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Figure it out : essays / Wayne Koestenbaum.

By: Publisher: New York : Soft Skull Press, 2020Edition: First Soft Skull editionDescription: pages cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781593765958
  • 1593765959
Uniform titles:
  • Essays. Selections.
Subject(s): Genre/Form: LOC classification:
  • PS3561 .O349 A6 2020
Contents:
I. Do You Want to Touch It? -- My New Glasses -- Of Smells -- Game of Pearls -- Corpse Pose -- Beauty Parlor at Hotel Dada -- II. No More Tasks -- Figure It Out -- Odd Secrets of the Line -- Making Marks -- "My" Masculinity Remix -- The Porn Punctum -- The Task of the Translator -- III. Punctuation -- On Futility, Holes, and Herv�e Guibert -- Riding the Escalator with Eve -- Adrienne Rich's Musical Ethics -- I Don't Understand Shakespeare's Sonnet #154 -- My Brief Apprenticeship with John Barth -- Twelve Assignments -- IV. Six Stars -- Celebrity's Secret Ameliorations -- An Evening of Screen Tests -- Rauschenberg's Squeegee -- Eighteen Lunchtime Assignments -- Little Elegy.
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"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Current library Shelving location Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode
Book Book NMC Library Stacks PS3561 .O349 A6 2020 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 33039001460756

I. Do You Want to Touch It? -- My New Glasses -- Of Smells -- Game of Pearls -- Corpse Pose -- Beauty Parlor at Hotel Dada -- II. No More Tasks -- Figure It Out -- Odd Secrets of the Line -- Making Marks -- "My" Masculinity Remix -- The Porn Punctum -- The Task of the Translator -- III. Punctuation -- On Futility, Holes, and Herv�e Guibert -- Riding the Escalator with Eve -- Adrienne Rich's Musical Ethics -- I Don't Understand Shakespeare's Sonnet #154 -- My Brief Apprenticeship with John Barth -- Twelve Assignments -- IV. Six Stars -- Celebrity's Secret Ameliorations -- An Evening of Screen Tests -- Rauschenberg's Squeegee -- Eighteen Lunchtime Assignments -- Little Elegy.

""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"-- Provided by publisher.

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