Author: Zachary Tavlin

Zachary Tavlin teaches in the Liberal Arts department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work on literature and poetics, literary and critical theory, the history of philosophy, and film and visual culture can be found in many journals and collections. He is currently working on a few books, including one on glances, one on Emily Dickinson, and one on the critical techne of serial art and poetry.

Barbara Payton
gossip
Hedda Hopper

“This Little Trixie”

Zachary Tavlin explores gossip’s utopian and dystopian possibilities through the story of Barbara Payton, notoriously hounded by mid-century gossip columnists, Hopper and Louella Parsons among them. Gossip is, in his account of Payton’s misadventures, an equivocal way of building social cohesion, for good and ill.

Party as Form

With

Zachary Tavlin

“This Little Trixie”

Dilettante Mail

Dilettante Mail