an affinity with D minor itself? … Did I feel an affinity with modernity or with tonality’s rupture?’ Later, she wonders about ‘the bewildered question’ that ...”

“... makes a declarative statement herself; a single page of her introduction contains references to Wayne Koestenbaum, Gertrude Stein, George Oppen, Robin D.G. Kelley, Judith Butler, Fred Moten and Wendy Brown. In as far as this amorphous work can be defined, On Freedom is an example of a recent genre that takes as its subject the phenomenon of mass ...”

“... Birmingham’s work to Kitty Kelly’s Jackie Oh! to Jackie Under My Skin by the Yale semiotician Wayne Koestenbaum. Specialist markets within the domain of Jackie studies include Camelot freaks, of course, but also the ‘gay icon’ sub-strain which places her next to Liz Taylor and Ava Gardner as a sympathiser of the truly, wistfully stylish.Mr ...”

“... is not what I meant at all’). In Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (1989), Wayne Koestenbaum, for instance, argued that one of Eliot’s primary motivations in writing a poem so ‘maimed’, so chaotic and sprawling and in need of editorial intervention, was as a kind of seduction technique, a way of appealing to Pound for his ...”

“... choice of language, or of rhetoric). Grover’s essay is interestingly counterpointed by those of Wayne Koestenbaum (‘Speaking in the Shadow of Aids’) and Michael Callen (‘Aids: The Linguistic Battlefield’). For example, it seemed to me at first sight exaggerated to decry, as Grover does, the term Aids victim: ‘Fear and pity are the emotions ...”

“... appeared on the subject of castrati in recent years. In The Queen’s Throat, published in 1993, Wayne Koestenbaum offers an ingenious clue as to why we might have a great interest in the voices of the castrati. He makes a connection between modern psychoanalysis and a study of the sound the castrato made when he sang, lost to us now, sadly. ‘Both ...”