Margaret Talbot on Bettie Page

[devifemme]

I just read a piece by Margaret Talbot in the New Yorker, and liked the writing so much that I Googled her to see what else she's done. Answer: a helluva lot, including an astute piece on Bettie Page for the New Republic* almost twenty years ago. "... We live in an age when pop culture is our history and history is our flea market. Kitsch never dies; it lacks the gravity to die; it just circles back, with a new price tag and a hopeful air. "It turns out that no junk is junky enough to be consigned to the obsolescence for which it was intended-not fake fur or Formica, not Russ Meyer or Ed Wood, not Esquivel or Abba. "We do not lament the passing of things that were meant to last; we lament the passing of things that were meant not to last. We refuse to be robbed of a past by a culture of transience. It is our lot, therefore, to be overrun, or to overrun ourselves, with the schlock not only of today, but of two, three, four decades past. "Oblivion, it seems, is worse than vulgarity. And so we claim ephemera for posterity." _____________________ *https://newrepublic.com/article/116626/margaret-talbot-bettie-page BTW I reworked the paragraph breaks for LJ's format.