My jaw cracks as I fling a cavernous smile into my bathroom mirror.
My mouth, a pit, threatening to swallow; my eyes, full moons, sparking with current; my nostrils, smokestacks, radiating terror; my smile lines, troughs, brimming with ecstasy; my expression, a billboard, beaming orgasmic desperation.
It’s 3am, and I’m practicing the art of grimacing.
Every part of Dante’s masterpiece1—Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso—ends with the word stars. A landmark work on fame (according to cultural historian Leo Braudy in his own benchmark text on stardom, The Frenzy of Renown),2 The Divine Comedy features a self-insertive Dante traversing three afterlife worlds, all the while encountering historical figures of note significant to his late medieval audiences.
Braudy identifies Dante as an adjudicator of fame.
By placing his contemporaries and historical references in the stratified rings of the afterlife, Dante makes judgment calls about who ought to be remembered in fame or infamy. Pope Nicholas III, a corrupt pope who granted high religious offices to his family members, must be thought of as stuck in a hole, upside down and on fire, in the Third Ring of Hell’s Eighth Circle; elsewhere, the soul of Ripheus, a virtuous Trojan who supposedly believed in Christ over a thousand years prior to Jesus’s birth, shines above the eye of a divine eagle soaring in the Eight Sphere of Heaven.
Explicitly, Dante puts himself at the top of this spiritual hierarchy. In fact, the entire story of The Divine Comedy is set in motion because Heaven has ordained that Dante must travel down the depths of Hell and up the terraces of Mt. Purgatory to reach the inner sanctum of Heaven’s Celestial Rose—the most sacred death realm.
Braudy describes Dante’s adjudication of fame as typical acts associated with the archetype of a poet: “the writer’s claim to bestow proper fame, a well-developed social role.”3 Think of Alexander the Great, remembered in part due to the cadre of historians he employed to write about his glories. The poet—as singer of heroes since time immemorial—determines who suffers in the underworld and who twinkles among the stars.
Geoffrey Chaucer offers an illuminating illustration of this point in his 14th century poem, The House of Fame.4
One of the many sights Chaucer sees in Fame’s great hall are several metal pillars, “of no great richness, yet they were made for nobleness.”5 Famous poets stand atop these columns, including Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan. Each of these poets carry something, more abstract in nature yet as solid as the beams that support them: the fame of their stories. Virgil carries on his shoulders the star of Aeneas; Ovid, of Cupid; and Lucan, of Caesar.
In crafting this tableau, Chaucer underlines the dynamic in which poets, writers, and storytellers pass on the memories of yesterday’s heroes and villains, a pattern familiar to Dante.
The Florentine even ascribes fame to himself (in a moment that undoubtedly inspired Chaucer) at the very beginning of his descent into Hell, when he meets the spirits of the aforementioned pillared poets (plus Homer and Horace).6 Dante, reverent to his literary ancestors, writes himself a warm welcome into this boy’s club of canonical Western poets:
An even higher honour came my way,
For they invited me to join their circle:
I was the sixth, with such great minds as they.7
Dante’s doing so, Braudy writes, “confirms . . . the poet’s sublime authority to know and judge greatness.”8
Consider this Substack, then, my attempt at embodying the role of a poet as I outline the shapes of contemporary stardom. 0:-)
In this newsletter, you can expect (hopefully) weekly essays that articulate some of stardom’s fundamental dynamics, as manifested in different historical and contemporary moments (and as informed by historical, sociological, and philosophical scholarship on fame, as well as a voracious appetite for pop culture).
What does rizz, a staple of Gen Z slang, have to do with Max Weber, a founding figure of sociology? How does the myth of Daphne and Apollo parallel Britney Spears’s infamous buzzcut? Who is Nina, why is she always mentioned in those TikTok meme compilations, and what does this have to say about the relationship between memory and fame? Such questions, and more, I will explore in these weekly musings, which non-paying subscribers enjoy access to forever.
Paying subscribers unlock access to three additional types of content released on a monthly basis: (1) TV/film/music/video essay/cultural criticism/podcast/book recommendations, (2) Q&As, and (3) behind-the-scenes peeks into the hybrid docufiction film I’m working on concurrently with this Substack (yes, I have high ambitions for my personal fame; yes, I’m documenting these ambitions; yes, that’s part of the point). Y’all even get to vote on the order these posts drop every month! :O
More fundamentally, I’m approaching this Substack as a conceptual laboratory where we—as writer and reader—sharpen our analytical understandings of fame, celebrity, and stardom. Politically rooted in the constellation of planetary movements embodying collective liberation, I hope this Substack community can serve as a place where we collectively expand our imaginative capacities for the roles stardom can play in nourishing interconnected relationships founded upon radical approaches to care, love, and healing.
Who gets to decide who is remembered in mainstream cultures, and how can this decision-making authority become more equitably distributed? How long ought we remember someone, and how do we decide this length of time? What kinds of practices do we use to reproduce a star, and how can these practices operate in alignment with socioecological boundaries and in service of collective flourishing? These types of questions lie at the heart of this project.
If you’ve read this far and are intrigued—great! Please consider subscribing (and financially supporting this project, if you can—it’d be greatly appreciated!). And please feel welcome to share any words or resonances down below. I feel an intense need to share and develop these thoughts on stardom in community, and I look forward to reimagining fame together.
This facial works pays off—an eccentric crewmember on a recent film shoot gleefully tells me that I’m good at scary faces. >:)
All references to The Divine Comedy in this post come from the J. G. Nichols translation, specifically the new edition published in 2021 by Alma Classics.
Leo Braudy. (1997). The Frenzy of Renown. Vintage Books.
The Frenzy of Renown, pg. 238.
References to The House of Fame come from the A. S. Kline translation published on Poetry in Translation in 2007.
No page number for this quote hehe, but it comes from “The Dream” section in Book III of the poem.
Dante places these poets in Hell’s First Circle, Limbo, a place for pagan and non-Christian souls who did not sin, yet were not baptized in the name of Christ. Souls do not suffer here (as opposed to those who endure the violent punishments featured in lower circles), but they do forever yearn to connect with God in Heaven.
The Divine Comedy, pg. 21.
The Frenzy of Renown, pg. 244.