E! Entertainment - Softcover

Durbin, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0989598519 ISBN 13: 9780989598514

Publisher: Wonder, 2014

Synopsis

Fiction. Poetry. Women's Studies. Art. Kate Durbin's E! ENTERTAINMENT sparkles with the static of TV personalities, the privileged dramas of MTV's The Hills and Bravo's Real Housewives, the public tragedies of Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith. Durbin traces the migratory patterns of the flightiest members of our televised demimonde, from the vacant bedrooms of the Playboy Mansion to the modern gothic set of Kim Kardashian's fairytale wedding, rendering a fabulous, fallen world in a language of diamond-studded lavishness.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer. She is the author of The Ravenous Audience, E! ENTERTAINMENT (Wonder, 2014), and co-author of Abra, forthcoming as an iPad app and artist's book with the help of a grant from Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. Kate is founder of online pop cultural criticism journal Gaga Stigmata, and her tumblr project, Women as Objects, archives the teen girl tumblr aesthetic.

Review

"Even more surreal than what we get on TV, and also subversively funny." -XO Jane

"Durbin elevates petty O.C. arguments between Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag to the status of serious literature." -Nylon

"Durbin breaks down reality television and transcribes it into a vivarium of microdetail. The scripted moments of the Real Housewives shows transform into something else entirely when beamed from televised drama into ecosystems of language, fashion, and class." --Bookish

"There is no one sporting hypermediaflesh like Kate Durbin's. With E! Entertainment she strips the TV image from its old curves, reupholstering 2D-packed pixelshit into clipped components, sentences, where somehow less surrounded they take on the shape of psychically deformed wallpaper. These are our icon baths hobbling toward you, reciting script-prayer in mime of sleep, and now Durbin is their lord." --Blake Butler, author of Sky Saw

"Kate Durbin is the brilliant combination of Warhol and Warhollian superstar--both pop satirist and performance artist. Courtroom defiant La Lohan, the clownish pathos of Anna Nicole Smith: these are Durbin's Jackie O's and car crashes. E! Entertainment, is both rapturous and ravaging of pop culture, sending up the paparazzi's glare, the vampiric obsession with the lives of reality starlets, endlessly reported on E! news by fakebaked anchors with colgate smiles." --Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines

"By recounting the actions of women from Lindsey Lohan to the Basketball Wives in matter-of-fact, objective language, Durbin actively does not make judgments about them--and in doing so calls attention to the types of criticisms regularly lauded at women in the public eye. Durbin's book reassesses a culture that at once fixates on public images of women--voyeuristically watching their lives for entertainment--while simultaneously mocking, dismissing and condescending to them." --Bitch

"Durbin looks past the snobbish dismissal of reality tv to study Kim Kardashian's nuptials and Anna Nicole's trials and, secretly, all of our tribulations. Durbin's anti-satire demands to be read and read again, lest the paparazzi flashes blind you from seeing your own reflection." --Adult Magazine

"Conceptual writing has always been a kind of literary reality television, and reality television, in turn, has always been a sort of vernacular conceptualism. In E! Entertainment, Kate Durbin lets us linger over the lustrous details of the most authentically constructed works of our time, in all their inauthentic constructions. Here, we can plainly see "a microphone pack is viewable in the back of her dress"; "the back of her tank top pops out where her microphone pack is"; "a mic pack is viewable on the back of her shorts"; "a cameraman is viewable in the kitchen." And we ourselves are viewable in every line. Which brings home the degree to which we are all simultaneously exhibitionists and voyeurs under what Guy Debord would have called Spectacle. Or, maybe (as Tiqqun might ventriloquize Debord), we're all just girlfriends. Because "girlfriends tell each other what's really going on." But then again, as Wife Kyle notes, "her reality and my reality are two very different things." And ultimately, "we don't have any real proof" because our constructions now are false only so so long as they are actually documented: "Look! It's what I'm hearing, huh. It's fake. Camera, camera [...] Watch this. She isn't real. Look." Look again. Watch this closely. Read this through. Somewhere, "My Reality" by Jordan Pruitt is playing. "And that's hard for me to believe, honestly. The reality, the reality, the reality of it, I am like honest girl beyond belief."
--Craig Dworkin, critic and author of No Medium

"I think it's really cool that you write books about pop culture. I read your chapters on Lindsay Lohan & Anna Nicole Smith--love them both."--Josie Stevens, star of E! reality TV show Married to Rock

"Since it's clear that ours is a Golden Age of TV it makes perfect sense that it might be a perfect moment for some Golden Age-type writing on reality television. Boom! That's what you get in Durbin's yummy delve into housewives, sexy sirens, lonesome doomed doves, and other boys and girls behaving badly but always with a sense of power."--Jerry Saltz, senior art critic, New York Magazine

About this edition

• Publisher: Wonder
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0989598519
• ISBN 13: 9780989598514
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 205