Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Figure It Out: Essays

Figure It Out: Essays

Koestenbaum, Wayne

Paperback

Letters & EssaysGeneral GLBTQIA FictionIndividual Artists

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1593765959
ISBN13: 9781593765958
Publisher: Soft Skull
Published: May 5 2020
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.20
Language: English
Whatever his subject―favorites include porn, punctuation and the poetry of Frank O'Hara―the goal is always to jigger logic and language free of its moorings . . . His great and singular appeal is this fealty to his own desire and imagination . . . Figuring it out, after all, is a life sentence. --Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

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.

Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments 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 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. Wayne dreams about a handjob 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 from one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today (John Waters).

Also from

Koestenbaum, Wayne

View All

Also in

Individual Artists

View All