Virtual Memories Show #128:
Rhonda K. Garelick – Impecunious Nobles
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“Chanel was trying to gift herself to women, and give them something that would lend them an allure that would be useful.”
Rhonda K. Garelick, author of Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History
“I remain certain that there is no one else who has had this sort of aesthetic influence.”
We also talk about Chanel’s pleasure in hiring fallen royalty to work in her boutiques and factories, the need for myth-making in fashion, the challenges of getting Chanel’s associates to talk to her, the psychological similarities of fashion and fascism, and the decision to structure Mademoiselle around Chanel’s relationships. Also, I make the major mistake of letting Rhonda ask me a question, which sends the conversation utterly off the rails.
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We talk about a couple of books in this episode. Here’s a list of ’em (Note: if I ever go to a Patreon crowdfunding model for the show, this is the first thing that goes subscriber-only):
- Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History
- Steve Jobs
– Walter Isaacson
- Between the World and Me
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
- The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture
– Scott Herring
- Private Lives, Public Deaths: Antigone and the Invention of Individuality
– Jonathan Strauss
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
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About our Guest
Rhonda K. Garelick writes on fashion, design, performance, art, literature and cultural politics. Her books include Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle
She is a Guggenheim fellow and has also received awards from the NEA, the NEH, the Getty Research Institute, the Dedalus Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Whiting Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Prof. Garelick received her B.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature and French from Yale University. She splits her time between Lincoln, Nebraska and her hometown of New York City.
At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she is Professor of Fine and Performing Arts and English, as well as the founder and director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Symposium. For the academic year 2015-2016, Rhonda will be the Stanley Kelly, Jr. Visiting Professor of Distinguished Teaching in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Garelick has also had a long career as an international business consultant, specializing in the fields of fashion, media, and journalism.
Credits: This episode’s music is Cri de Coeur by Edith Piaf. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
! We also talk about her need to try different genres, that pigeonholing process, how abandoning the supernatural for her Cass Neary novels was like working without a net, how her success at writing may be attributable to the Helsinki Bus Syndrome, what it was like to be at the punk scene in the mid-’70s, how she learned to strip down her prose for her recent (and excellent) noir crime novels, just how she ended up in coastal Maine, and more! 
– Jennifer Marie Brissett
– Julian Cope
– Pamela Des Barres
– Daryl Gregory
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Liz Hand
– Thomas Harris
– Greill Marcus
– Sally Mann
– Legs McNeil
– Kem Nunn
– Jean Stein, George Plimpton
– John Steinbeck
– JRR Tolkien
– Laura van den Berg
– Rob Young
, how a trip to Patagonia led to a new phase of his art, and why he decided to become a cartoonist instead of a painter (while making his rep in fashion illustration). 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
(with Lou Reed), 
, and his newest book, 
(2012, English translation, MacLehose 2013), which imagines Hitler returning to life in present-day Berlin is the latest example of this shift in German memory and what appears to be a collective desire for a normalized relationship to the country’s troubled past. The author will be in conversation with New York Times book critic and author 
(2015). The panel will be moderated by Gil Roth, host of 
(New York Review Books), which profiles Lionel Triling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, WH Auden, Frank O’Hara. We discuss the role of individuals in mass culture, the intellectual’s temptation to be a leader, the outdated figure of the Beloved Professor, Orwell’s misinterpretation of Auden, the writer he was terrified to meet, the failures of identity politics, the purpose of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, his lack of nostalgia for the era of public intellectuals, the way certain books need a year off from teaching in order to recharge, and more. 
is a study in self-pity, and more! Go listen!
(1999) is a sequel to his 
(1981). His book, 
, was published by Pantheon in 2006. His new book is 
. He has prepared editions of novels by Hardy, Bennett, Meredith, Wells, and Trollope, the first five volumes of a complete edition of Auden, and selections of Auden’s poems and prose. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, TLS, the New York Times Book Review, and many other journals and collections, and he wrote an introduction for a new edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. He has also written about computers, music, and the visual arts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
