HUMILIATION - WAYNE KOESTENBAU

As part of a series that bills itself as consisting of “big ideas//small books” this book lives up to it’s premise. It is indeed a short little book all about humiliation. I’ve never read anything by Kosetenbaum before, I know he’s a sort of jack-of-all-trades in that he writes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, does music (plays piano?), and teaches painting at Yale. I believe he’s most famous for a book about the relationship between gay men and opera. This book does show some of that omnivorous spirit. It isn't’ straight philosophy or cultural criticism, which is what I would assume if I heard there was a book about humiliation. Instead he combines all of this with personal reflections/memoir and divides the whole thing into short little segments, almost prose-poem-like, which he calls fugues. This means he’ll swing back and forth between talking about something as serious as the torturer at Gitmo, to Liza Manelli give a bad concert to a memory of humiliation from his own childhood. Koestenbaum does try to keep things in perspective, clearly these examples aren’t on the same level of seriousness, but you do get some whiplash from toggling back and forth from such disparate examples. The most interesting parts to me involved his attempts to trace the link between pleasure and humiliation, especially in a sexual context. He never comes up with a unifying theory, the very structure of the book is designed to merely touch on things then move on, so we don’t ever get too deep. This is particularly frustrating when he discusses the “Jim Crow Gaze” and the relationship between racism and humiliation. There might be something there but he doesn’t stick with it long enough or go deep enough to really excavate something new and original, it’s more of an outline. Overall, I would say I would be interested in reading something longer by Koestenbaum, he seems to be a pretty original thinker, but I need him to follow the various threads he’s pulling longer. 1969 humiliations