If you missed Tom Payne’s excellent interview with Neal Conan on NPR‘s “Talk of the Nation,” be sure to listen here. (aired 12/29/10)

A nice review of Fame ran on The Atlantic.com on December 27th — read here.

And Toby Young reviewed Fame in The Wall Street Journal on December 27th, concluding that “Fame is lively and well-written, and there is much to interest classicists here…”

Previously:

• A rave review from Caroline Weber in The New York Times Book Review:

In his trenchant, unsettling, darkly hilarious FAME, Tom Payne…examines the murky pact that binds stars to their public…. Moving seamlessly between yesterday’s great literature—Greek, Roman, early Christian, Enlightenment and Romantic—and today’s trashy tabloids, Payne advances a persuasive, if disturbing, definition of what fame is now, and what it has ever been…. This may sound like heavy stuff, but Payne wears his erudition lightly, alternating between the highbrow and the low in a way that invests the classics with surprising accessibility and relevance. And he endows modern celebrity gossip with unexpected cultural import.

• Click to read about Tom Payne’s Fame in ”Dying to Live Forever” (Newsweek)

Nothing seems more modern than society’s relentless obsession with reality-show stars, Hollywood tweets, and tabloid scandals. Buta wildly entertaining new book by former Daily Telegraph literary editor Tom Payne suggests that our celebrity culture has rather old roots. In Fame, Payne draws provocative parallels between 21st-century stardom and the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Aztecs to explore how the fame game has evolved over the millennia.”

• Fame was also recently reviewed in Library Journal:

Payne knows his literature and his modern culture, and he deftly draws some astounding parallels between these classical figures and today’s celebrities as well as audiences both past and present who invest their idols with power but can rob them of privacy, dignity, and even fame.

Verdict: This one-of-a-kind book looks at current society’s responses to celebrities from a highly literate and astute perspective. It is well written and accessible enough to have appeal beyond academic audiences, and it warrants a second read by those who would like to absorb more fully the finer points of its thesis.”

• Interview: Tom Payne in Newsweek. Click to read “How Lady Gaga Is Like the Aztecs”

Megastars like Lady Gaga, he argues, are elevated to the status of demigods—but we demand sacrifices from them in return (their image, their privacy). ‘The crowd wants something, and anindividual is prepared to give it to them,’ Payne writes, and the whole affair is often tinged with ‘collective cruelty.’ It’s not so different from how the Aztecs liked to select a sacrificial victim, worship her as a deity, and then cut out her heart in front of a rapt crowd.”

• Radio: Click to listen to Tom Payne discuss our cult of celebrity on NH Public Radio “Word of Mouth” (15 minutes)
• Radio: Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities”– KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour)

• Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club:
  Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review)

Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies [...]“

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  “Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”

“In his trenchant, unsettling, darkly hilarious FAME, Tom Payne…examines the murky pact that binds stars to their public…. Moving seamlessly between yesterday’s great literature—Greek, Roman, early Christian, Enlightenment and Romantic—and today’s trashy tabloids, Payne advances a persuasive, if disturbing, definition of what fame is now, and what it has ever been…. This may sound like heavy stuff, but Payne wears his erudition lightly, alternating between the highbrow and the low in a way that invests the classics with surprising accessibility and relevance. And he endows modern celebrity gossip with unexpected cultural import.”

Previously:

• Click to read about Tom Payne’s Fame in ”Dying to Live Forever” (Newsweek)

Nothing seems more modern than society’s relentless obsession with reality-show stars, Hollywood tweets, and tabloid scandals. Buta wildly entertaining new book by former Daily Telegraph literary editor Tom Payne suggests that our celebrity culture has rather old roots. In Fame, Payne draws provocative parallels between 21st-century stardom and the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Aztecs to explore how the fame game has evolved over the millennia.”

• Fame was also recently reviewed in Library Journal:

Payne knows his literature and his modern culture, and he deftly draws some astounding parallels between these classical figures and today’s celebrities as well as audiences both past and present who invest their idols with power but can rob them of privacy, dignity, and even fame.

Verdict: This one-of-a-kind book looks at current society’s responses to celebrities from a highly literate and astute perspective. It is well written and accessible enough to have appeal beyond academic audiences, and it warrants a second read by those who would like to absorb more fully the finer points of its thesis.”

• Interview: Tom Payne in Newsweek. Click to read “How Lady Gaga Is Like the Aztecs”

Megastars like Lady Gaga, he argues, are elevated to the status of demigods—but we demand sacrifices from them in return (their image, their privacy). ‘The crowd wants something, and anindividual is prepared to give it to them,’ Payne writes, and the whole affair is often tinged with ‘collective cruelty.’ It’s not so different from how the Aztecs liked to select a sacrificial victim, worship her as a deity, and then cut out her heart in front of a rapt crowd.”

• Radio: Click to listen to Tom Payne discuss our cult of celebrity on NH Public Radio “Word of Mouth” (15 minutes)
• Radio: Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities”– KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour)

• Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club:
  Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review)

Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies [...]“

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  “Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”

Facebook is but one more embarrassing fracture in the perceived dignity of the monarchy – like forcing the queen to wear a sombrero at a Spring Break Cinco de Maya party.  Even attempts to maintain some propriety and ceremony seem silly (oh, but her “friends” do try.  One commenter on a photo of the queen trumpets: “Your Majesty . . . a shinning light you are. Your servant, the Yank.”).

It used to be the case that people could command some clout if they were seen to be in with a monarch. Proximity to the royal family was implicit in a system of titles, after all. Being a Lord looks rubbish when the language of the hierarchy is telling us that a Marquis is more in his or her Royal Highness’s favour.

All that changed one day in 1813, with a remark from Beau Brummell, who was famous for dressing nicely (that’s Old English for “famous for being famous”). The Prince Regent snubbed him, so Brummell said to the prince’s companion, “Who’s your fat friend?”

From then on, the tide has turned, so that now, just as mere civilians such as Barack Obama and Tony Blair, can only really be respectable if they hang out with celebrities.

Happily, the Queen has access to endless celebrities. The Prime Minister finds them for her, by preparing Honours Lists. Then, day by day, luminaries in limos roll up to Buckingham Palace to receive medals.

This is the most striking thing about Her Majesty’s facebook page, called, self-deprecatingly, The British Monarchy. People of whom you’ve sort of heard arrive for an investiture. You’ve sort of heard? Actually, you might not know whom I mean by Fred Dineage. He’s a local newsreader, highly familiar to people who grew up near enough to a transmitter in the south of England, but not global, or even national. But there he is, receiving an MBE, and smiling at the Queen. All the comments about this scene pay homage to Dineage, and a children’s show he had in the Seventies, called HOW.

Still, one Dineage fan has paid lip service to the royal presence, with a two-word allusion to the work of Justin Timberlake: “Sexy back.” The back of the queen is all you can see in this picture. She’s looking good, in a blue floral number.

Compared to Beau Brummell’s quip, it has a 21^st-century kind of gallantry.

Here in Britain, we are thrilled, of course, and intrigued by an announcement from Buckingham Palace that the ceremony will (somehow) reflect current economic circumstances, much like the London Olympics of the same year. And pundits rejoin that the whole show will be a matter of “bread and circuses”  – yes, they quote Juvenal on Roman emperors. We’re supposed to understand by this that the Royal Family might, in some cynical way, divert our attention from the mess we’re in.

To which I can only reply, so they should. Are we complaining that the Royal Family is somehow too glamorous? That bling doesn’t suit them? That a gold carriage is a little de trop? Phooey to that. They have a gold carriage anyway. What are they meant to do – leave it in the garage? And those poor horses to pull it – aren’t they allowed a trot to Westminster Abbey? It’s not such a long way (depending on the traffic).

These are probably the same people who mope about our cult of celebrity. The history of fame and the history of monarchy are the same, after all. And if you’re going to complain about people who are famous for not having done much, then royal families look like prime examples. They were famous even as babies, when they could barely roll around or walk: I mean, when they could achieve even less than the line-up of Jersey Shore.

And then they do grow up to be some use. At the risk of being serious, they fly helicopters, visit the sick and help people raise money. Usually in a good way (pace Sarah Ferguson). So we have a use for them, too. If they don’t benefit us directly in the ways above, then they are a focal point for our own feelings. That is to say, we gossip about them: “What great ones do, the less will prattle of.” They fulfil exactly that role of defining themselves by shining more brightly than the rest of us. Or, as the exchange so aptly has it in Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail: “How do you know he’s a king?” “Because he hasn’t got shit all over him.”

So they are uber-celebrities, and ur-celebrities (they’re less good at German than they used to be, though). Let them have the Abbey, and the horses, and let them eat really nice cake. But maybe not Elton John. That would be a little too much. How about Lily Allen?

Life by Keith Richards: review

From The Telegraph, 05 Nov 2010

If you can remember the Sixties, blah blah blah. Boy can Keith Richards remember the Sixties, which is great. The real miracle is that he can remember the Seventies, considering that Keith’s poison was heroin, which would surely make performing in a high-energy band quite difficult, let alone raising two children, with a heroin-addicted Anita Pallenberg.

Read the full article here.

Nothing seems more modern than society’s relentless obsession with reality-show stars, Hollywood tweets, and tabloid scandals. But a wildly entertaining new book by former Daily Telegraph literary editor Tom Payne suggests that our celebrity culture has rather old roots. In Fame, Payne draws provocative parallels between 21st-century stardom and the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Aztecs to explore how the fame game has evolved over the millennia.”

Fame was also recently reviewed in Library Journal:

Payne knows his literature and his modern culture, and he deftly draws some astounding parallels between these classical figures and today’s celebrities as well as audiences both past and present who invest their idols with power but can rob them of privacy, dignity, and even fame.

Verdict: This one-of-a-kind book looks at current society’s responses to celebrities from a highly literate and astute perspective. It is well written and accessible enough to have appeal beyond academic audiences, and it warrants a second read by those who would like to absorb more fully the finer points of its thesis.”

Previously:

• Interview: Tom Payne in Newsweek. Click to read “How Lady Gaga Is Like the Aztecs”

“Megastars like Lady Gaga, he argues, are elevated to the status of demigods—but we demand sacrifices from them in return (their image, their privacy). ‘The crowd wants something, and anindividual is prepared to give it to them,’ Payne writes, and the whole affair is often tinged with ‘collective cruelty.’ It’s not so different from how the Aztecs liked to select a sacrificial victim, worship her as a deity, and then cut out her heart in front of a rapt crowd.”

• Radio: Click to listen to Tom Payne discuss our cult of celebrity on NH Public Radio “Word of Mouth” (15 minutes)
• Radio: Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities”– KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour)

• Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club:
  Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review)

“Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies [...]“

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

“Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  ”Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”

Excerpt:

“Megastars like Lady Gaga, he argues, are elevated to the status of demigods—but we demand sacrifices from them in return (their image, their privacy). ‘The crowd wants something, and anindividual is prepared to give it to them,’ Payne writes, and the whole affair is often tinged with ‘collective cruelty.’ It’s not so different from how the Aztecs liked to select a sacrificial victim, worship her as a deity, and then cut out her heart in front of a rapt crowd.”

Previously:

• Radio: Click to listen to Tom Payne discuss our cult of celebrity on NH Public Radio “Word of Mouth” (15 minutes)
• Radio: Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities” – KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour)

• Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club:
  Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review)

“Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies [...]“

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

“Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  ”Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”

Listen to Tom Payne on “why [...] we revere but also revile our celebrities” – KERA “Think” (Dallas Public Radio; 1 hour):

Previously:

• Fame Reviewed in The Onion‘s A.V. Club:
  Fame: What The Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity (A.V. Club Review)

“Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies [...]“

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

“Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  ”Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”

Excerpt:

“[...] Fame isn’t a simple reduction of modern celebrity culture to we’ve-seen-this-before status, or a cheap attempt to fuse philosophy to the flavor of the month. Payne’s questions and answers have a distinctly modern feel, a semiological argument that recalls Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (which Payne also cites) as much as it does ancient Greek mythology. The book is at its best in the passages where he discusses the symbolic meaning of our perception of the famous, not just its similarity to that of the past. A canny chapter on our interpretation of celebrity beauty focuses on the question of what Kate Winslet really looks like: ‘On the one hand, we don’t really know,’ Payne observes, ‘but we’re quick to complain when we see a photograph of her that doesn’t look like her.’”

– Leonard Pierce, The Onion’s A.V. Club

Previously:

• “Why Cicero Would Have Loved Kim Kardashian”
  (The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy blog)
• Tom Payne is interviewed in  Publishers Weekly.
  Click to read “The Fame Monster”
• In the same issue, Fame gets a rave review:

“Erudite and vastly entertaining… A charming, contrarian, and very witty look at how our stargazing can be ‘something that bonds us, and which expresses something about how our civilization works.’”

• And, if you missed it, Tom has an excellent piece in The Huffington Post:
  ”Lady Gaga and the Episode with the Meat”