Dear Wayne Koestenbaum, thank you

Poet, critic, novelist, and professor Wayne Koestenbaum is here to help us. We are so lucky. In "Dear Wayne, I've Been Humiliated," a series of book trailers for Humiliation, forthcoming from Picador in August, Koestenbaum cycles through various circumstances of mortification, recalling YM Magazine's infamous "Say Anything" confessional—if only he had been around when we were 14! As his publisher writes of the videos, "[h]is generous disclosures and brilliant observations go beyond prurience to create a poetics of abasement." Publisher's Weekly writes of the book:

In fragments that recall Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, the author advances his provocative "paradoxes and juxtapositions" to trace humiliation's contours, the circumstances that make it possible ("Humiliation involves a triangle" of victim, abuser, and witness), and its centrality to certain kinds of pleasure (e.g., Koestenbaum's delight in Liza Minnelli's ability to repeatedly succumb to--and triumph over--humiliation). He refreshes worn tropes such as the humiliation inherent in reality TV and such political scandals as Richard Nixon's resignation ("Watergate wasn't a sexual scandal, but it manifested as physical abhorrence") while also deepening our understanding of racism, lynching, and police brutality in the context of shame. It's a wide-ranging, allusive conversation that wears its erudition lightly--not least because Koestenbaum is at his confiding, self-implicating best ("I am tired, as any human must be, after a life spent avoiding humiliation and yet standing near its flame, enjoying the sparks, the heat, the paradoxical illumination.")

The sparks in the "Dear Wayne, I've Been Humiliated" web series include "Farted in Yoga," "Book Party Faux Pas," "Hot Date, Cold Sore," "Shy Coworker, Dirty Movies," "Fat or Pregnant? (Subway Mistakes)," and more. Reframe your Monday blues by watching the teaser below.

http://youtu.be/W1uqF0XOrxc