Overview
āToward what goal do I aspire, ever, but collision? Always accident, concussion, bodies butting together . . . By collision I also mean metaphor and metonymy: operations of slide and slip and transfuse.ā
Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and āassignmentsā that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passengerās leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for āstrangerā; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friendās stinky feet. Wayne dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenbergās squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences.
He directly proposes assignments to readers: āBuy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina.ā āDescribe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed.ā āFind in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness . . . Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.ā
Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from āone of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing todayā (John Waters).
This book title, Figure It Out (Essays), ISBN: 9781593765958, by Wayne Koestenbaum, published by Catapult (May 5, 2020) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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