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Book

Figure it out : essays

Call Number

  • 814 K785 (CEN)

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Edition

First Soft Skull edition.

Publication Information

New York : Soft Skull, 2020.

Physical Description

273 pages ; 21 cm

Uniform Title

Essays. Selections

Summary

""Toward 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." In his new nonfiction collection, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for stranger; Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet. Koestenbaum dreams about a hand job from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to readers: "Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina." "Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed." "Find 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." Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play"--

Contents

  • I
  • Do You Want to Touch It? p. 3
  • My New Glasses p. 9
  • Of Smells p. 17
  • Game of Pearls p. 27
  • Corpse Pose p. 41
  • Beauty Parlor at Hotel Dada p. 57
  • II
  • No More Tasks p. 77
  • Figure It Out p. 85
  • Odd Secrets of the Line p. 105
  • Making Marks p. 127
  • "My" Masculinity Remix p. 133
  • The Porn Punctum p. 143
  • The Task of the Translator p. 147
  • III
  • Punctuation p. 165
  • On Futility, Holes, and Hervé Guibert p. 189
  • Riding the Escalator with Eve p. 203
  • Adrienne Rich's Musical Ethics p. 209
  • I Don't Understand Shakespeare's Sonnet #154 p. 215
  • My Brief Apprenticeship with John Barth p. 217
  • Twelve Assignments p. 229
  • IV
  • Six Stars p. 235
  • Celebrity's Secret Ameliorations p. 243
  • An Evening of Screen Tests p. 251
  • Rauschenberg's Squeegee p. 257
  • Eighteen Lunchtime Assignments p. 261
  • Little Elegy p. 267.

Subjects

Genres

Essays.